An ongoing log of small & large things.

Nucleic Acids ResearchOur manuscript was published, titled “Structures of naked mole-rat, tuco-tuco, and guinea pig ribosomes—is rRNA fragmentation linked to translational fidelity?” Gutierrez-Vargas et al., 2026.

NatureOur manuscript was published, titled “Ku limits RNA-induced innate immunity to allow Alu expansion in primates.” Zhu et al., 2025.

NYU LangoneAfter over 9 years at Columbia University, I am starting my new position as a Senior Research Scientist at New York University Grossman School of Medicine, Department of Pathology and Applied Bioinformatics Laboratories.

Nature CommunicationsOur manuscript was published, titled “Structure-based prediction and characterization of photo-crosslinking in native protein–RNA complexes.” Feng et al., 2024.

Cell · ResourceOur manuscript was published, titled “Time resolution in cryo-EM using a PDMS-based microfluidic chip assembly and its application to the study of HflX-mediated ribosome recycling.” Bhattacharjee et al., 2024.

IEEE TCIOur manuscript was published, titled “Recovery of conformational continuum from single-particle cryo-EM images: optimization of ManifoldEM informed by ground truth.” Seitz et al., 2021.

Biophysical J.Our manuscript was published, titled “What is in the black box? — A perspective on software in cryo-electron microscopy.” Maji & Frank, 2021.

Nature ChemistryOur collaborative manuscript was published, titled “A glycan gate controls opening of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein.” Sztain et al., 2021.

Columbia UniversityI am now an Associate Research Scientist at Columbia University.

JCIM · FrontiersOur manuscript was accepted by the Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling, Frontiers in CryoEM Modeling: “Propagation of Conformational Coordinates Across Angular Space in Mapping the Continuum of States from Cryo-EM Data by Manifold Embedding.” Maji et al., 2020.

Software · ManifoldEMManifoldEM alpha v0.1.0 released — a Python package for obtaining the continuum of conformational states of molecular machines from cryo-EM data. Reference: Dashti et al. 2014.

AwardJacques Dubochet, Joachim Frank and Richard Henderson awarded the 2017 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

AwardDr. Joachim Frank receives the 2017 Wiley Prize.

JPC-BOur manuscript was accepted by the Journal of Physical Chemistry B: “Quantitative Characterization of Domain Motions in Molecular Machines.” Maji et al., 2017.

Columbia UniversityI joined the lab of Joachim Frank at Columbia University as a postdoctoral research scientist.