Nematostella imaged during the course.
For more than a century, MBL courses have connected and inspired scientists and students from around the world. Now, a new intensive training program based on those courses introduces graduate students at the University of Chicago (UChicago) to one of MBL’s most popular offerings—the Embryology Advanced Research Training Course.
Mengjie Chen, PhD (left), Megan McNerney, MD, PhD (center), Maanasa Raghavan, PhD (right), and Anindita Basu, PhD (not pictured), are working at the leading edge of human genetics research.
Despite decades of messaging that “STEM is for boys,” the proportion of women in science, technology, engineering and mathematics continues to rise. Today, women earn more than half of all PhDs in the biological sciences in the U.S.
A gift of $10 million to the University of Chicago from the Margot and Tom Pritzker Foundation will establish the Pritzker Plant Biology Center on the University’s Hyde Park campus.
The research hub, a first of its kind for the University, will focus its efforts on investigating new ways to promote plant growth and increase crop yield. This research has the potential to address and solve one of the most significant global challenges today: climate change’s pressure on food production.
New research at the University of Chicago has found that the same machinery used by mammalian cells to drive cellular differentiation also plays a critical role in activating genes in yeast in response to environmental stress. The results, which were published on November 17 in Molecular Cell, suggest that these machines, known as transcriptional condensates, are an ancient, conserved tool used by eukaryotic cells to promote high level gene expression for over a billion years.
The Black Death was the single greatest mortality event in recorded history, killing up to 50% of the European population in less than five years. New research from the University of Chicago, McMaster University, and the Institut Pasteur has found evidence that one of the darkest periods in recorded human history placed a significant selective pressure on the human population, changing the frequency of certain immune-related genetic variants and affecting our susceptibility to disease today.
Prof. Manyuan Long (Ecology and Evolution, Evolutionary Biology, GGSB) is an evolutionary geneticist who focuses on how new genes originate in organisms. He has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship this year, selected on the basis of prior achievement and exceptional promise. His work combines theoretical, computational, and molecular experimental approaches to explore the functions of new genes, the evolution of essential genes in development, gene interactions with new genes, sexual selection and conflict on new genes, and de novo gene origination.
Congratulations to Edwin (Chip) Ferguson, PhD, for his appointment as Associate Dean for Academic Affairs!
Five University of Chicago scholars have been elected to the National Academy of Sciences, joining other scientists and researchers chosen in “recognition of their distinguished and continuing achievements in original research.”
Matthew Stephens has been named the Ralph W. Gerard Professor in the Departments of Statistics and Human Genetics and the College. Stephens’ research focuses on a wide variety of problems at the interface of statistics and genetics. His lab often tackles problems where novel statistical methods are required, or can learn something new compared with existing approaches. Much of that work involves developing new statistical methodologies, many of which have a non-trivial computational component.
Sue Levison, graduate education administrator for Genetics, Genomics and Systems Biology and Human Genetics, has been chosen to receive the Leadership Award at the Biological Sciences Division's second annual Excellence in Staff Awards reception.
