Results of the annual Best Scientific Figure competition are in. Congratulations to Boyu Jiang and Maria Unger for receiving top votes, and a big thank you to all who developed and submitted figures and videos for consideration. We have many talented researchers in EMBRIO who craft amazing images and simulations, elegantly visualizing the story of the data and cellular mechanisms. Kudos to everyone for participating and for voting.

Our next All-Hands Lab Meeting will be September 22, 3pm ET (more details to be shared). For those that want to access the introductory sessions on Biological Modeling Workflow from our last two all-hands lab meetings, see the slides and materials via our shared box account under "All-Hands Meeting Recordings > 2025 ": https://app.box.com/s/vmoaq3w216ye0c78vxhyzmhh0j4vr8mx Thank you to Hayden Fennell for leading those two sessions. If you would like to get input and help in thinking through your biological problem of interest before Sept. 8th, please reach out to Hayden Fennell (haydenfennell@gmail.com) and James Glazier (jaglazier@gmail.com).

A new peer-reviewed publication by members of the Gardner lab is available that focuses on EMBRIO Institute by lead author and Ph.D. Candidate, Soumi Mukherjee titled: "Building and Sustaining a Community of Practice: Repair Mechanisms in a Biology Integration Institute." See more about the paper below.

There are details below from Qing Deng about an opportunity to meet with renowned cell biologist, Dr. Denise Montell, in October when she speaks at Purdue, as well as earlier reminders and announcements on the new CalciumInsights tool and making sure your experimental and computational data published as part of EMBRIO projects is properly uploaded and shared to EMBRIO repositories.

EMBRIO 2025 Best Scientific Figure Awards

Division I: Graduate Students

Top vote: Boyu Jiang (Graduate Student member with affiliate Baloni Lab at Purdue)

Faculty advisor: Priyanka Baloni

Other authors: Anke Tukker, Hyunjin Kim, Shuang Wang, Juexin Wang, Aaron Bowman

Division II: Postdocs and Research Staff

Top vote: Maria Unger (Postdoc Scholar member in the Zartman Lab at Notre Dame)

Adviser: Jeremiah J. Zartman, University of Notre Dame

Co-authors: Vijay Velagala, Dharsan K. Soundarrajan, David Gazzo, Nilay Kumar, Marycruz Flores Flores, Jinwen Liu, Jun Li, Jeremiah J. Zartman

Collaboration: Nilay Kumar, Purdue University

Division I Winner: Boyu Jiang

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Division II Winner: Maria Unger

New Paper on EMBRIO as a Community of Practice Published by American Educational Research Association.

“Building and Sustaining a Community of Practice: Repair Mechanisms in a Biology Integration Institute."

Authors: Soumi Mukherjee, Purdue University; Emily Georgopoulos, Purdue University; Stephanie M. Gardner, Purdue University

The paper documents the evolution of EMBRIO as a Biology Integration Institute through the lens of Community of Practice (CoP) change theory, highlighting its meaningful activities and evaluation feedback loops, which led to the implementation of several repair mechanisms to support members in becoming experts within the community. The study provides insights that could enable other Institutes to implement intentional structures, activities, and evaluation strategies to develop a CoP, fostering meaningful interactions and enhancing collaborative efforts.

📖 Access the full paper: https://doi.org/10.3102/2195576

Opportunity to meet with Dr. Montell October 6 - 7 at Purdue (note from Qing Deng)

Dear EMBRIO investigators,

I am hosting Dr. Denise Montell, a world-renowned cell biologist, in the fall. She will deliver our department's Karling Lecture on Oct 7, 12:30-1:30 pm. She would have some time to meet faculty and students on the 7^th and possibly the 6th. Please let me know if you would like to meet her. Each meeting slot will likely be 25-30 minutes.

I have attached her Wikipedia page FYI: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denise_Montell

qingdeng@purdue.edu

https://www.denglab.us

EMBRIO Labs: Get Your Experimental Data Associated with EMBRIO Publications Ready and Connected with our Data Management System

We have an obligation to make our published data accessible to the broader scientific community. With the fall semester starting up again, now is a great opportunity to begin using OMERO to store your experimental data taken at the microscope. You can store your data with detailed experimental text to keep your images organized with context. This will benefit your science because:

Identifying experiments no longer requires searching image filenames written in your notebook
Original data is stored in a viewable format in a central location
Data can be reviewed by everyone in the lab without downloading a local copy and opening in ImageJ
Comments, tags, and keywords can be annotated at any time that stays with the image(s)
Support for Fiji (ImageJ) is built-in – you can use a plugin to work with the image data directly in OMERO
Image data can be published as a persistent link in PURR for your publications

Thanks to the labs who are already adopting OMERO into their workflow. We encourage everyone in EMBRIO who performs microscopy experiments to take advantage of this new tool. We hope it will improve your workflow and make the management of your microscopy data easier.

For more information and help getting started, please contact Scott Bolton at boltons@purdue.edu.

Check Out CalciumInsights Application

EMBRIO members at University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez, in collaboration with labs in the Institute, developed CalciumInsights, an interactive application built in R that is designed to analyze tissue-agnostic calcium traces. The tool is now available on the Institute's central GitHub (of which we'll be forking more projects and materials soon): https://github.com/orgs/EMBRIOInstitute/repositories

For details, please contact Deiver Suarez (deiver.suarez@upr.edu ), Mauricio Cabrerra (mauricio.cabrera1@upr.edu ) and Clara Isaza (clara.isaza@upr.edu ).