I'm not able to travel at the moment, but my group is! You can catch amazing Venton lab posters this week at both the ACS meeting in DC and the International Society for Neurochemistry meeting in NY. Another group is down at Oak Ridge National Lab at CNMS.

Another exciting new direction in the Venton lab is modulating neurotransmission with Focused ultrasound (FUS). Led by Greatness Olaitan, and in collaboration with Wendy Lynch, we can now use noninvasive FUS to modulate a dopaminergic circuit onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

The Venton lab is getting into multiplexing. In this exciting new paper led by Kailash Shrestha and Yuanyu Chang, we multiplex FSCV detection of adenosine and dopamine with fluorescent iGluSnFR to understand adenosine neuromodulation onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

Check out our latest manuscript in ACS Electrochemistry, detailing how to make electrodes from pyrolyzed parylene. First author He Oliver Zhao and noted ORNL collaborator Nick Lavrik are the brains behind this one. pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/...

As a department chair, I think about if NIH indirects are cut to 15% we will never see any funds. The university will take their money first (perhaps rightly so). Our department uses indirects to pay an instrument tech, run NMR and mass spec, run a graduate retreat etc. Real benefits for research.

We landed a senior recruit (to be announced publicly later) and I enjoyed the fact that former department chairs wrote to tell me thank you for all my work. Recruiting, negotiating with, and finally landing faculty candidates is a time consuming business for a department chair, but very worthwhile!

New Venton lab publication. In collaboration with the Ankeeva group at MIT-we tested multifunctional fibers, including for FSCV and fiber photometry. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1...

We're about to host 9 faculty candidates for 2 different searches in the next 3 weeks before break. And I have to finish a class and grade 30 papers.. Plus, I'm going to meet with every person in my lab individually. It's going to be an exciting ride if I make it through...

I don't know what profs needs to hear this, but Dec. 1 is the Sunday after Thanksgiving, meaning all those letters of recommendation for grad school need to get done before Thanksgiving break. I'm working with an admin this year to upload mine, so trying to get the letters to her this week.

Hoos in STEM? I am! Had a great time joining Ken Ono on the Hoos in STEM podcast talking all things UVA Chemistry. podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/i...

Trying out this new platform. Hope to find some good chemistry (and neuroscience) content. Let me know what I should follow!