This week, Dr. Alexandra Kent (postdoctoral scholar, Cate lab), Dr. Chandrima Majumdar (postdoctoral scholar, Cate lab), and C-GEM Executive Director Dr. Sarah Smaga all attended the 2025 ASBMB Annual Meeting in Chicago. Alexandra and Chandrima both presented posters and were selected to speak in the “Synthetic Biology-enabling Technologies” session. In addition, Chandrima spoke at the Emerging Investigators Seminar, hosted a Career Hub interview, and won an ASBMB Postdoctoral Researcher Travel Award.
Sarah was joined by Jill Townley from Eterna to present a workshop highlighting C-GEM’s collaborative efforts to adapt Eterna for education and outreach activities. Workshop attendees learned about two different ways to use Eterna in a college classroom and gained experience with both the “RNA biology with Eterna” online course and the Eterna Demo app for science festivals.
Eterna is a citizen science game where players solve puzzles to help scientists find the best RNA sequence to achieve a target structure. Play the game, check out the Coursera, and download the outreach kit.
Congratulations to Chandrima, Alexandra, and Sarah for their presentations and to Chandrima for her award.