The MBL’s spring and summer educational season has begun! We are excited to see the campus coming alive again, after months of careful planning. On March 21, the season started when 12 University of Chicago undergraduates arrived for their MBL Spring Quarter. This program builds on the success of the inaugural MBL Autumn Quarter – which
Cell division in bacteria is a fundamental and medically important process, but how it works on the molecular level remains enigmatic. Recently, the MBL Physiology course hosted a collaboration that managed to fit an important piece into the puzzle of bacterial cell division. Led by Physiology faculty Ethan Garner of Harvard University, the group’s results
Congratulations to MBL alumni Leah Guthrie and Guillaume Urtecho, two of 21 Hanna Gray Fellows selected by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in 2020. The Hanna Gray Fellows are exceptional early-career scientists who will each receive up to $1.4 million over four years in support of their research. Guthrie, a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University,
Millie Hughes-Fulford was an alumna of the MBL Physiology course (1987) and Analytical and Quantitative Light Microscopy course (1999). By Richard Sandomir Millie Hughes-Fulford, NASA’s first female payload specialist, who conducted biomedical experiments on the physical toll of spaceflight on humans on board the space shuttle Columbia in 1991, died on Feb. 2 at her
The MBL Practical Course in Developmental Biology in Quintay, Chile, will be held Jan. 5-17, 2022. The course is primarily intended for Latin American students, but all may apply. At the end of the course, two students will receive the Quintay Prize, which includes a full fellowship to attend the MBL Embryology course (Woods Hole)
By Diana Kenney The most powerful substance in the human brain for neuronal communication is glutamate. It is by far the most abundant, and it’s implicated in all kinds of operations. Among the most amazing is the slow restructuring of neural networks due to learning and memory acquisition, a process called synaptic plasticity. Glutamate is
Three MBL affiliates have been honored by the Society for Development Biology, including longtime MBL faculty member Scott E. Fraser of the University of Southern California, who was awarded the 2021 Edwin G. Conklin Medal in Developmental Biology. “Fraser helped define our understanding of stem cells, cell lineage, and morphogenesis through development of tools that
Sharon Begley was a 1987 alumna of the MBL’s Logan Science Journalism Program. By Eric Boodman Trying to write a lede about the loss of Sharon Begley feels a little like being asked to sing a song at Aretha Franklin’s grave. Sharon would have hated that sentence. She didn’t settle for similes that needed qualifying.
When the influential A. Murat Eren (Meren) decided to offer an online beginners’ course on microbes and computational ways to study them, the responsive was explosive: 2,000 people registered in the first 24 hours. With creative planning using both Zoom and YouTube, Meren’s team found a way for all to interactively participate. Meren is an
In this delightful podcast, MBL Fellow Hari Shroff delves into memories (fond and not so much) of his childhood in England; his lifelong interest in tool building, “by luck” taking a post-doc in the lab of Eric Betzig and helping to develop a microscopy technology that went on to win a Nobel Prize; the uncertainties