Congrats to our former graduate student, Dr. Ayse Sahan, who has been selected as the recipient of the 2026 Roland K. Robins Outstanding Pharmacology Thesis Award for her thesis, "Illuminating the Spatiotemporal Regulation of Metabolic Signaling." Congratulations, Ayse! 🎉

Double the celebration this July! 🎂💍Happy birthday to postdoc Jing Ling, and congratulations to postdoc Anneliese Gest on her wedding! Wishing you all happiness, good health, and beautiful moments ahead. ✨

Congrats to postdoc Nick Bergkamp (center) on completing the Rock ‘n’ Roll San Diego Marathon in 3:28:51!

Congrats to graduate student Rosie Zhou, who was awarded the Graduate and Professional Student Association’s Outstanding Community Leader award! We’re so proud of her work and her accomplishments. Congrats, Rosie!

New paper, new tool! 🚨 Where a signaling protein lives matters as much as what it does. Our new tool lets you interrogate this one compartment at a time. We built TerminaTOR, a genetically encodable inhibitor that silences mTORC1 at subcellular locations.

Happy birthday to the April and May Zhang Lab birthdays! We celebrated Nick, and then Rosie, Su Hyun, and Max with cake and song in our latest group meetings! 🎂

Encode the cell signals for this "dynamic" conference! Featuring keynotes Tobias Meyer of @weillcornell.bsky.social and @jinzhanglab.bsky.social, alongside organizers Mary Teruel, Eric Batchelor, @bugajlab.bsky.social, and Andrew Paek. Register and submit your abstract by April 26: buff.ly/YMRzst4

🚨🚨Double preprint alert! 🚨🚨 Two papers went up on Biorxiv this week! The first presents new chemigenetic FRET-based biosensors: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... And the second presents an improved version of our C-Y FRET PKA reporters, AKAR6 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... Thread 🧵 1/5

Happy birthday to graduate student Yingqi! Another year, another #dragonknife and cake! 🎂

Congratulations to graduate student Rosie Zhou and postdoc Nick Bergkamp on winning poster prizes at last month’s Roger Tsien Cell Signaling Symposium! It was a great day with lots of amazing science, and nice to have our trainees’ work highlighted.

Just before the holidays we celebrated project scientist Ben Li, who is moving on to a new position at Zymo Research. Congratulations and good luck in your future endeavors, Ben!

At our annual holiday party we wished a happy birthday to graduate student Evan Wen! Happy birthday and happy holidays, Evan! #dragonknife

We recently said farewell to Ryan Weeks, who defended his thesis a few months ago and is now moving on from the lab to do a postdoc in Mia Myong-Hee Sung’s lab at the NIH (irp.nih.gov/pi/myong-hee...)! We'll miss him but we're proud to see him take his next scientific steps. Congrats, Dr. Weeks!

Congratulations to graduate student Evan Wen on receiving and NIH F31 Fellowship Award for his project “Spatial diversity of GPCR-mediated ERK signaling and its role in cardiovascular disease”!

Check out this recent paper from the lab, which sheds light on the physiological role of RIa phase separation, including its impact on insulin secretion! journals.plos.org/plosbiology/... This work was led by project scientist Skott and former grad student Julia, part of our phase separation team!

Last week we celebrated Wei, @weilin1113.bsky.social, who has left the Zhang lab to start his independent career at Jiangnan University, focused on glycobiology. Wei has led numerous projects including the kinase integrator, KINACT. We’re proud of his work here and excited to see his next steps!

Congratulations to Leah Bae, who successfully defended her master’s thesis last week! We’re very proud of her achievements in the lab and are excited for her next steps!

Congratulations to Dr Ayse Sahan! Ayse defended her thesis this summer, and just finished up in the lab to move to her next adventure: a postdoc at UChicago! We miss Ayse already, but we’re very proud of what she’s accomplished here and excited to see her future work! #DragonKnife #PhDone

Last week we said “au revoir” to Prof. Xavier Nicol, who joined us for his sabbatical over the last year. It’s been great to have him for discussions and ideas, and we’re excited to keep working with him on collaborations!

Congratulations to Dr Emily Pool, who defended her thesis last week! She’s been an incredible asset to the lab, from her precision, to her mentorship, to the subject of her work, phase separation of PKA regulatory subunits. We’re so excited to see what she does next! Congrats, Dr. Pool!

We are counting down the days to our Protein Science Symposium on June 10-12! Thrilled to be hosting our colleagues from WCM @weillcornell.bsky.social as well as keynote speakers Dr. Christopher Lima @christopherdlima.bsky.social and Dr. ‪Jin Zhang @jinzhanglab.bsky.social

Three cakes! 🎂🎂🎂 The Zhang lab is full of May birthdays! Happy birthday to grad students Rosie and Max, and to postdoc Su-Hyun. (And belated birthdays to postdocs Nick and Ben, not part of today’s triple cake event, but celebrated nonetheless) #dragonknife

Congratulations to graduate student Rosie Zhou, who won the Shu and KC Chien Best Poster in Bioengineering award at the annual Jacobs School of Engineering Research Expo for her poster “Visualizing Protein Communication in Human Cells to Improve Cancer Treatment” @jacobsschool.bsky.social

Congratulations to two members of the lab on receiving fellowships and prizes! We're very proud of them, and these awards will support their work on signaling in heart disease and lung cancer, respectively. Details in the thread for each of their projects. 🧵

So happy to see Michelle’s excellent paper from her postdoc with us now out! Her expertise allowed us to develop a new class of KARs with enhanced dynamic range and shifted to the far-red. Everyone should keep an eye on her independent career, more incredible work is on the way!

Michelle Frei@michellefrei17.bsky.social · last yr.

Happy to see my Postdoc work out @natbiotech.nature.com. Using HaloTag and synthetic fluorophores instead of FPs enables us to shift the spectral properties of kinase activity reporters (KARs) to the far-red 🔬. Huge thanks to everyone involved @jinzhanglab.bsky.social! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Your yearly reminder to acknowledge the core facilities you use and their staff scientists in your papers. These scientists are a crucial part of the scientific ecosystem and to continue to exist they need tangible credit for their work. Plus their associated expertise adds credibility to your work.

🧵 1/6 Just dropped in @naturecomms.bsky.social We’ve engineered the most photostable yellow fluorescent proteins (YFPs) to date—mGold2s and mGold2t—with up to 25× greater photostability than mVenus and mCitrine, without compromising brightness. 👇 🔗 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Congratulations to graduate student Ayse Sahan and former student Shawn Mingyuan Chen on the publication of their lipid biosensors in PNAS! With these sensors, we’re able to track PI(3,4)P2 and PIP3 signaling in the cell, and show the lysosome is a PIP3 signaling site. www.pnas.org/doi/full/10....

Last week we celebrated 3 lab birthdays! Happy birthday to grad students Qian and Pal, and Project Scientist Scott! #DragonKnife

STAND UP FOR SCIENCE! Join us and thousands nationwide on Friday, March 7th at noon at the UC San Diego Geisel Library / Silent Tree