Emeritus News

It is with great pleasure that we take a moment to reflect on our lab’s 2023 journey. Last year was truly exceptional for the Gierasch Lab, marked by significant achievements, fruitful collaborations, and the hard work of each and every lab member.

Throughout the year, our lab remained a hive of activity. We saw our research efforts come to fruition in our paper on the interaction between the bacterial chaperone DnaK and its co-chaperone GrpE, led by our postdoc Agustina Rossi and former postdoc Alexandra Pozhidaeva, published in the Journal of Biological Chemistry. Collaboration has always been at the heart of our research, and 2023 was no exception. Our fruitful partnership with the Hebert Lab resulted in a major publication in Molecular Cell and an important methods paper on expressing the pathogenic alpha-one antitrypsin protein. We are excited about the ongoing collaborations that promise further discoveries in the years ahead.

As we celebrate our achievements, we also bid farewell to some members of our lab family who embarked on new journeys. Two of our undergraduate students, Zoe Wetmore, and Lea Doerries, took significant steps in their academic careers. Zoe joined the Keck Lab at the University of Wisconsin for graduate school, while Lea decided to continue her research on Hsc70 chaperones in our lab for her 5th year Master’s degree. We welcomed Emilio Salazar, who joined our lab in the fall to contribute his talents and enthusiasm to our ongoing projects. We look forward to witnessing his growth and achievements in the years to come.

The group members presented their research at local and international meetings. Postdoctoral fellow Robert Williams attended the Endoplasmic Reticulum FASEB Summer Research Conference in Melbourne, FL; postdoctoral fellow Maria Agustina Rossi and graduate student Lea Dorries presented their research at the 37th Annual Protein Society Meeting in Boston, and postdoctoral fellow Karishma Bhasne presented her research at the Biophysical Society Annual Meeting in San Diego, CA. As we do every year, many lab members presented at the CBI/BMB/BMP Joint Retreat with our colleagues at UMass Worcester (in Worcester MA), as well as at the Massachusetts Undergraduate Research Conference 2023 (virtual).

Last year, Lila traveled in the US (for example, presenting at the Chaperone Code meeting in Alexandria, Virginia) and all over the world (Venice, Italy; Martinsried, Germany; and Il Ciocco, Italy) to speak about the lab’s research. The picture above is of Lila and Research Professor Eugenia M. Clerico having some fun in Florence before the Gordon Conference on Stress Proteins at Il Ciocco, Italy!

I traveled to Australia with my wife to see the eclipse in April 2023. Perfect weather for the event, seen as part of a cruise along most of the western coast of the continent, with the eclipse in the middle.

We saw and sometimes stopped at various islands and coastlines along the way. We did not land on the island that is posted as still being a bit radioactive after nuclear bomb testing decades ago.

Later in the year, we enjoyed a visit to my wife's homeland, the place we first lived together, Kingston, Jamaica. We spent a few days in the mountains far above the city, a beautiful rainforest area with ethereal views down to the Caribbean and up to the higher peaks of the Blue Mountains (over 7000 feet high).

I continue to pursue astronomy as a hobby, including capturing images through telescopes. It is surprising and pleasing how often a return look  at an image shows something noted in a recent astro-focused article, even when the image was not taken with that something in mind.

My most recent contribution to the Goessmann Gazette was “Lab Notes” in the May 2017 issue. Since then, I've been busy with the following.

The Arsenic Project: In fall 2017, Patrick Moquin, Nick Fragola, Alex White, Paul Sinno, Yuying (Chloe) Zhang, and Katrina Nguyen were in the lab; by fall of 2019 only Chloe

remained, but we collaborated with Xioyang Pan, an honors student in ECE, and his advisor, Professor Yadi Eslami, who helped with the digital image analysis aspect of the project (measuring arsenic in rice). My association with Chemists Without Borders continues and since July 2023, Hannah Wawda, a high school student in Cupertino CA, has modified the method.

Collaborations: Collaboration with Professor Lili He (Food Science) produced a publication. Collaboration with the international groups of writers producing the Atomic Spectrometry Updates (ASU) for the Journal of Analytical Atomic Spectrometry (JAAS) has ramped up a bit, so that since retirement I have contributed to 12 of these ASU reviews.

Conferences: For the RSC’s Biennial National Atomic Spectrometry Symposium (BNASS) in 2020, I was planning a tribute to a collaborator from my Loughborough University days, Stanley Greenfield, who passed away in September 2019 at the age of 99. Stan was responsible for the development of inductively coupled plasma (ICP) as a source for atomic emission spectrochemical analysis and later as a source of ions for mass spectrometry. The pandemic got in the way, and I wasn’t able to present until the BNASS meeting of 2022.

Teaching: Since retiring, I have continued to teach Chem 101 online pretty much every semester until the spring of 2023, when numbers started to fall. My final offering was winter 2024. In total, I taught the course 38 times, 28 of which were post-retirement.

Publishing: I wrote a letter to the editor of Chemical and Engineering News in response to an article about the problem of reports of “metal-free” reactions that, on further investigation, turned out to have been affected by traces of palladium, in which I suggested that such manuscripts should contain the result of appropriate ICP-MS analysis. I also contributed a couple of op ed pieces to The Analytical Scientist. Professor Mike Maroney kindly arranged for an invitation to join him and two other co-authors in the revisions of a chapter for Elsevier’s Handbook on the Toxicology of Metals. Following recent articles in  J. Chem. Ed., I investigated how ChatGPT would perform in Chem101, feeding in a selection of assignments from the course. ChatGPT was hopeless as a student – it made errors in calculations and included bogus references, which the articles’ authors failed to notice. I wrote up the “Shortcomings of ChatGPT” as a communication for J. Chem. Ed.

Life in Retirement:  I’ve been fencing, playing music, and Holly and I have been traveling. All these were impacted by the pandemic. Although I qualified for Team USA in 2021 and 2022, both World Veteran Fencing Championships were canceled. I’m playing fiddle in local Irish sessions, in addition to playing with UMass’s own Machine Shop Band. In spring 2023, in the company of Michael Maroney and his wife, Sharon Palmer, we visited a number of single malt whisky distilleries in the Scottish Highlands and Isle of Islay.

In 2022, Mary K. Carroll was elected as American Chemistry Society president by members of ACS. Dr. Carroll is currently Dwane W. Crichton Professor of Chemistry at Union College. She has ties to UMass, having spent time in the Tyson lab as a postdoc in the early nineties.

During her time in the Tyson lab, she developed low-cost spectrophotometric instrumentation, suitable for undergraduate teaching experiments, based on the measurement of time rather than the intensity of the color of the product formed when the sample reacts with a suitable reagent. If a large volume of the sample solution is injected into a flowing stream of reagent, then the colored reaction product forms on both the leading and trailing edges of the sample zone. Dr. Carroll devised a way to measure the time interval (Δt) between the maximum intensity of these two colored zones under conditions that ensured that Δt was directly related to the logarithm of the concentration of the sample. This procedure is analogous to the well-known electrochemical analysis procedure where the voltage of a sensing electrode is related to the logarithm of the concentration of sample by an equation known as the Nernst equation. Thus, just as for the potentiometric procedure based on the Nernst equation, Carroll’s method is able to measure over a range of concentrations much wider than is usual for spectrophotometry. She is lead author on three publications, including one in the Journal of Chemical Education, describing her work (https://doi.org/10.1016/0003-2670(94)80344-7, https://doi-org.silk.library.umass.edu/10.1366/0003702944028579, https://doi.org/10.1021/ed070pA210).

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