THE D'ORAZIO LABORATORY - News

THE D'ORAZIO LABORATORY

Students prepare "elevator pitches" to describe their projects

11/10/2022

I'm very proud of undergraduate Tanner Durst and graduate student Joshua Nowacki for putting themselves out there and competing in some campus wide presentations held at UK this fall. Tanner took part in the "5 Minute Fast Track" competition for undergraduates. He won 2nd pace overall, which came with a $500. prize! Joshua competed against graduate students from different colleges across campus in the 3 Minute Thesis. He did a FANTASTIC job, and we all thought he was robbed when they did not award him a prize. Although the awards and recognition are lovely, the real value in these competitions is to develop your speaking skills, to think deeply about the significance of your project, and to learn how to speak about science without using lab jargon. And in that regard, they both exceeded all expectations!

UK hosted the KY-TN ASM Branch Fall Meeting

11/13/2021

One great thing to come from the pandemic was that I finally became acquainted with my local American Society for Microbiology (ASM) branch. Sad to say, even though I first joined ASM in 1989 as a student member, I had NEVER attended an ASM branch meeting. But because of the global SARS-Cov2 pandemic, the recent KY-TN Branch meetings were held via Zoom., which made it much easier to get involved. In Spring 2021, I participated in my very first branch meeting, which was hosted by Matt Lawrenz and Kevin Soloski at the University of Louisville. I guess I didn't waste any time, because at the lunchtime business meeting, even though I really wasn't that familiar with branch meetings yet, I volunteered to co-host the next one with Erin Garcia! We managed to put together a pretty nice lineup of speakers, and I'm proud to say that Jamila Tucker from our lab won third place in the Graduate Student 3MT! To learn more about the KY-TN ASM branch, check out their newly revised website.

Proud mentor!

4/1/2021

Top row, third from the right - that's my first Ph.D. graduate Dr. Elsa Bou Ghanem! It's hard to believe that it's been 10 years now since Elsa left the lab. She did a very successful and productive postdoctoral fellowship at Tufts Medical Center in Boston, MA in Dr. John Leong's lab. She's now an Assistant Professor in the Dept. of Microbiology and Immunology at SUNY Buffalo. I nominated her for this special issue of Infection and Immunity that was to highlight the best and the brightest of the junior faculty in the field. I'm thrilled to say that she was chosen from an impressive list of 90 total nominations received to be designated as one of the future leaders in the field of host-pathogen interactions. You can read her mini-review entitled "Older but not Wiser: the Age-Driven Changes in Neutrophil Responses during Pulmonary Infections here.

The new normal...

11/2/2020

We've held our weekly lab meetings on Fridays at 4 PM for years. That sounds like a horrible time, I'm sure, but it works for us. It doesn't interfere with most experiments; no one has any classes then; and the MIMG department has never had a "happy hour" type thing at the end of the week because of public school challenges related to serving alcohol on campus.
So we used to gather in the conference room and discuss new data acquired during the past week and planned experiments that were coming up the following week. We often brought food to celebrate occasions, or just to share a new recipe. Now we have this. Some people in the lab; others at home, all staring at our screens. I will say that using the Zoom "share screen" feature to share graphs and images is actually better than the conference room experience in terms of being able to see details clearly. But I miss gathering in that room to celebrate another successful week. And I miss lab outings to restaurants and other fun spots!

Thank you, Katie!

4/28/2020

This year 31 faculty members across the University of Kentucky were nominated by undergraduate students to receive recognition as an excellent research mentor. I was nominated by Katie Alexander, a senior who has been working in the lab for the past 2.5 years. After graduation, Katie will spend the summer working in the lab to finish up her projects and then head to a PhD program at Emory University. Each of the nomination letters is reviewed by a small committee, and three are selected as the winners. I was shocked and delighted to be chosen for this honor today! Because of the lab shut down, the ceremony took place via Zoom conference, and I was able to watch a short video presentation from Katie explaining why she nominated me. I've always enjoyed having undergrads in the lab. It's fun to watch their careers develop. Thanks again, Katie - I really appreciated your thoughtful nomination.

Autumn Immunology Conference 2019

11/25/2019

Katie, Jooyoung, and I drove to Chicago to attend the 2019 Autumn Immunology Conference. I had to arrive early on Friday to attend the Executive Council meeting, so the girls got to spend an extra afternoon hanging out in Chicago, which is always fun. John Wherry gave a fabulous keynote talk the first night. Katie presented a poster on our Apolipoprotein E project. Her abstract was selected as the best in the "Host Response to Pathogens" workshop, and she given an AAI Young Investigators Award! She did a great job during her 10 minute talk, and that night we celebrated with a great tapas meal at Cafe Ba-Ba-Reeba. On the way home we stopped off at the Fair Oaks Farm complex in Indiana for lunch. This is always a great meeting, especially for trainees, and this year was no exception.

ISOPOL Meeting in Toronto

10/1/2019

I spent most of last week in Toronto, Canada at the 20th International Symposium on Problems of Listeria and Listeriosis. I was an invited speaker, and I gave the very last talk of the conference! Fortunately, there was a vote being held after my talk, so everyone stuck around. :-)

ISOPOL is held every three years, and at each meeting brave volunteers in the field offer to host the next meeting. This time there were three options to choose from: Yuelan Yin from Yangzhou University in China, Nancy Freitag from University of Illinois in Chicago, and Keith Ireton from University of Otago in New Zealand. After the entire group of attendees voted, the next destination for ISOPOL 2022 will be....New Zealand!

John Brummell and Jeff Farber really did a great job of hosting this year's meeting in Toronto. I was able to reconnect with many friends in the field, and met quite a few new people as well. The venue at the the Peter Gilgan Centre for Research and Learning at the Hospital for Sick Kids was top notch, and the the food at the meeting, the Speaker's banquet at Canoe and the Gala Dinner at the Royal Ontario Museum were all great. The variety of talks we heard throughout the conference, from epidemiological details on the recent polony outbreak in South Africa to the latest cell biology discoveries using Listeria as a tool were fantastic. I'm looking forward to attending the next meeting in New Zealand!

ASM Microbe Meeting in San Francisco

6/25/2019

Several members of the D'Orazio lab attended the annual American Society for Microbiology Microbe Meeting in San Francisco, CA from June 20-24th, 2019.

I arrived a few days early to attend the mSphere Senior Editors meeting. The journal, which debuted 4 years ago, is doing well with continually increasing numbers of submissions and great metrics in terms of impact. And the average time to final decision for papers submitted to mSphere is still right around 21 days. We are all very proud of the author-friendly review experience that ASM Journals, and mSphere in particular, is trying to maintain. This is a great group of people to work with, and I'm really enjoying the experience of being a Senior Editor at mSphere.

Undergraduates Taylor Senay and Katie Alexander were both authors on a poster presentation entitled "Neurotropic strains of Listeria monocytogenes disseminate to the brain without reaching high titer in the blood." ASM Microbe is a huge meeting, and can be a bit overwhelming, but I think both students really enjoyed seeing so many aspects of the field of Microbiology represented, as they contemplate their future career paths.

Review article published

5/24/2019

I worked on this review article for a long time, and I'm so glad that it's finally done! I was solicited by Editor Dan Portnoy to write an update to a chapter published in the 2nd Edition of the ASM Book "Gram Positive Pathogens." That chapter was written in 2006, and so much has changed in the fields of innate & adaptive immunity since that time.

Writing a comprehensive review is labor-intensive, and requires big stretches of uninterrupted time to stay "in the flow." It is common knowledge in academic circles that book chapters and textbooks are rarely completed by the original deadline. I won't tell you just how late I was in completing this chapter, but let's just say it took a long time!

ASM now publishes updated chapters to their iconic texts "Escherichia coli and Salmonella" and "Gram Positive Pathogens" online as articles in the periodical called "Microbiology Spectrum," so anyone can easily access the material. This review is ideal for anyone who is looking for a comprehensive overview about immunity generated during Listeria monocytogenes infection.

Thank you, Travis!

4/30/2019

I received this invitation in the mail for a recognition ceremony. I had a conflict on that date, so I wasn't able to attend, but I appreciated being nominated. To my great surprise, a few days after the event, I received this lovely little trophy commemorating my nomination. Even better was the copy of the nomination letter they slipped inside the package.

Travis Combs, a former masters degree student in the lab who also took my class MI495G, had this to say: "Dr. D'Orazio is a master of the socratic method. We would read passages from the textbook before class and she would pose stimulating questions that exposed what I did and did not understand about the topic and most importantly, I would always leave the room with my mind brimming with new thoughts and questions. If you define a teachers job as stimulating a students imagination and curiosity then there's no one better than Dr. D'Orazio. I enjoyed her class so much that I asked to join her lab. Presenting data to her was always a thrill. She was highly critical, as a good scientist ought to be, but always kind and collegial. Her tutelage undoubtedly made me a better scientist and thinker. My time in her lab resulted in a publication, which certainly boosted my application to medical school. But most of all she helped me develop my critical thinking skills and curiosity - an invaluable gift."

Well, that just about sums up exactly why I love mentoring students. It's so rewarding to see them succeed, and I can't wait to see Travis graduate from med school in a couple of years!