LCID Researchers in the News

Vernita Gordon

Gordon Selected as American Physical Society Fellow

November 7, 2023

LCID Faculty member Vernita Gordon, Associate Professor of Physics, was recently selected as a fellow of the American Physical Society. Gordon was recognized “for fundamental contributions to the understanding of the role of physical properties in the development of bacterial biofilms and the interactions of biofilms with the immune system,” according to the APS website.

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LCID Associate Director Talks with Daily Texan About COVID-19

September 7, 2023

As new cases of COVID-19 are increasing at the end of this summer, Dr. Jaquelin Dudley, LCID Associate Director, talked with the Daily Texan about this peak in COVID. She also discussed the risks involved in coming back to school in crowded classrooms and stressed the need to continue taking precautions as well as self-care actions to help the body's immune system fight illness.

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FDA Approves RSV Vaccine Utilizing McLellan and NIH Research

May 30, 2023

The Food and Drug Administration recently approved the first-ever respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) vaccine for older adults that utilizes research developed by a team that includes LCID Member Jason McLellan and scientists at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). This vaccine culminates a decades-long search for an effective tool to prevent this illness which can be deadly to children and older adults.

McLellan, along with NIH researchers Barney Graham and Peter Kwong, has been working for several years on structure-based vaccine design

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Nancy Moran

Moran Recipient of NAS Waksman Award

February 1, 2023

The National Academy of Sciences has announced LCID Faculty Member Dr. Nancy A. Moran as recipient of the 2023 Selman A. Waksman Award in Microbiology. Established by the Waksman Foundation for Microbiology, the Selman A. Waksman Award is a prize of $20,000 that is presented to recognize a major advance in the field of microbiology.

In its announcement, the NAS cited Moran’s trailblazing research on the evolution and biology of the intimate symbiosis between insect hosts and bacteria that has expanded understanding of microbial symbiosis and bacterial genome

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Jason McLellan

McLellan Receives 2 Prestigious Awards in Recognition of His Vaccine Work

January 30, 2023

LCID Faculty Member Dr. Jason S. McLellan has been named the 2023 recipient for both the Welch Foundation’s Norman Hackerman Award in Chemical Research as well as the National Academy of Sciences Award in Molecular Biology. The two awards were given in recognition of McLellan’s work as a pioneer in structure-based vaccine design. His work has been instrumental in the development of COVID-19 mRNA vaccines in addition to on-going research towards an effective RSV (Respiratory Syncytial Virus) vaccine that has gone through a successful phase three trial.

The Norman

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Dr. Maria Croyle

Dr. Maria Croyle Receives Best Paper Award from the University Co-op Research Excellence Awards

November 4, 2022

Dr. Maria Croyle, LCID Faculty Member and Molecular Pharmaceutics and Drug Delivery Glaxo Wellcome Professor in the College of Pharmacy, recently received the Best Research Paper Award from the University Co-op as part of its Research Excellence Awards. 

The Best Paper Award recognizes extraordinary achievement by a faculty member or staff researcher who was the principal or sole author of a peer-reviewed scholarly paper reporting original research that was published between January 1, 2020 and December 31, 2021.

Dr. Croyle’s paper, published in 

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Jason McLellan

LCID Member McLellan's RSV Research Featured in News Media

October 24, 2022

The Washington Post and Texas Monthly recently featured articles on LCID Member Jason McLellan and his contributions to the development of an RSV vaccine with National Institutes of Health viral immunologist Barney Graham. The articles looked at the beginnings of McLellan’s partnership with Graham when they worked together at NIH in 2008 and the challenges they faced in developing the vaccine as well as the promising results that have come from recent human trials of RSV vaccines based on their research. The Texas Monthly article also looked at other research

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2 LCID Members Receive Grants from Cancer Institute

October 4, 2022

LCID Members Jennifer Maynard and Walter Fast recently received grants from the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas for their cancer research. Dr. Maynard's lab received $3.9 million, which will go towards new equipment to aid the lab's work in creating antibodies against cancer. A grant of $250,000 was awarded to the Fast Lab, led by Dr. Fast, which will go to the lab's graduate students who are translating Dr. Fast's research into a usable drug to treat cancer.

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Harold Varmus, Jaquelin Dudley, Wendy Kaichun Xu

Three Generations of Retrovirologists

May 5, 2022

LCID Assistant Director Dr. Jaquelin Dudley is shown with her mentor, Dr. Harold Varmus, and her mentee, Dr. Wendy Kaichun Xu, at the recent Fifty Years of Reverse Transcriptase conference at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory held April 20-23, 2022. Dr. Dudley and Dr. Varmus both spoke at the Symposium.

Dr. Varmus is a former Director of the National Institutes of Health. He has many accolades and is currently the Lewis Thomas University Professor of Medicine at 

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Fast Lab Discovers an Effective Small-Molecule Allosteric Inhibitor of New Delhi Metallo-β-lactamase (NDM)

April 1, 2022
A new publication from the Fast lab features the discovery of an allosteric inhibitor of New Deli metallo-beta-lactamase for treating CRE through the use of high-throughput screening. For more on this discovery, go to https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acsinfecdis.1c00577. Read more about Fast Lab Discovers an Effective Small-Molecule Allosteric Inhibitor of New Delhi Metallo-β-lactamase (NDM)