Faculty Highlights 2022-2023
Catherine Freudenreich and Freudenreich lab member Erica Polleys were featured in a May 2023 Tufts Now article discussing their research on DNA repair; you can read the article here.
The Wolfe Lab shares some interesting insights into their research on fungi and microbial communities in an excellent Popular Science piece, “LaeA-Regulated Fungal Traits Mediate Bacterial Community Assembly” published May 2023; read the full article linked here!
Helen McCreery was featured in a March 2023 Biology Newsletter as part of our celebration of Women's History Month -- way to go, Dr. McCreery, let's get more women into STEM!
Congratulations to Lawrence Uricchio, who was honored as the inaugural Youniss Family Professor of Innovation at an event on March 8th, 2023 where he gave a talk titled, "Evolutionary Genetics as a Prospective Discipline."
Scientific American did a short documentary on some of Mike Levin and Doug Blackiston's work on their "Animal Robot" in the Levin Lab, which was featured at the AAAS annual meeting in early March. The video can be viewed on YouTube.
Kelly McLaughlin developed and ran a new upper level lab course – BIO56: Developmental Biology Research Lab. The course ran in the Spring 2023 semester and was filled to near-capacity!
The Biology Department welcomes new faculty member Professor Alfredo Hernandez, who joined in Fall 2022. Alfredo received his PhD in Biochemistry from Texas A&M University. He did a postdoc at Harvard Medical School in the Department of Biological Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology, where he was later an instructor. He has broad expertise in nucleic acid metabolism and is interested in the function, structure, and interactions of proteins and nucleic acids. His lab will pursue a number of research projects with the goal of understanding how human cells faithfully replicate mitochondrial DNA. He will be teaching Biochemistry and upper-level courses in DNA replication and RNA biology. Alfredo's favorite non-work activities are playing electric guitar, running, and going on road trips with his family.
Tufts researchers' limb-regeneration startup, Morphoceuticals, raises funding -- Morphoceuticals' scientific founders, Tufts University professors Michael Levin and David Kaplan, published a study last January (2022) in Science Advances that demonstrated limb regeneration in an African clawed frog.
In March 2023, Michael Romero’s, “Common myths of glucocorticoid function in ecology and conservation” was the Most Cited Paper for the journal Journal of Experimental Zoology-A -- great article, Michael!
March 17, 2023, Erik Dopman gave an invited YouTube talk on the topic of speciation, hosted by the Institute of Science and Technology Austria. View the full interview here!
Department Chair Catherine Freudenreich was asked to write a short blurb about trinucleotide repeat diseases for a Molecular Cell “Voices” piece, published February 2, 2023 -- you can read it here!
Mimi Kao's R01 grant was funded this year! This grant is a collaboration with Ani Patel of the Tufts Psychology Dept. to investigate auditory-motor interactions during rhythm perception using a small animal model.
It was a busy year for Colin Orians, who completed his position as an NSF program officer in January 2023 and returned to Tufts University for the spring semester. At NSF, in addition to his primary duties to the Population and Community Ecology Program within the Division of Environmental Biology, he also worked on interdisciplinary initiatives including Integrative Biology (a program within the Biology Directorate) and Signals in the Soil (a cross Directorate program).
Tufts biology researchers are studying species from birds and tadpoles to fruit flies seeking to understand their strength in the face of natural and man-made challenges -- Michael Romero and Michael Reed are featured along with graduate and undergraduate researchers in this January 11, 2023 TuftsNow piece, "Uncovering the Secrets of Resilience in Nature" -- read the article and watch the accompanying video here!
In January 2023, two Tufts faculty members, including the Biology Department's own Mitch McVey, have been named fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the world’s largest scientific society -- congratulations, Dr. McVey! Read the article on TuftsNow.
This summer ('22) a large group of collaborators including Tufts Biology Professor Michael Reed received a large NSF grant to work on 'Predicting Emergence in Multidisciplinary Pandemic Tipping Points'; the research funded by this grant will directly support our ability to address many of the complex and interconnected challenges in pandemic preparedness and response.
The more we understand how cells produce shape and form, the more inadequate the idea of a genomic blueprint looks – Michael Levin and colleagues describe their research into xenobots and how they reshape our understanding of genetics in the August 2022 article linked here.
This August 2022, Mimi Kao gave a talk, "Vocal Plasticity in the Songbird" at a Gordon Conference on the Neural Mechanisms of Acoustic Communication at Mt. Holyoke.
In July 2022, Mitch McVey, with McVey Lab members Terrence Hanscom, Nicholas Woodward, Rebecca Batorsky, Alexander J Brown, Steven A Roberts, published a paper on Nucleic Acids Research that has been a year in the making! You can read their work, "Characterization of sequence contexts that favor alternative end joining at Cas9-induced double-strand breaks" in Nucleic Acids Research, gkac575, here.
Barry Trimmer was the organizer and Chair of an invited Symposium, “Making Biorobots Behave: Connecting Engineering and Animal Behavior” that took place from July 24th to the 29th at the 2022 International Congress of Neuroethology in Lisbon, Portugal.
Sergei Mirkin is the PI on an impressive NSF grant, "Studying the relationship between DNA replication and tandem repeat instability." The grant funding will run from July 2022 - June 2026 -- well done, Sergei!
Summer 2022 was an exciting one for Assistant Professor Mimi Kao, who was delighted to offer her talents teaching in the Neural Systems & Behavior Course at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. A songbird module was recently added to the course, which Mimi co-led.
The “30 Year Bird Project”, a study which aims to identify causes of and curb the decline of the bird population of North America, and on which our own Michael Reed is Co-PI received some press in June 2022. Read about the study.
June 14th, 2022, Sergei Mirkin had a letter, "Fleeing Russian researchers seek Western support" published in Nature; the letter discusses the struggle of Russian scientists to find work elsewhere in the wake of the invasion of Ukraine. You can read the brief yet powerful letter here.
In June 2022, former grad student of Professor Michael Reed, Dr. Charles van Rees posted a Tedx Talk:
"Nature is an all-you-can-eat buffet of new ideas," says Dr. van Rees, "and perhaps we've been too hasty to dismiss nature's limitless teachings in our busy modern world." In his talk, (titled "A glance through nature's playbook") Charles explains how to be more present to the teachings around us and why we should think twice about what we might be throwing away as the loss of the natural world continues. Learn more about Dr. van Rees and view his Tedx Talk here.