Dominique Bergmann

We use genetic, genomic and cell biological approaches to study cell fate acquisition, focusing on cases where cell fate is correlated with asymmetric cell division. Our current research is focused on three areas. (1) regulation of stomatal identity by MAP kinase signaling (2)Pattern formation and its reliance on cell communication to regulate division polarity (3) Identification of positive regulators of stomatal formation

Barbara Block

The Block lab investigates endothermy in fish including cellular, ecological and evolutionary physiology. Cellular basis for endothermic metabolism. Research at sea is focused on understanding the movements and physiological ecology of tunas and billfishes to gain insight into the selective advantage of endothermy in fish and habitat utilization.

Steven Block

Properties of proteins or nucleic acids at the level of single macromolecules and molecular complexes. Experimental tools include laser-based optical traps ("optical tweezers") and a variety of state-of-the-art fluorescence techniques, in conjunction with custom-built instrumentation for the nanometer-level detection of displacements and piconewton-level detection of forces.

Carol Boggs
Professor (Teaching)

We are exploring how environmental variation affects life history traits, population structure and dynamics, and species interactions in ecological and evolutionary time, using Lepidoptera. Current interests include (1) how resource allocation strategies interact with foraging and life history in variable environments to affect fitness and population dynamics; (2) the ecological and evolutionary dynamics of small populations, including population re-introductions; and (3) invasion biology, particularly the evolutionary and ecological effects of non-native species' invasion into co-evolved systems..

Bill Burkholder

Our lab is interested in how bacteria monitor and coordinate cell cycle events. We are focused on identifying and characterizing signal transduction pathways used by the bacterium Bacillus subtilis to regulate cell cycle progression and development in response to chromosome status. Our goal is to understand how these pathways work mechanistically and how they contribute to normal growth, development, and genome stability.

Allan Campbell

Comparative molecular biology of DNA insertion by bacteriophage lambda and its relatives, analyzing the organization of the biotin operon in Escherichia coli, and the genetic control of related pathways. Phage integration is a model system for the catalysis and regulation of specific DNA rearrangements.

Martha Cyert

Cells respond to extracellular changes by activating signal transduction pathways, many of which are highly conserved. We study Ca2+-mediated signaling in a simple eukaryote, Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Using genetic, genomic, biochemical and cell biological approaches, we are examining how the Ca2+/calmodulin-regulated phosphatase, calcineurin, regulates gene expression and other cellular processes in response to environmental stress.

Gretchen Daily

Future course of extinction, the resulting changes in the delivery of ecosystem services, and novel opportunities for biodiversity conservation. She is developing ways of forecasting changes in biodiversity and certain ecosystem services, based on countryside biogeography, remote sensing, and theoretical modeling.

Mark Denny

Mechanical design of intertidal organisms. This subject is studied at many different levels of organization, from the molecular, through the material, structural, and organismal, to the ecological.

Rodolfo Dirzo

My current work on conservation biology emphasizes the need of complementing the traditional interests of the conservation of taxa with the increasingly needed conservation of ecological processes. Most of my tropical work is carried out in Mexico and Central Amazonia.

Paul Ehrlich

Conservation biology; ecology, evolution, and behavior of natural populations (especially of butterflies); human ecology and evolution.

David Epel

How development takes place in the marine environment, especially how embryos resist the effects of such environmental stresses as ultraviolet radiation, pathogens and natural and man-made toxins. How can the oocyte or the few-celled embryo protect itself from pathogens such as bacteria, ultraviolet radiation, or the effects of toxins, both natural and manmade?

Marcus Feldman

Evolution of complex genetic systems that can undergo both natural selection and recombination. Human demographic studies, particularly of the sex ratio. Human molecular evolution.The evolution of learning as one interface between modern methods in artificial intelligence and models of biological processes, including communication. The interaction of biological and cultural evolution, for example in the spread of food plant domestication across Europe, and the transmission of learned behaviors in contemporary groups.

Russell Fernald

In the course of evolution,two of the strongest selective forces in nature,light and sex, have left their mark on living organisms. I am interested in how the development and function of the nervous system reflects these events. In the visual system, we are studying the cellular basis of retinal development. In the reproductive system, we have indentified a collection of cells in the brain containing gonodotropin releasing hormone(GnRH) that respond to changes in the social conditions by changing size.

Chris Field

Ecosystem responses to interacting global changes, controls on the carbon and energy balance of natural ecosystems, and ecology and biogeochemistry at the global scale.

Hunter Fraser

We study the regulation and evolution of gene expression using a combination of experimental and computational approaches. Our work brings together quantitative genetics, genomics, epigenetics, and evolutionary biology to achieve a deeper understanding of how genetic variation within and between species affects genome-wide gene expression and ultimately shapes the phenotypic diversity of life.

Judith Frydman

The mechanism of protein folding has become a central problem in biology. We wish to understand the pathways and regulation of protein folding in eukaryotic cells. Knowledge of how proteins actually fold in the cell should eventually provide the basis for controlling protein function under normal conditions and during abnormal conditions of environmental stress and disease.

Tadashi Fukami

Ecological and evolutionary community assembly, with emphasis on historical contingency in community structure, ecosystem functioning, biological invasion and ecological restoration, using experimental, theoretical and comparative methods involving bacteria, protists, fungi, plants and animals.

William Gilly

Mechanisms involved in the cellular regulation of properties, density, and spatial distribution of voltage-gated Na and K channels and of ionotropic glutamate receptors cloned from the squid nervous system and expressed in frog oocytes and insect cells.

Deborah Gordon

Our research examines the social behavior and ecology of social insects. The current research investigates (1) Ant colony organization. (2)Ecology of harvester ant populations.(3)Population genetics of harvester ant populations.(4)The invasive Argentine ant.

Or Gozani

Chromatin dynamics regulate fundamental nuclear processes that influence diverse physiologic and pathologic processes. Our research focuses on chromatin modulation by the ING (Inhibitor of Growth) family of tumor suppressor proteins. The goal of our research is to elucidate the molecular mechanism by which ING proteins regulate chromatin under normal conditions and in response to genotoxic insults, and to understand the relationship between these activities and tumor suppressor pathways.

Elizabeth Hadly

We study morphologic, genetic, population and community responses to the last several thousand years of climatic change in vertebrate ecosystems of temperate North and South America.

Philip Hanawalt

Philip C. Hanawalt discovered repair replication of DNA, the major process by which all living cells deal with damage to their genetic material. His research group studies the mechanisms by which living cells maintain their genomes in the face of endogenous DNA damage and environmental radiations and chemical carcinogens.

H. Craig Heller

Neurobiology of sleep, circadian rhythms, regulation of body temperature, mammalian hibernation, and human exercise physiology. Dr. Heller is co-director of the Center for Sleep and Circadian Neurobiology. The Center fosters multidisciplinary approaches and collaborations that will help us understand the neural mechanisms controlling arousal states and arousal state transitions, the function of sleep, and the neural mechanisms of circadian rhythms. Research on human exercise physiology focuses on the effects of body temperature on physical conditioning and performance.

Patricia Jones

Genetic, cellular, and molecular mechanisms that regulate adaptive immune responses (the antigen-specific responses carried out by B and T lymphocytes, unique to vertebrates), and innate immune responses (responses present in both invertebrates and vertebrates triggered by microbial components).

Richard Klein

Richard G. Klein researches the archeological and fossil evidence for the evolution of human behavior. He has done fieldwork in Spain and especially in South Africa, where has excavated ancient sites and analyzed the excavated materials since 1969. He has focused on the behavioral changes that allowed anatomically modern Africans to spread to Eurasia about 50,000 years ago, where they swamped or replaced the Neanderthals and other non-modern Eurasians.

Ron Kopito

Cellular mechanisms which monitor protein biogenesis and ensure that only properly folded and assembled proteins are deployed within the cell. Genetic biochemical and cell biological approaches are used to identify the machinery involved in recognizing and destroying misfolded proteins.

Sharon Long

Molecular, genetic, and biochemical techniques are used to study how Rhizobium cells recognize and form nodules on their plant hosts. The association is highly specific: individual species of Rhizobium are classified according to the particular legumes they are able to nodulate.

Chris Lowe

My research interests are in the field of evolution and development, and more specifically the evolution of the deuterostomes. My lab is currently investigating three major areas: The origin and evolution of the vertebrate brain and head. The early evolution of the deuterostome endoderm and mesoderm. The evolution of posterior growth in bilaterians.

Liqun Luo

Molecular genetics are used to understand the logic of neural circuit assembly. The human brain is composed of ~10ˆ12 neurons with complex morphologies and intricate connections. We use primarily the simpler brain of the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, composed of ~10ˆ5 neurons, to uncover fundamental mechanisms that are likely to be used in our own brain.

Susan McConnell

How individual neurons know where they should sit in the brain and with which neurons they should form specific axonal connections. Identify and characterize the progenitor cells that give rise to neuron and the processes by which young neurons locate their correct targets among hundreds of thousands of other neurons in the brain.

Fiorenza Micheli

We are investigating how coastal marine assemblages are shaped through the interplay of physical factors and biological interactions, and examining how much of the observed variation in these assemblages can be attributed to human impacts on the marine environment.

Harold Mooney

Harold Mooney has demonstrated that convergent evolution takes place in the properties of different ecosystems that are subject to comparable climates, and has pioneered in the study of the allocation of resources in plants. Research in his laboratory is currently centered on the study of the impact of enhanced CO2 on ecosystem structure and function.

Ashby J. Morrison

Our research interests are to elucidate the contribution of chromatin to mechanisms that promote genomic integrity. The regulation of chromatin is a crucial component of DNA metabolism and processing in eukaryotic organisms. Chromatin-remodeling complexes, modified histones, and higher order chromatin structure are all factors influencing genome stability. We utilize an integrated approach of genetic, biochemical, and molecular techniques, in both yeast and mammalian systems, to examine the involvement of chromatin in processes that prevent genome instability and the pathogenesis of disease.

Mary Beth Mudgett

My laboratory investigates how bacterial pathogens employ proteins secreted by the type III secretion system (TTSS) to manipulate eukaryotic signaling to promote disease. We study TTSS effectors in the plant pathogen Xanthomonas campestris, the causal agent of bacterial spot disease of pepper and tomato. For these studies, we apply biochemical, cell biological, and genetic approaches using the natural hosts and two model pathosystems.

W. James Nelson

Our research objectives are to understand cellular mechanisms involved in development and maintenance of cell polarity. Recent studies indicate that development of epithelial cell polarity is a multistage process requiring instructive extracellular cues (eg. cell-cell and cell-substratum contact) and reorganization of proteins in the cytoplasm and on the plasma membrane. Once established, polarity is maintained by targeting and retention of proteins to functionally distinct apical and basal-lateral plasma membrane domains.

Stephen Palumbi

We study genetics, evolution, conservation, population biology and systematics in a wide variety of marine organisms. Primary focus is the use of molecular genetic techniques in conservation, including identification of dolphin and whale products in commercial markets. Also, molecular evolution of reproductive isolation and its influence on speciation.

Dmitri Petrov

To study the role of mutational biases in evolution, we have been using defunct transposable elements to estimate mutational biases in different organisms. Evolution of mitochondrial DNA insertions into the nuclear genome, the evolution of introns and intergenic regions, and experimental evolution of gene regulation.

Joan Roughgarden

We study the relationship between evolutionary biology and ecology using a combination of theoretical ecology and field studies. We use mathematical descriptions of evolution of community structure and population dynamics and we study Anolis lizards in the Caribbean and barnacles in California.

Robert Sapolsky

How a neuron dies during aging or following various neurological insults; How such neuron death can be accelerated by stress; The design of gene therapy strategies to protect endangered neurons from neurological disease.

Stephen Schneider

Climatic change, global warming, economic implications of global warming mitigation strategies, food/climate and other environmental/science public policy issues, public understanding of science, ecological implications of climatic change, climatic modeling of paleoclimates and of human impacts on climate, e.g., carbon dioxide “greenhouse effect” or environmental consequences of nuclear war.

Mark Schnitzer

The Schnitzer lab develops and uses fluorescence endoscopy and microscopy imaging methods to study biophysical events underlying various forms of learning and memory. A mjaor goal is to accomplish studies of these cellular and molecular events in alert animals. Using fluorescence imaging of neuronal populations, indvidual neurons and neuronal dendtrites, the Schnitzer lab aims to monitor cellular dynamics and simple behaviors concurrently in alert rodents.

Carla Shatz

The major goal of research in the Shatz Laboratory is to discover cellular and molecular mechanisms that transform early fetal and neonatal brain circuits into mature connections, and in particular to determine the extent to which neural function during critical periods of development is needed for these circuits to tune up into adult patterns of connectivity.

Kang Shen

We are interested in understanding how synapses are formed, the final step in wiring a nervous system. In particular, the molecular mechanisms underlying synaptic specificity: how neurons recognize each other and how they make decisions about forming synapses between contacting neurites during development. We use molecular, genetic and cell biological tools to study this question in the nematode, C. elegans, which has a very simple nervous system containing only 302 neurons and approximately 6000 synapses.

Michael Simon

We use genetic and biochemical approaches to study three areas of developmental biology; Planar cell polarity (PCP) in epithelial cells, control of cell shape, motility and the actin cytoskeleton by Src family protein tyrosine kinases, and control of cell fate specification by receptor tyrosine kinases.

Robert Simoni

The nature of cellular membranes using a broad range of techniques, from molecular biology and biochemistry to cell biology. We continue to analyze the role of cholesterol in biological membranes, as well as the genetic mechanisms by which cholesterol production is regulated. This study has direct clinical relevance to the problems of atherosclerosis and heart disease.

Jan Skotheim

A central aim of the burgeoning field of systems biology is to understand the principles governing genetic control networks. I believe finding the principles underlying genetic circuits will occur through detailed studies and then comparisons of several natural systems. Due to its extensive development as an experimental system, our favorite model, the budding yeast cell cycle, is poised to become central to this enterprise. A systematic understanding of biological control circuits should allow us to more readily discern the function of natural systems and aid us in engineering synthetic systems.

George Somero

We study how changes in protein sequence and in the intracellular milieu in which protein function occurs enable organisms to succeed in diverse environments. By comparing homologous proteins from animals adapted to different temperatures, we have shown that only minor differences in habitat temperature are sufficient to favor evolutionary changes.

Tim Stearns

The central question in our work is how cells accurately segregate their genome at each cell division. The work is focused on the centrosome, a unique organelle at the center of the cell that organizes the cytoskeleton and serves as a site for integration of cellular signals. We use the tools of cell biology, genetics, and biochemistry in systems ranging from yeast to human cells to understand how the centrosome duplicates once per cell cycle, and how centrosome defects are involved in the genome instability that is observed in many types of cancer. .

Stuart Thompson

Signal transduction mechanisms in neurons with the goal of better understanding how neurons process information. Signal cascades initiated by G-protein coupled receptors and egional specialization of function in neurons and the role that localized clusters of ion channels play in the processing of information by the cell.

Shripad Tuljapurkar

Dynamics and evolution of human and natural populations. Sensitivity and extinction dynamics in the presence of disturbance, population aging and age structural transitions, evolution of senescence.

Peter Vitousek

Nutrient cycling in tropical and temperate forests. Regulation of cycling of nitrogen, phosphorus, and several other nutrients by using chemical analysis of soil, water, and gas samples from field sites. Biological invasion by exotic species, and sources of elements during long-term soil and ecosystem development in the Hawaiian Islands.

Virginia Walbot

Our laboratory studies the behavior of MuDR/Mu transposons of maize to answer fundamental questions about transposon regulation and plant development. Without a fixed body size, how do plant cells cease division and how are Mu element excisions restricted to the final cell divisions? Plants lack a germ line, but a few floral cells differentiate to undergo meiosis - why does Mu transposition outcome change in pre-meiotic cells?.

Ward Watt

Developing evolutionary theory from mechanistic viewpoints. Using techniques ranging from biochemistry, DNA sequencing, and wind-tunnel flight biophysics to field ecology and mathematical population genetics, we study biochemical and physiological mechanisms of genetic variation, ecological niche structure as the source of natural-selective pressures, and the resulting patterns of evolution of metabolic organization.

Bruce Baker

Sex determination, sexual behavior, dosage compensation and imaginal disc development in Drosophila melanogaster, with the goal of understanding at a molecular level how these processes are brought about.

Charles Yanofsky

Studies are focused on two major problems: 1) Determining the features of the attenuation regulatory mechanism used by E. coli to control transcription of the degradative tryptophanase operon; 2) Determining the features of the transcriptional and translational regulatory mechanisms controlling expression of operons concerned with tryptophan biosynthesis in B. subtilis. Both studies are revealing novel features of gene regulation.

Kathryn Barton

Shoot apical meristem (SAM) -formation of leaves and stems in plants. Identifying Arabidopsis mutant phenotypes in SAM function to determine genes involved in molecular and cellular processes of SAM development.

Joseph Berry

Physiological means by which plants adapt to environmental stress and climactic change, and photosynthetic mechanisms used by higher plants and algaes to fix carbon dioxide.

Daniel Fisher

Theoretical research on the dynamics of evolutionary processes and the interplay between genomic and phenotypic changes, especially in microbes. And dynamics of cellular processes involving interactions between multiple proteins, including cellular oscillators and switches and cooperative phenomena arising from multiple molecular motors acting on actin or microtubules.

Wolf Frommer

Focus:Transport/signaling across the plasma membrane(sugars,amino acids)
Tools:FRET-based nanosensors for imaging metabolites in living organisms using confocal fluorescence microscopy;Sensor optimization by computational design;RNAi to modify cellular functions.
Goals:Identify unknown sugar effluxers from liver or plant cells;study regulatory networks.
Model systems:liver,neuronal and plant cell cultures,C.elegans and Arabidopsis.

Arthur Grossman

How photosynthetic organisms acclimate to their environment and adjust the physiology of the cell. Effects of light are studied in cyanobacteria. Effects of changes in nutrients such as sulphur and phosphorus are studied in mutant green algae and cyanobacteria which are unable to acclimate to nutrient limitation.

Terry Root

Research interests include: 1) ecological analyses of the distribution and abundance patterns of species on a continent-wide scale; 2) examining the physiological constraints on the distribution of wintering birds; 3) influence of global warming on the biogeography of species; 4) large-scale geographic examinations of the structure and composition of communities; 5) applying quantitative problems; 6) analyzing the ecological causes of rarity and commonness; and 7) women's attrition rate out of academics.

Alfred Spormann

Molecular mechanisms of microbial degradation of unusual organic compounds, for example organic pollutants. Also the molecular mechanism of gliding motility in bacteria.

Zhiyong Wang

Steroid responses mediated by a receptor kinase in Arabidopsis thaliana using molecular genetics and proteomics.

Irving Weissman

Developmental biology, self-renewal, homing and functions of the cells that make up blood-forming and immune systems.

Wing Hung Wong

We develop and enhance tools in data analysis, statistical inference, machine learning, Monte Carlo, stochastic process and differential equation, and use them to study problems in computational and systems biology. The major focus are 1)Microarray analysis 2)Cis-regulatory analysis and comparative genomics3)Statistical learning and computation.