NEWS AND UPDATES
August 2023: Emily Ruff presented the talk "Can ChatGPT write a good lab report?" at the 2023 Minnesota Summit on Learning and Technology in St. Cloud, MN.
July 2023: Emily Ruff presented two talks at the ASBMB Transforming Undergraduate Education in the Molecular Life Sciences meeting in Boston: "At-home experiments in an asynchronous course for non-majors," and "ChatGPT: A department-level analysis of usage possibilities and actualities."
April 2023: Several presentations at this year's Ramaley Celebration! Karina Kpahn presented as part of the Early Years Research and Creative Mentoring Session. Steven Richter presented a poster on his project studying VRK2, Halie Schettl and Kyle Blom presented their research on PETase purification, and Maddie Degenhardt presented her work on the VRK1 project. Congratulations to all!
April 2022: At the Ramaley Research celebration, Justin Sells presents the poster, "Creating an Exploratory Protocol of Protein Thermodynamics for Chemistry Undergraduates." This was a joint project with Dr. Hannah Leverentz-Culp.
April 2022: McKinzie Frederick, David Hurley, Lisa Mai, and Laura Schoeneman travel to Philadelphia, PA to present the poster, "Investigation of Disease Causing Point Mutants of VRK1" at the ASBMB National Meeting. Congratulations!
April 2021: Emily Ruff presents the poster, "Combined In Vitro and Computational Investigations of Protein Kinase Point Mutations for the Undergraduate Teaching Lab" at the ASBMB online national meeting. This poster is available upon request.
April 2021: At Winona State's online Ramaley Research Symposium, Lisa Mai presents the poster, "Development of an Mst2 construct for future studies of conformational regulation." McKinzie Frederick, David Hurley, and Laura Schoeneman present the poster, "Investigation of VRK1 Point Mutants." Congratulations to all on these stellar presentations!
June 2020: Emily Ruff's innovative adaptions to online teaching were recognized by the MinnState system's Innovating Through COVID project. Thank you to the MinnState system for this award!
May 2020: Along with other WSU faculty, Emily Ruff's innovative adaptations to online teaching were recognized by local press in Winona and by the university. http://www.winonapost.com/Community-Record/Births/ArticleID/69019/Winona-State-University-goes-digital
March 2020: Unfortunately the ACS National Meeting has been cancelled. Domenic Ogno, Nate Betcker, and Sam Lund will present their research with Dr. Ruff as part of CHEM 475.
November 2019: Nate Becker (jointly advised by Ruff and Joe West (WSU) and Valeria Stepanova (University of Wisconsin-La Crosse) and Sam Lund have posters accepted for the ACS Spring National Meeting and Expo!
July 2019: Emily Ruff presented a poster, "Purification and analysis of human protein kinase domains for undergraduate students," at the ASBMB symposium, Transforming Education in the Molecular Life Sciences.
May 2019: Mitchell Maw presented his research at the poster session at Winona Health!
April 2019: Mitchell Maw, Emily Dunham, Astyia Franken-Golden, Brittany Whittington, Julia Fogarty, and Emily Landgreen presented research at the Ramaley Research Celebration. Congratulations all!
November 2018: Emily Ruff is co-author of the new article, "Quantitative conformational profiling of kinase inhibitors reveals origins of selectivity for Aurora kinase activation states" by Eric W. Lake and Nicholas M. Levinson. Congratulations Eric and Nick! Link to article: https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/115/51/E11894.full.pdf
March 2018: A paper from Dr. Ruff's postdoctoral work with Nick Levinson, "A dynamic mechanism for allosteric activation of Aurora kinase A by activation loop phosphorylation," is published in eLife! Link to article: https://elifesciences.org/articles/32766
January 2018: Our grant, "Conformational Regulation of the Noncanonical Mitotic Kinase Haspin,"
was funded! Thank you to the Winona Foundation!
November 2017: Our Leveraged Equipment Grant for a Perkin-Elmer LS 55 (submitted with Jeanne Franz) was funded! Excited to do some fluorimetry at WSU! Thank you, MinnState System!
August 2017: Emily Ruff finishes her postdoctoral position with Nick Levinson and Dave Thomas at the University of Minnesota and starts work as an assistant professor at Winona State University.
March 2017: Emily Ruff presented a short talk titled "Novel Allosteric FRET Assays for Mechanistic Studies and Inhibitor Screening of Aurora A Kinase" at Keystone Symposium - Kinases: Next-Generation Insights and Approaches.