OEB alumni Trevor Bedford (PhD '08) named a 2021 MacArthur Fellow and awarded a 'genius grant.' Bedford will use the funds to build tools for tracking and forecasting the spread of viral pathogens such as those that cause influenza, Ebola, and COVID.

Bedford was a graduate student in Professor Dan Hartl's lab...

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Congratulations to Cassandra Extavour selected as one of 33 Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Investigators. Extavour is investigating the ancient origins of germ cells, which are the only cells in the body to pass on their genes, making germ cells central to the process of evolution. Extavour studies the evolutionary processes that led to the formation of the first egg cell. “While my research...

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Charles Davis, OEB Professor and Curator of Vascular Plants at Harvard University Herbaria, has been awarded $4.7 million from the National Science Foundation’s Advancing Digitization of Biodiversity Collections Grant for his team’s collaborative project "Bringing Asia to digital life: mobilizing underrepresented Asian herbarium collections in the US to propel biodiversity discovery.”

Asia is the largest continent on Earth, and includes the world’s tallest mountains, lowest...

Read more about Herbaria awarded $4.7 million to mobilize digital collections of Asian plant biodiversity

The fish species Amia calva goes by many names including bowfin, freshwater dogfish, grinnel, and mud pike. No matter what you call it, this species is an evolutionary enigma because it embodies a unique combination of ancestral and advanced fish features.

In a paper published August 30 in Nature Genetics an international and collaborative team of researchers, headed by Ingo Braasch and Andrew Thompson of...

Read more about Bowfin genome reveals old dogfish can teach researchers new tricks

Lizards and snakes are a key component of most terrestrial ecosystems on earth today. Along with the charismatic tuatara of New Zealand (a “living fossil” represented by a single living species), squamates (all lizards and snakes) make up the Lepidosauria—the largest group of terrestrial vertebrates in the planet today with approximately 11,000 species, and by far the largest modern group of reptiles. Both squamates and tuataras have an extremely long evolutionary history. Their lineages are older than dinosaurs having originated and diverged from each other at some point around 260...

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Congratulations to Xuemei Zhai (Paul R. Moorcroft, Advisor, James J. McCarthy, Advisor, posthumous)) who has successfully defended her PhD and is now officially Dr. Zhai!

One of the biggest questions in evolution is when and how major groups of animals first evolved. The rise of tetrapods (all limbed vertebrates) from their fish relatives marks one of the most important evolutionary events in the history of life. This “fish-to-tetrapod” transition took place somewhere between the Middle and Late Devonian (~400-360 million years ago) and represents the onset of a major environmental shift, when vertebrates first walked onto land. Yet, some of the most fundamental questions regarding the dynamics of this transition have remained unresolved for decades....

Read more about Sustained fast rates of evolution explain how tetrapods evolved from fish

Ctenophores, also known as comb jellies, are a group of over 200 living species of invertebrate animals with a transparent gelatinous body superficially resembling that of a jellyfish. There is much interest in ctenophore evolution in recent years as their controversial phylogenetic position in the animal tree of life has prompted conflicting hypotheses. While some studies suggest they might represent the earliest branching animals, others suggest a more traditional position as close relatives of jellyfish.

These hypotheses carry different and important implications for...

Read more about Rare Cambrian fossils from Utah reveal unexpected anatomical complexity in early comb jellies

Congratulations to Alyssa Hernandez (Brian Farrell, Advisor) who has successfully defended her PhD and is now officially Dr. Hernandez!

Congratulations to Phil Fahn-Lai (Andrew Biewener and Stephanie Pierce, Co-Advisors) who has successfully defended their PhD and is now officially Dr. Fahn-Lai!

Professor L. Mahadevan, OEB and John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, has been named a 2021 Simons Investigator.

Simons Investigators are outstanding theoretical scientists who receive a stable base of research support from the foundation, enabling them to undertake the long-term study of fundamental questions.

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Congratulations to postdoctoral researcher Paula Rodriguez Flores (Giribet Lab) awarded LinnéSys: Systematics Research Fund for her project, "Speciation and connectivity in deep-sea cosmopolitan and vicariant squat lobsters." The awarded is funded through the Linnean Society of London and the Systematics Association.

In a paper published in Geology, Javier Ortega-Hernandez and colleagues from the University of New England, The Natural History Museum, and Pomona College report a unique case of an exceptionally preserved nervous system in a 310 million-year-old fossil horseshoe crab from the...

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Congratulations to PhD candidate Molly Edwards (Elena Kramer, Advisor) recipient of the Katherine Esau Award at the Botany 2021 conference. Molly was selected for her presentation, "A developmental and transcriptional framework for pollinator-driven evolutionary transitions in petal spur morphology in Aquilegia (columbine)."

The...

Read more about Molly Edwards Recipient of Katherine Esau Award

Congratulations to PhD candidate Dwayne Evans (Harvard Medical School Biological and Biomedical Sciences PhD Program, Cassandra Extavour, Advisor) awarded a 2021 Ford Foundation Predoctoral Fellowship.

The fellowship, administered by the Fellowships Office of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, seeks to increase the...

Read more about Dwayne Evans Awarded Ford Foundation Predoctoral Fellowship