Michael Russello named 2012-1013 Hrdy Visiting Fellow in Conservation Biology. The fellowship is awarded to an individual who will engage in scientific study and work in the Department of Organismic and Evolutonary Biology.

President Barack Obama has appointed James J. McCarthy to the U.S. Arctic Research Commission. McCarthy is recognized internationally for his fundamental contributions to oceanography and Arctic science. Full Story.

Research in the Extavour Lab finds that a gene that acts as "master regulator" of germ cell development originally evolved to play a role in the nervous system rather than in reproduction. Graduate student Ben Ewen-Campen was the first author of this study that shows that this gene arose much earlier in evolution than previously suspected....

Elena Kramer among seven faculty members from Harvard University named American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Fellows. Full Story.

With sorrow and a profound sense of loss we learned of the death of our colleague and friend, Farish Jenkins, on November 11, 2012.

Hopi Hoekstra receives First Estela Medrano Award for excellence in aging research. The award honors the memory and work of Dr. Estela Medrano a professor at the Huffington Center on Aging at Baylor College of Medicine and an internationally recognized expert in the regulation of aging and cancer development of human melanocytes, who died tragically in August...

Arhat Abzhanov principal investigator in new study of Caribbean bullfinches in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that offers new insights into the development and adaptation of beak shape and shows the molecular signals that produce beak shapes show even more variation than is apparent on the surface. ...

Martin Nowak's group latest research paper in Nature Medicine creates a mathematical model that helps to design new drug cocktails aimed at controlling HIV.

L. Mahadevan study in Science unravels the mystery of a cucumber vine's coiled tendrils and has characterized a new kind of spring. Full Story.

Ned Friedman describes the Arnold Arboretum's ginkgo project as part of the first-ever effort to define the entire community of microbes — the “microbiome” — of a tree.

Kirsten Bomblies and Cassandra Extavour nominated for the 2012 Harvard Graduate Women in Science and Engineering (HGWISE) Mentor of the Year Award. The HGWISE Mentoring Program pairs female graduate students with female faculty in order to promote strong mentoring relationships and nurture a new generation of scientists.

Martin Nowak among the authors of a paper proposing a mathematical framework for the evolution of in-group favoritism from a continuum of strategies. Article in Nature.com's Scientific Reports.

Research in the Abzhanov Lab finds that a change in developmental timing was crucial in the evolutionary shift from dinosaurs to birds. Graduate student Bhart-Anjan Bhullar was the first author on a paper that has been receiving a lot of attention in the scientific and popular press. Read more in ...

Postdoctoral Fellow, Pleuni Pennigs (Wakeley lab), has published an article in PLoS Computational Biology that uses new computational modeling and suggests that pre-existing HIV drug resistance mutations may contribute more to drug failure than...

Yun Zhang and colleagues from the Center for Brain Science studied C. Elegans (tiny, transparent worms) and demonstrated they have a more complex neural system than was previously thought. Their paper was published in the Journal Nature suggesting a possible path for study of neurological disorders such as shizophrenia....