NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Awardees & Honorable Mentions
The awardees and honorable mentions for the 2020 NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP) competition have been posted! MCBB is exited to announce that Marisol Dothard of the Finnerty and Segrè labs was awarded a three-year graduate research fellowship, and Abigail Descoteaux of the Bradham Lab received an honorable mention.
Marisol’s research interests lie primarily in investigating the role that microbial communities may play in the survival of corals in refuge habitats in Belize. She is excited to work closely with undergraduate students at both BU and the University of Belize in the field and in the lab.
In the Bradham Lab, Abigail studies pattern formation and skeletogenesis using Lytechinus variegatus as a model organism. However, the extent of our understanding of how skeletogenesis is regulated is limited by our inability to observe the process dynamically in individual embryos. Early in development, embryos begin to swim. To image them, the embryos must be immobilized; however, current immobilization techniques are either highly transient, perturb normal development, or are lethal. To resolve this issue, she is working with Zachary Heins in the Khalil Lab to engineer a simple flow device that will continuously deliver a non-toxic paralytic drug to immobilize the embryos throughout development. By combining this device with fluorescent biomineralization read-outs and transplanted PMCs, she will for the first time visualize the entire process of PMC migration and skeletal biomineralization in individual live embryos. She will then introduce pharmacological perturbations to disrupt previously identified patterning cues and observe how they impact skeletal patterning and development in real time. This work will provide unprecedented insight into both the biomineralization process and the mechanisms driving PMC migration and embryonic patterning.
Congratulations, Marisol and Abigail!