Douglas Blackiston

Assistant Professor, Biology

(617) 627-4552

douglas.blackiston@tufts.edu

200 Boston Ave

Full Profile (facultyprofiles.tufts.edu)

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Career Highlights / Publications Research Professional Activities Courses / Teaching Activities

Research/Areas of Interest

Developmental Biology
Animal Behavior
Living Materials
Biorobotics

We are a developmental biology lab interested in understanding how groups of stem cells self-assemble and organize into functional tissues and organisms. Half of our projects are built around basic developmental biology questions - examining cell populations giving rise to mucociliary tissues and the eye, and how signaling pathways in these tissues may be used to treat airway and vision diseases in a regenerative medicine context.

The other projects in the lab are built around using developing tissues as living materials in applied contexts - to design biosensors, biological robots, and self-healing biohybrid devices. This work combines aspects of stem cell biology, traditional robotics, and simulation to generate new classes of living machines for use in both ecological and biomedical contexts.

Education

PhD, Georgetown University, Washington D.C., United States

Biography

Douglas Blackiston received his Ph.D. in Biology from Georgetown University and is currently an Assistant Professor at Tufts University and a Visiting Scholar at the Wyss Institute at Harvard, where his research program examines the relationship between developmental events and organism level behaviors. His work encompasses many diverse questions and models, from the ability of memory to survive metamorphosis in moths and butterflies, to the capacity of transplanted eyes to restore vision in blind animals. He is a National Academy of Sciences Kavli Fellow, a Cozzarelli prize recipient, an Altmetric top 100 scientist, and his research has been featured as exhibits in numerous museums including the Design Museum of London, the CCCB, and the Copernicus Science Centre.