Amber Rolland was awarded this year’s Graduate Dissertation Fellowship from the Graduate School at the University of Oregon based on her “highly original, important, and coherent” prospectus. Congratulations, Amber!

Jim Prell is grateful for one of two “Outstanding Reviewer Awards” from the Journal of the American Society for Mass Spectrometry, announced at this year’s ASMS Annual Conference.

Amber Rolland has received the John R. Moore scholarship and Graduate Doctoral Service Award for her outstanding scholarship and service to the university and community.

Congratulations to Dr. Jesse Wilson, who defended his dissertation this Spring! Dr. Wilson will be moving on to Pacific Northwest National Laboratory this July.

Amber Rolland and Lejla Biberic received a Peter O’Day Fellowship from the University of Oregon for Summer 2020. This fellowship supports pairs of undergraduate and graduate students to foster mentorship, excellence in research, and teamwork. Amber and Lejla will be studying the structure of pore-forming toxins using native IM-MS and allied techniques.

The Prell groups heartily congratulates Dr. Sean Cleary and Dr. Micah Donor, who successfully defended their dissertations in Winter and Spring 2020, respectively.

Dr. Cleary has moved on to The Ohio State University, where he has joined the staff of the Mass Spectrometry Facility.

Dr. Donor has accepted a position at Pacific Northwest National Laboratories, continuing to work in the area of mass spectrometry.

The Prell Group was recently awarded a seed grant to fund a collaboration with Oregon Health and Science University (Portland) Profs. Kirsten Lampi and Larry David to study eye lens proteins implicated in cataract formation.

The Fall has a been a time for the Prell group! Jim gave talks on the group’s work with Fourier and Gabor Transforms as well as alpha-hemolysin toxin at Purdue, UIUC, Texas A&M, and UT Austin in September, followed by his “tenure talk” at UO in October. Amber gave a poster and recruited for UO’s REU and graduate programs at the 2019 SACNAS Diversity in STEM Conference in Honolulu, HI.

Jim recently attended the second biannual Advancing Mass Spectrometry conference in Amherst, MA in July. This conference featured numerous talks from world-class speakers on the latest in native mass spectrometry, glycomics, and other exciting topics. Jim gave two talks at the Native Mass Spectrometry workshop held on the Sunday of the conference (one on gas-phase ion activation methods, and one on software for native mass spectrum deconvolution) as well as an invited talk on the Prell Group’s latest research. The conference was a huge success, thanks to the hard work of all the organizers, including and especially Prof. Richard Vachet (UMass Amherst).

Sean gave a talk on his latest work deconvolving extremely congested mass spectra (using iFAMS) at the Northwest Regional Meeting of the American Chemical Society in Portland, OR in June. His talk covered the use of Gabor Transform to simplify interpretation of native protein mass spectra, including those acquired from electrospray ionization out of non-volatile salt buffers.

In case you are a Mac or Windows user and want Collidoscope, you might be pleased to find out that we have recently uploaded new and improved instructions at our GitHub site for how to compile it on your Mac or PC. Turns out it is quite easy once you install the necessary compiler on your computer (we give instructions for that as well). The code should also now run much faster in Windows than previously.