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We celebrated the end of our lab renovations with a delicious lunch from Mae's and with lab photos, professionally taken by Michele (we missed you, Shdema & Denise)! Our tissue culture room is now up and running with four biosafety cabinets. Our microscope rooms are ready and the rest of the lab has been spruced up too. It has been 19 months of planning and renovations and we are thrilled that our space is finally ready.  
We are very grateful to the NIH for awarding us an NIH Director's New Innovator Award (MIT press release; NIH press release). This award will support our synthetic 3D genome biology research program with $2,318,250 over the next 5 years, and it is funded by the NIH Common Fund. A list of all the awardees - which include our MIT colleagues Tami Lieberman and Michael Birnbaum - can be found here. Thank you, NIH! 
The first review paper from the lab has now been published Open Access in WIREs Developmental Biology.
Viraat reviewed the development of chromosome conformation capture technologies, giving a historical account and discussing the insights into 3D genome structure and function that were gleaned from the application of these methods. Viraat also placed special emphasis on Micro-C, a new technology for mapping 3D genome structure at unprecedented resolution and which is especially sensitive to transcriptionally relevant features of genome structure. Congratulations to Viraat!
After months of virtual get-togethers, the Hansen lab gathered for a socially distant summer outing on the banks of the Charles. With stomachs full of Thai food, we spent the warm Boston evening chatting and trying to find the "spies" in the game of Resistance. With our first outing since March a resounding success, the Hansen lab is ready to take on the Fall semester!  
It has been a big week for the lab and we are happy to finally return to lab.
We are thrilled to welcome Asmita to the lab. Asmita started as a Technical Associate on Monday of this week and we are very excited about her joining the team. She has already started culturing cells and doing some imaging. And Harvey was the 2020-2021 MathWorks Engineering Fellowship. MathWorks is the company behind MATLAB and is supporting Harvey's computational work for the next year. A big congratulations to Harvey and thank you to MathWorks. Congratulations to Shdema on being awarded a post-doctoral fellowship through the Zuckerman STEM Leadership Program for the academic year of 2020-2021. We look forward to Shdema joining us in August. Here is the full announcement.
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Hansen Lab at MIT, Building 56, Room 722, 32 Vassar St, Cambridge, MA 02139; Accessibility