Anders won a 2026 Vallee Foundation Scholar Award, which also includes 4 years of funding for the lab. The full press release can be found here. 

We also got together for a 3D polymer simulation bootcamp hosted by James. James went through the basic theory and approach and then guided everyone through some example simulations and list of problems to finish. See also the full description on our GitHub https://github.com/ahansenlab/polysim_bootcamp, which builds on the Mirny lab's polychrom package. 

We all got together for the microscopy bootcamp. We began with two hours of lectures from Domenic and Maxine covered  the 4f microscope, ray tracing, diffraction, Fourier transforms, and basic optics theory and then moved on to current research topics including super-resolution, MINFLUX, light sheet microscope and other topics. 

We then went down to the optics teaching labs normally used for the 20.309 course that Anders has co-taught with Maxine Jonas and Steve Wasserman. The optics labs are free during the Summer, so we got together in groups and built a fluorescence microscope. 

We could even see the DNA loci that we recently imaged using lattice lightsheet microscopy on the simply microscope we built in the labs. 

Congratulations to Varshini on her new preprint, describing the discovery of Matchmaker elements: cis-regulatory elements that load cohesin to promote looping among neighboring enhancers, promoters, and CTCF sites. 
This has been a very close collaboration with Vijay Sankaran and lab and Chun-Jie from the Sankaran lab is co-lead author and with many people internally in the lab including Masahiro, Viraat and Clarice as well as with Zuzana Tothova's lab. 

You can read the full paper on BioRxiv. 

We celebrated Varshini with a Picnic at the Cambridge Common:

Congratulations to Varshini on her recently published collaborative paper with the teams of Brad Bernstein and Liz Gaskell from the Broad Institute. 

We are very happy to welcome Benson as the new Tech Associate in the lab. Benson joined us recently from Tuft University. 

Congratulations to Masahiro on the publication of his collaborative paper with the Wysocka Lab at Stanford on promoter competition, showing that at the Sox2 locus promoter competition can be explained to a large extent by RCMC-measured changes in insulation. Read the full paper in Nature Genetics.

We get a lot of requests for help with Region Capture Micro-C (RCMC) and genome-wide Micro-C, so led by Miles we have put together a comprehensive protocol for both including small adjustments and improvements since our 2023 paper first reporting RCMC. 

Please find the protocol now published in Nature Protocols. 

We also have a GitHub repo with a user-friendly end-to-end computational pipeline for Micro-C and RCMC processing and analysis, which you can find on GitHub. 

A big thank you and farewell to Allison, who is off to Columbia University for graduate school.

We celebrated and said goodbye to Allison with a lab dinner at Five Spices House. All the best for Columbia Allison and come back and visit!