Month: December 2025

Associate professor Rajan Sekhon along with a team of researchers at Clemson University and partner organizations have received a $2.4 million, four-year grant to map genes that control leaf senescence in corn. Funded by the National Science Foundation through both the Plant Genome Research Program and the Cross-Directorate Activities program, this project aims to sustain photosynthesis longer, improve yield stability and support smarter on-farm nitrogen use.

Trudy Mackay was inducted into the National Academy of Medicine.

The Board of Trustees recently approved the elevation of the Center for Human Genetics (CHG) to the Institute for Human Genetics (IHG).

Kim Paul celebrated 20 years of service at Clemson University!

Postdoctoral fellow Joshua Turner received a travel award from the Environmental Mutagenesis and Genomic Society to attend their annual meeting,

For International Microorganism Day Clemson News highlighted G&B’s Manuel Fierro and his research with the cell biology of the microorganism that causes malaria.

Three G&B lecturers were recently promoted to senior lecturer including Heidi Anderson, Michael Harris and Todd Lyda.

Caroline Palmentiero won best talk at the 20th International Free Living Amoeba Meeting in Puerto Morelos, Mexico.

Graduate students Sky Lu and Roger Zhang gave poster presentations on their dissertation research at the North Carolina Chestnut Festival, where Sky won first prize for her presentation.

Recently Haiying Liang and her lab assisted at the Chestnut Return Farm in Seneca, SC and the North Carolina Chestnut Festival in Asheville, NC

Tara Doucet-O’Hare was invited to give a seminar to the Department of Biology at UNC Asheville. The title was “Diving into the dark genome: endogenous retroviruses in human health and disease.”

The Witt Dillon lab published “The MUC19 gene: An evolutionary history of recurrent introgression and natural selection” in Science.

Trudy Mackay and Robert Anholt published “Angiotensin-Converting Enzyme Inhibitors and Metabolic Aging: A Drosophila Perspective” in Biomolecules.

Tara Doucet-O’Hare’s lab published two textbook chapters for the book “Transposable Elements in Human Health and Disease” that is being published by Springer Nature. The titles of the chapters published are “The Role of Transposable Elements in Development” written by Doucet-O’Hare and John R. McCoy and “The Role of Transposable Elements in Therapeutics,” written by Doucet-O’Hare and Kathryn Howe.

“A Quest to Root Chestnut Cuttings” was published by Haiying Laing in the Chestnut magazine, a publication of the American Chestnut Foundation.

Graduate student Ashley Kirby, along with assistant professor Miriam Konkel, published “Structural and transduction patterns of human-specific polymorphic SVA insertions” in Mobile DNA.

Jennifer Mason and her lab published “Overexpression of NEK8 inhibits homologous recombination” in DNA Repair.