Congrats to Sneha Chandak, an undergraduate researcher in the lab who just graduated and was named a 2026 Dean’s Honored Graduate! This is a very selective award, given to about 30 graduates each year, representing the top ~1% of graduates in the college.
Sneha has been a fantastic researcher in the lab, working on several projects involving anchialine organisms. Most notably, she formed a collaboration with Brian Sedio’s lab to examine the metabolomics of anchialine sediment samples. She found that while different habitats are composed of different microbes – they have a taxonomic “fingerprint” – their metabolites are fairly similar, suggesting different microbial communities might be performing similar metabolisms overall. She presented this work at SICB 2026.
She has also worked with several other labs across campus and her senior thesis was centered on how an anti-DEI bill affected student organizations at UT. She’s headed to Rice University in the Fall to start a PhD in microbiology. It was great to get to celebrate her and the other “DHGs” this year!