Ishmail Abdus-Saboor, PhD

Columbia University

Ishmail Abdus-Saboor is interested in the skin-brain axis for tactile sensations. He wants to understand how the brain generates the perception of pain and pleasure based on sensory stimuli applied to the skin. Working in mice and naked mole-rats, Abdus-Saboor and his team are integrating the peripheral and central nervous systems, seeking to uncover genes and neural circuits for somatosensation.

Mariana X. Byndloss, DVM, PhD

Vanderbilt University Medical Center

Mariana Byndloss wants to understand how disruption of beneficial host-microbiota metabolic interactions contributes to human disease. Focusing on the interactions between gut microbes and intestinal epithelial cells, she is investigating the effects of intestinal epithelial dysfunction in the pathogenesis of infections and noncommunicable diseases. By pursuing how the intestinal epithelium responds to microbiota imbalance caused by diet, antibiotics, or infection with enteric pathogens, Byndloss hopes to create novel therapeutic strategies focusing on the intestinal epithelium and the gut microbiota as potential targets for treating infectious gastroenteritis and noncommunicable diseases such as obesity, inflammatory bowel disease, and colorectal cancer.

Gerald G. Carter, PhD

The Ohio State University

Gerry Carter studies cooperative relationships in vampire bats with the larger goal of understanding the biology of social bond formation. How do strangers become friends? When two unfamiliar female vampire bats form a new social bond, it involves natural, frequent, and costly helping behaviors that Carter can monitor, measure, and manipulate over time. His goal is to use lab experiments and field observations to test theory-based predictions about the ecological forces, biological mechanisms, and cognitive strategies that might shape how individuals create and maintain cooperative relationships. He hopes to gain fundamental insights applicable to other socially complex mammals.

Lucas Martin Cheadle, PhD

Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory

Although the nervous system and the immune system are often considered distinct biological domains, emerging evidence suggests that these systems interact extensively in the contexts of both health and disease. Lucas Cheadle merges in vivo multi-photon imaging with single-cell genomics to define the roles of immune cells in shaping brain development, plasticity, and function. In parallel, Cheadle investigates the inflammatory signals that disrupt neural circuit maturation in disorders of brain development, such as autism. Cheadle’s ultimate goal is to design new therapeutic strategies for treating neurodevelopmental disorders through the pharmacological manipulation of neuro-immune interactions.

Kizzmekia S. Corbett, PhD

Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health

Targeting the coronavirus spike protein in vaccine design is not a one-size-fits-all solution. Spike structures for epidemic and endemic coronaviruses have differing characteristics and thus present unique problems for elicitation of cross-reactive antibody responses. Towards pandemic preparedness, Kizzmekia Corbett is exploring vaccine-induced immunity to spike by defining mechanisms of action and protective capacity of B-cell and antibody responses that target cross-reactive epitopes. She is also uncovering the antigenic landscape of endemic coronaviruses. Simultaneous understanding of viral immunology for both epidemic and endemic coronaviruses will inform universal coronavirus vaccine design.

Josefina del Mármol, PhD

Harvard Medical School

Josefina del Mármol’s research aims to elucidate the structural and molecular mechanisms underlying the sense of smell. Across the tree of life, animals rely on detecting and discriminating between millions of odorant compounds present in the environment to guide complex behaviors – from a baby recognizing her mother’s scent to a mosquito locating her next bloodmeal. The del Mármol lab uses structural biology, electrophysiology, and neurogenetics to understand how olfactory receptors translate the chemical complexity of the environment into interpretable neuronal signals that enable robust odor-driven behavior.

Chantell Evans, PhD

Duke University

Mitochondria are energy-producing organelles vital for neuron survival and function. There are millions of mitochondria within a single neuron that require continuous repair and removal to maintain a healthy population of mitochondria. Chantell Evans will explore how neurons use these quality control pathways to restore or sequester and eliminate damaged mitochondria. These clean-up processes, called mitochondrial-derived vesicles and mitophagy, are important for maintaining mitochondrial health and are implicated in Parkinson’s disease and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. By studying healthy nerve cells and cells from people with neurodegenerative diseases, Evans plans to discover how neurons perform this important quality control and how these pathways may compensate for one another in disease backgrounds.

Moisés Expósito Alonso, PhD

Carnegie Science

Moisés Expósito Alonso investigates the genetic processes driving species adaptation or extinction in response to new environments caused by climate change. Centered on model plant species, Expósito Alonso’s team integrates long-term evolutionary experiments in field sites worldwide with molecular biology and genomics to explore the gene pathways underlying plant climate adaptation, and the speed and predictability of rapid evolution. By employing biodiversity modeling informed by genomics, this research is unveiling the impact of climate and land transformations on species evolution and the loss of genetic diversity globally.

D’Juan Farmer, PhD

University of California, Los Angeles

The skull protects and shields the head from external damage, and changes to skull shape and function dramatically impact surrounding organs, like the brain. Such is the case in a congenital anomaly called craniosynostosis, where bone and brain growth are decoupled, altering skull shape and impairing brain development. D’Juan Farmer and his team study cranial sutures, the structures that facilitate cooperative growth between the skull and the brain and are lost in patients with craniosynostosis. Farmer’s lab combines mouse and zebrafish models with cutting-edge genomic and imaging technologies to understand the developmental events that drive suture formation and how these processes go awry in craniosynostosis.

Walter G. Gonzalez, PhD

University of California, San Francisco

Throughout our lives, we navigate two distinct domains: one in which we are awake and exhibit controlled behavior, and another where we sleep and experience a world constrained by our creativity. Walter Gonzalez’s research aims to discern how neuronal networks in the brain minimize errors in motor behavior while facilitating the exploration of behaviors during sleep. To accomplish this objective, Gonzalez employs mesoscale recordings of neuronal activity controlling motor behaviors in awake and sleeping mice and songbirds. Ultimately, Gonzalez’s research seeks to determine how errors in neuronal activity are corrected and how sleep affects brain computation and behavior. 

Elizabeth Johnson, PhD

Cornell University

Beneficial gut bacteria contribute to the optimal development of infant immunity and digestion. These bacteria rely on nutrients in human milk to survive in the human gut and can produce health-promoting chemical signals from these dietary inputs. Liz Johnson wants to know which specific nutrients promote the development of the infant gut microbiome and how the microbial transformation of dietary inputs impacts infant health. This information will help caregivers make more informed decisions about what to feed their babies during a critical window to support lifelong microbiome-dependent health.

Sarah Kocher, PhD

Princeton University

Sarah Kocher wants to understand what shapes variation in social behavior. Her lab has developed new tools to study social behavior across different scales, from the molecular building blocks of the “social brain” to the ecological and evolutionary forces that shape social evolution. Her research focuses on a unique group of bees that includes solitary, social, and socially flexible lineages. In these bees, social behavior has been independently gained and lost multiple times, creating an ideal framework for uncovering the factors shaping social behavior and its evolution.

Bianca Jones Marlin, PhD

Columbia University

Parenthood induces a host of changes in the brain to promote survival of offspring. Some alterations are new, while others unmask latent or “turned off” behaviors that exist within us. Bianca Jones Marlin explores how the brain’s sensory systems and emotional circuits are altered by parenthood and related experiences. She combines high-resolution imaging, behavior, and molecular genetics to uncover how parents may unknowingly, but adaptively, prepare offspring for challenges they have experienced through the transfer of biological adaptations, called “transgenerational inheritance.” She hopes her work will inform healthcare breakthroughs, identifying how to halt the maladaptive transmission of stress across generations.

Kara Marshall, PhD

Baylor College of Medicine

Kara Marshall is interested in how the brain senses mechanical forces within the body. The nervous system continuously monitors internal organs, a collection of senses called interoception, to control basic bodily functions like blood pressure, feeding, digestion, and urination. All of these processes rely partly on the detection of mechanical force for their varied roles: gastrointestinal stretch halts eating, and bladder stretch indicates the need to find a bathroom. The Marshall lab aims to understand the molecules and cell types that enable these important internal senses to drive physiology and behavior, in both health and disease.  

Kara L. McKinley, PhD

Harvard University

Kara McKinley studies the biology of menstruation. During menstruation, the uterine lining – the endometrium – is extensively damaged and then rapidly rebuilt, and these processes continue month after month for decades. The McKinley lab uses the natural destruction-construction cycles of the endometrium to understand and improve how our bodies heal from damage. In addition, a central goal of the lab is to improve care for the hundreds of millions of people worldwide who have endometrial diseases or menstrual experiences that interfere with their quality of life.

Juan L. Mendoza, PhD

The University of Chicago

The immune system relies on an intricate cell-to-cell communication system. This system can warn cells that a virus has been detected. Signaling proteins called cytokines bind specific receptors on cell surfaces, resulting in those cells performing specific preprogrammed actions inside the cell. Juan Mendoza’s work includes studying every cytokine-related interaction outside and inside of cells. These interactions are important for initiating, transmitting, and acting on these warning signals. Using knowledge about these interactions, he aims to find new ways to improve immunotherapies, either by using small molecules or engineered proteins.

Mustafa Mir, PhD

University of Pennsylvania

Regulating when and where genes are expressed is essential to the proper development and health of all life. The remarkably robust nature of this regulation is illustrated during embryonic development where individual cells make decisions to lay out the future body plan of an animal. Mustafa Mir and his lab develop and apply new microscopes to directly visualize the molecular scale events that underlie gene expression within live embryos. By interrogating these events in their native contexts, the Mir lab aims to build a quantitative understanding of how gene expression is regulated and new approaches to correct it when it goes awry.

Patrick Mitchell, PhD

University of Washington

Patrick Mitchell is uncovering strategies that animal cells use to specifically detect pathogens via the innate immune detection of activities that are unique to pathogens. Self- versus non-self-discrimination ensures the appropriate activation of host immunity. These molecular recognition events sense microbial threats by detecting microbe-specific patterns. However, these ubiquitous microbial cues fail to distinguish between ‘true’ pathogens and harmless or even beneficial microbes. Mitchell hopes that understanding the principles of this mode of innate immune recognition, and how they have been shaped by host-pathogen genetic conflicts, will reveal new therapeutic strategies to bolster host defense and dampen auto-inflammatory diseases.

Claudia Moreno, PhD

University of Washington

Claudia Moreno wants to understand the mechanisms that govern heart rate adaptability. Her research focuses on the most robust oscillator in the body: the cardiac pacemaker. The Moreno lab studies pacemaker adaptability at different timescales, ranging from short-term adaptability that occurs within seconds, such as the instantaneous increase in heart rate during stressful situations, to long-term adaptability, which pertains to the adaptations that animals have developed to maintain the wide range of heart rates observed in nature. Her overarching goal is to identify novel mechanisms of heart rate control that can be leveraged to prevent and treat heart rhythm disorders.

Hernandez Moura Silva, PhD

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Immune cells are known for helping our body to fight infections. However, immune cells are present even in tissues that are not typically exposed to potential infections. This suggests that immune cells actively support normal tissue function beyond host defense. In his lab, Hernandez Moura Silva seeks to understand “non-immune” mechanisms mediated by immune cells that support normal tissue function. By understanding the defining principles of homeostasis, he hopes to develop new strategies to tune molecular pathways to reestablish normal tissue function in pathological conditions, such as type II diabetes.

Sonya Neal, PhD

University of California, San Diego

Over the last decade, the rhomboid superfamily of proteins has been uncovered as regulators of diverse membrane-related processes, and yet almost nothing is known about the molecular mechanism by which they carry out their functions. Sonya Neal strives to understand the widely conserved rhomboid proteins by leveraging yeast, human cells, and zebrafish for complete characterization of rhomboid proteins at the mechanistic, cellular, and organismal level. Ultimately, her research holds great promise in revealing new fundamental mechanisms, which will be harnessed to tackle rhomboid-related diseases.

Lena Farah Pernas, PhD

University of California, Los Angeles

Lena Pernas is challenging the conventional view of the role of mitochondria during infection. Her work has shown that mitochondria counteract invading pathogens, rather than being simply hijacked or damaged by them. Going forward, her team aims to uncover how organelles sense and respond to infections, and how metabolism and organellar function are rewired to defend against pathogens at different organizational and temporal scales. Her findings have the potential to reveal new aspects of organellar biology and broaden our understanding of the role of human metabolism in the progression of infectious disease.

Angela M. Phillips, PhD

University of California, San Francisco

Angela Phillips is uncovering the molecular determinants of host-virus evolution. She focuses on the mutations that fuel the evolutionary arms race between viral proteins and antibodies, investigating how they enable viruses to escape antibodies, and antibodies to recognize new viruses, without compromising the stability or function of these proteins. Her lab tackles these questions by developing high-throughput methods to measure stability and function for millions of proteins in parallel. They then integrate this rich information to develop predictive evolutionary models, which they hope will be useful for forecasting the emergence of new viral variants and designing long-lasting vaccination strategies.

Molly Schumer, PhD

Stanford University

Hybridization, or the exchange of genes between different species, is much more common than previously recognized. In the past decade, the genome sequencing revolution has allowed us to peer into the evolutionary histories of myriad species. This has led to the realization that many if not most plant and animal species have hybridized with their close relatives. Research in Molly Schumer’s lab seeks to understand the molecular and evolutionary consequences of this genetic exchange. The lab uses a unique model system – swordtail fish – to bridge the gap between studies of molecular mechanism and studies of evolution in natural populations.

Madineh Sedigh-Sarvestani, PhD

Cornell University

Madineh Sedigh-Sarvestani is a visual neuroscientist working to understand how our brains create experience: the neural representation of the world that is shaped by our bodies and bodily movements. Her work builds on the diversity of brains, bodies, and environments that exist in nature, using state-of-the-art technologies to unlock the brain-body interactions that derive meaningful information from the environment. She believes these discoveries will lead to new theories of information processing in the brain and new therapies for neurological disorders.

Judith Simcox, PhD

University of Wisconsin–Madison

Lipids are the most abundant metabolite in the plasma, accounting for more than 60 percent of the circulating metabolite pool. These plasma lipids function as stored fuel, structural elements, and signaling molecules that regulate cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes. Despite their established biological importance, the majority of observed plasma lipids are unidentified, and their function is unexplored. Judith Simcox and her lab work to identify novel lipids in the circulation, determine how their production is regulated, and discover how these plasma lipids function in metabolic disease.

Trevor R. Sorrells, PhD

Yale University

Millions of years ago, ancient flies evolved to feed on the blood of vertebrates, becoming the mosquitoes that bite us today. This behavior profoundly altered the health and history of humans by transmitting numerous disease-causing pathogens. Trevor Sorrells studies the neural circuits in the mosquito brain that control how mosquitoes locate a source of blood. By identifying these neurons and comparing them across insects, we can understand the evolutionary origins of this innovation in behavior and develop new strategies to prevent the spread of mosquito-borne illness.

HaoSheng Sun, PhD

The University of Alabama at Birmingham

Our brains are made up of largely the same composition of neurons from birth to adulthood, yet we exhibit extensive behavioral changes across our lifespan. HaoSheng Sun’s laboratory aims to identify genetic timing mechanisms that govern the maturation of our nervous system and how environmental factors influence these mechanisms. His lab uses both worm and mouse models to understand conserved and divergent mechanisms of neuronal maturation across the animal kingdom. 

David Van Valen, MD, PhD

California Institute of Technology

David Van Valen seeks to understand how living systems link environmental information to changes in cellular behavior with signaling pathways. To study this question, his lab combines ideas from cell biology and physics with advances in imaging, genomics, and artificial intelligence to increase the scope and scale of biological measurements. By integrating information about signaling activity, gene expression, and cellular behaviors at the level of single cells, Van Valen and his team hope to understand the mechanisms behind cellular information processing and how these are perturbed in human disease states.

Rebecca Maria Voorhees, PhD

California Institute of Technology

How do human cells accurately make millions of proteins each minute? Proteins are the molecular workhorses of the body, responsible for everything from the signaling of neurons in our brain to recognition of viruses in our blood stream. Rebecca Voorhees seeks to understand how cells make membrane proteins, an essential class of proteins that must be embedded into the thin protective “skin” that surrounds our cells and organelles. Her lab’s goal is to define the molecular logic that regulates membrane protein synthesis, which will ultimately provide the insight necessary to manipulate protein flux to treat human disease.

Seychelle M. Vos, PhD

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Each of our cells contains nearly two meters of DNA that needs to be compacted and organized to fit within the confines of the cell. This organization impacts which genes are active, influencing cell function and fate. Disruptions in this process can lead to cancer, intellectual disability, and developmental delay. Seychelle Vos aims to understand the connection between genome organization and gene expression. She studies RNA polymerase II, the molecular machine which transcribes most protein coding genes, and its interactions with genome organization at various levels. Her research will help uncover how cells achieve specific functions.