News ARCHIVE

2021

September

Doctoral student Zhenyu Yu joined the Howe Lab to work on the biodegradation of plastic wastes. Welcome, Zhenyu!

August

Neil has been named as the recipient of the 2021 McAdie Chemistry Doctoral Student Award and an SGS-Doctoral Award! The McAdie Award is given to the top student entering the Queen's Chemistry Doctoral Program. Congratulations, Neil!

July

The Howe Lab, Prof. David Zechel, and Prof. George diCenzo received funding from Queen's University's Wicked Ideas fund to engineer plant-rhizobia symbioses and reduce the need for enviromentally damaging nitrogen fertilizers in agriculture.

The Howe Lab and an international consortium of researchers have received funds from Ontario Genomics and Genome Canada to use microbes and enzymes to break down plastic waste! If you are interested in engineering biocatalysts to tackle plastic pollution, consider joining the OpenPlastic team!

Graeme and The Howe Lab received funding from the Ontario Research Fund to understand the chemical mechanisms of enzyme-catalyzed reactions.

March

Christyn received an NSERC Undergraduate Student Research Award to investigate how the mechanisms of a designer enzyme change over the course of its evolution. Congrats, Christyn!

Graeme and Prof. Chantelle Capicciotti were both named as recipients of the 2021 Thieme Chemistry Journals Award. This award is given to promising early career researchers working in chemical synthesis and catalysis or closely related areas of organic chemistry. Congrats Chantelle!

January

2020

December

Graeme was awarded the 2020 Polanyi Prize in Chemistry for his efforts to understand the evolution and catalytic mechanisms of enzymes. A huge thanks to the Council of Ontario Universities for the recognition! The news was also covered in the Kingston Whig-Standard - Canada's oldest daily newspaper!

How does evolution allow Nature to tackle common problems in different genetic or environmental contexts? Neil's new review on the convergent evolution of bacterial natural products in Current Opinion in Biotechnology offers fascinating insights into this important question. Way to go, Neil!

The Howe lab received funding from the inaugural Wicked Ideas competition to solve the water-removal bottleneck in sustainable chemistry. Congrats to the team members in the Jessop, Dinh, and Mabee groups!

November

August

The Howe Lab was featured in the Queen's Gazette alongside Dr. She Zhe for receiving funding to purchase tools for exceptional research. Congrats Dr. She!

Graeme and the group received generous funding from the Canada Foundation for Innovation through the John R. Evans Leadership Fund. These funds will be used to bring state-of-the-art instruments into the Howe Lab.

April

Our efforts to tease apart the evolutionary origins of enzyme catalysis received generous funding from NSERC in the form of a Discovery Grant! Thanks for the support!

March

Christyn received an NSERC Undergraduate Student Research Award to carry out research in the Howe Lab! She will be evaluating the evolutionary importance of quantum mechanical tunneling in enzyme catalyzed hydrogen transfer reactions. Congrats Christyn!

January

Neil arrived at Queen’s by way of UOIT and the Hospital for Sick Children to study natural product biosynthesis in the Howe and Ross Labs. Welcome Neil!

2019

September

Our paper describing the role of quantum mechanical tunneling in phosphite dehydrogenase was accepted for publication in Biochemistry. This is the first example of tunneling on a P-H activating enzyme and suggests that all H-transferring enzymes exploit this quantum mechanical feature.

Our website went live in September of 2019. We managed to stay off the internet for two whole months!

July

The Howe Lab opened its doors at Queen’s University on July 1st of 2019. Graeme appreciated this coincidence and was happy to drive from Illinois to celebrate Canada Day in Kingston!