Hello Department of Biology!
Welcome to the Biology Department newsletter.
Thanks to everyone who submitted news items.
Your contributions are greatly appreciated!
Chair’s Note
Dear Department of Biology Community,
I hope that the spring finds all of you doing well! In this department newsletter, you’ll see how our community of students, staff, and faculty continue to do amazing work. We hope you enjoy reading about them and we invite you to contribute to our department website and upcoming newsletters by clicking here.
All the best,
Pamela Templer
Professor and Chair
Congratulations to the Following Faculty
Congratulations to Assistant Professor Ana Fiszbein for being awarded an NSF CAREER grant and an Award to Catalyze Discovery from Hevolution. The title of Prof. Fiszbein’s NSF CAREER grant is “Splicing factors as transcriptional activators” and the Hevolution grant title is “Tracking gene boundaries in aging”.
Congratulations to Professor Kim McCall for being awarded funding from NIH for her grant titled “The coordination of cell death and corpse clearance in Drosophila.” Prof. McCall’s research program aims to understand the diverse mechanisms of cell death, how dead cells are efficiently removed, and the physiological effects on organisms when these processes go awry.
Congratulations to Professor Richard Primack for being invited to join the Academia Europaea, an initiative of the United Kingdom’s Royal Society and other National Academies in Europe.
Congratulations to Professors Katya Ravid and Nathanael Fillmore for being awarded an Allostatic Load and Cardio-Oncology Grant from the American Heart Association to focus on work on clonal hematopoiesis, cancer and cardiovascular disease.
Congratulations to Professor and Chair Pamela Templer who was invited to serve on the U.S. National Committee for the International Union of Biological Sciences (IUBS) and being invited to serve as an Author on the U.S. Global Change Research Program’s First National Nature Assessment. Also, congratulations to Pam for being named a CAS Distinguished Professor!
Congratulations to the Following Students
Congratulations to Morgan Bennett-Smith of the Buston Lab for receiving an Explorers Club Exploration Grant to examine anemonefish and host sea anemone mutualisms in changing ocean conditions, such as during coral bleaching events, as well as for receiving the Dana Wright Fellowship.
Congratulations to Emerson Conrad-Rooney for receiving the Ecological Society of America 2024 Graduate Student Policy Award!
Congratulations to Nyomi Inda (ECE Major, College of Engineering, graduate student in the Tay Lab) for having their abstract on “AutoMorFi: Automated Morphometric Analysis in Fiji” selected for the prestigious Engineering Community Technical Research Exhibition sponsored by Lam Research Corporation.
Congratulations to Ph.D. candidate María José Salazar-Nicholls of the Warkentin Lab for receiving the Marlene Zuk award for the best student talk in Animal Behavior at the 2024 meeting of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology.
Congratulations to our Graduate Students who’ve received department awards so far this year!
Alden Macchi Award: Alexandra Chasse
Belamarich Dissertation Writing Award: Mandy Pinheiro
Brendon R. Lutz Award: Alejandro Rondon Ortiz
Charles Terner Award: Jaice Rottenberg
Dana Wright Fellowship: Morgan Bennett-Smith
Economakis Award: E Schlatter
Marion Kramer Award: Kathryn Atherton and Jillian Ness
Outstanding Teaching Fellow in Biology Award: Chelsea Stephens
Thomas Kunz Award: Abigail Robinson
Warren-McLeod Award (Summer): Mu-Han Chen and Maria Ingersoll
Warren-McLeod Award (Year): Caroline Fleming
Congratulations to the Following Staff
Congratulations to Todd Blute for receiving the 2024 CAS Outstanding Achievement Award!
Congratulations to Barkha Shah for being awarded the CAS Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, Access, and Leadership (IDEAL) Award!
What’s New
Boston University’s Marine Program (BUMP) released their first-ever newsletter, covering news about events, faculty updates, student profiles, alumni achievements, and more.
Recent Publications
Abbonante, V, AI Karkempetzaki, C Leon, A Krishnan, N Huang, CA Di Buduo, D Cattaneo, CM Ward, S Matsuura, I Guinard, J Weber, A De Acutis, G Vozzi, A Iurlo, K Ravid and A Balduini. Newly Identified Roles for PIEZO1 Mechanosensor in Controlling Normal Megakaryocyte Development and in Primary Myelofibrosis. American Journal of Hematology, U.S. National Library of Medicine, 2024, pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38165047/.
Aichelman, H, A Huzar, D Wuitchik, K Atherton, R Wright, G Dixon, E Schlatter, N Haftel and SW Davies. Symbiosis Modulates Gene Expression of Symbionts, but Not Coral Hosts, under Thermal Challenge. Wiley, 2024, onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/mec.17318.
Postdoc Dr. Hannah Aichelman published one of her dissertation chapters exploring how symbiosis modulates gene expression of algal symbionts, but not coral hosts. This work was in collaboration with several BU Marine Program students. This publication is the result of one of Hannah Eichelman’s dissertation chapters, and was a collaborative effort across BU Marine Program students, former BU undergrad and Davies Lab tech Alexa Huzar, former Davies Lab postdoc Rachel Wright, BU PhD student Katie Atherton, former Davies Lab PhD student Dan Wuitchik, and external collaborator Groves Dixon. They leveraged gene expression of coral hosts and their symbionts to test the hypothesis that coral gene expression responds more strongly to thermal stress compared to symbionts because hosts modulate symbiont environments to buffer stress.
Azorsa, F and JFA Traniello. Dietary variation, social complexity, and brain size evolution in predatory ants.
Bekendam, R and K Ravid. Mechanisms of Platelet Activation in Cancer-Associated Thrombosis: A Focus on Myeloproliferative Neoplasms. Frontiers in Cell and Developmental Biology, U.S. National Library of Medicine, 2023, pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37457287/.
Castillo, KD, CB Bove, AM Hughes, ME Powell, JB Ries and SW Davies. Gene Expression Plasticity Facilitates Acclimatization of a Long-Lived Caribbean Coral across Divergent Reef Environments. Scientific Reports, 2024, www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-57319-0.
Previous Davies lab postdoc (and now Assistant Professor at Ursinus College) Dr. Colleen Bove led a paper exploring the acclimation capacity of long-lived corals across divergent reef environments in Belize using long term mortality, growth and gene expression data.
Elguero, J, G Liu, K Tiemeyer, S Bandyadka, H Gandevia, L Duro, Z Yan and K McCall. Defective Phagocytosis Leads to Neurodegeneration through Systemic Increased Innate Immune Signaling. Cell, 2023, doi.org/10.1016/j.isci.2023.108052.
A failure to remove dead cells in the brain of the fruit fly was found to promote elevated immune signaling and neurodegeneration.
Grupstra, CGB, M Gómez-Corrales, JE Fifer, HE Aichelman, KS Meyer-Kaiser, C Prada and SW Davies. Integrating Cryptic Diversity into Coral Evolution, Symbiosis and Conservation. Nature News, Nature Publishing Group, 2024, www.nature.com/articles/s41559-023-02319-y.
Postdoc Dr. Carsten Grupstra from the Davies lab led a perspective piece published in Nature Ecology Evolution discussing how cryptic diversity affects the study of coral adaptation to future environments and the challenges and opportunities that this diversity poses for conservation and restoration efforts.
Güell, BA, JG McDaniel and KM Warkentin. Egg-Clutch Biomechanics Affect Escape-Hatching Behavior and Performance. OUP Academic, Oxford University Press, 2024, doi.org/10.1093/iob/obae006.
Most gliding leaf frog embryos die in snake attacks, while their congeners mostly escape, cued by egg-clutch vibrations. Using standardized physical testing and cross-species egg-transplant predation experiments, we found that egg structure and clutch vibration mechanics help explain species differences in embryo behavior and escape success.
Katchmar, A and AB Cohen. A National Benefit For Cell And Gene Therapies: A Proposed Framework. Health Affairs, 2024, www.healthaffairs.org/content/forefront/national-benefit-cell-and-gene-therapies-proposed-framework.
This article explores a novel way to mitigate the impact of high-cost cell and gene therapies on the US health care system, and was covered by InsideHealthPolicy and Bloomberg Intelligence.
Lobel, P and L Kerr Lobel. A Ten-Year Record Shows Warming inside the Belize Barrier Reef Lagoon. MDPI, Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute, 2024, www.mdpi.com/1424-2818/16/1/57.
Lotfollahzadeh, S, X Yang, DJW Wong, J Han, F Seta, S Ganguli, A Jose, K Ravid and V Chitalia. Venous Thrombosis Assay in a Mouse Model of Cancer. Journal of Visualized Experiments : JoVE, U.S. National Library of Medicine, 2024, pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38251710/.
Smith, J, J Vizueta and JFA Traniello. Diet diversity and gustatory receptor evolution in ants.
Recent Events
Jordan Smith and Frank Azorsa presented their research at the Cold Spring Harbor on Genomics and Biology of Social Insects Conference, March 25-28, 2024.
The Emerging Scholars in Global Change event took place on March 25-26, 2024 which was funded by Boston University’s Office of Diversity and Inclusion. This event identified and established relationships with current emerging scholars in Biology from underrepresented backgrounds.
The Davies Lab collaborated with Multiverse to conduct an outreach event at a Boston Public Elementary School that involved science booths, short lectures, and music.
Photos by Sarah Davies.
Upcoming Events
Evans Center ARC Seminars, Symposia and Special Events for Spring 2024.
Prof. Warkentin will provide an invited talk in June 2024 titled “Plasticity, modularity, and cross-sexual transfer: a nonbinary framework for sexual diversity.” The invited talk will be in the Symposium titled Increasing the visibility of LGBTQ+ scientists and building a queer-friendly community in the Animal Behavior Society Meeting in London, Ontario.
Clubs and Athletics
BU oSTEM
Out in Stem (oSTEM) empowers LGBTQIA+ graduate students in STEM fields to succeed personally, academically, and professionally by cultivating community and promoting visibility through hosting a range of social, academic, and scientific events. BU oSTEM recently elected their 2024-2025 Leadership Team, which included many Biology and MCBB students.