Articles by Guest Author (166 results)

Guest post by Rebecca Mandt. Being a scientist can be incredibly rewarding. As a PhD student who studies the genetics and evolution of the malaria parasite, I am motivated to go to the lab every day because I believe the research I do will contribute in some way to our future ability to address a serious…

Guest post by Meredith M. Course* and Irini Topalidou.** The career success of graduate students and postdocs (referred to here as “trainees”) is largely dependent on just one or two principal investigators (PIs). PIs influence how trainees think about science and whether they choose to stay in the field. The fundamental purpose of mentorship is for a…

As COVID-19 has spread across the world, members of the GSA community have faced unprecedented challenges in their professional and personal lives. To stay connected during this socially distant time, GSA invites the scientists in our community to share how they are meeting these challenges, as well as their questions and worries.  If you would…

Guest post by Michele Markstein and Gregory Davis. A summary of the May 26, 2020 TAGC 2020 Online workshop, “Raising a Woke Generation of Geneticists: How and Why to Include Eugenics History in Genetics Classes.” In the wake of George Floyd’s murder by Minnesota police officers, the nation has been wrestling with how to identify and combat…

Guest post by Jennifer Tsang. Years ago, Sarah Edie and Norann Zaghloul pored over 50,000 zebrafish embryos, examining them for developmental phenotypes. They had previously injected each of these embryos with a plasmid expressing a gene from chromosome 21. Their goal was to understand how overexpression of specific genes on chromosome 21 affected early development1.…

Guest post by Erin Vinson, University of Maine and Michelle Smith, Cornell University Are you teaching genetics and looking for some new ideas? Check out CourseSource, a peer-reviewed, open-access journal that publishes field-tested articles describing undergraduate biology activities. All the activities are aligned with learning goals written by life science professional societies, including GSA. Many…

Guest author Rori Rohlfs describes a unique classroom project for exploring the eugenic history of our field. I was a fourth-year graduate student when I found myself asking a librarian for the archives of the journal The Annals of Eugenics. I got to that point by climbing back through a chain of references on fundamental…

As COVID-19 spreads across the world, members of the GSA community have had to face unprecedented challenges in their professional and personal lives. To stay connected during this socially distant time, GSA invites the scientists in our community to share how they are meeting these challenges, as well as their questions and worries.  If you…

We are sad to report that Dr. Karl Gordon Lark died on April 10th, 2020 from an aggressive form of prostate cancer. Karl Gordon Lark was born on December 13th, 1930 in Lafayette, Indiana to Karl and Betty Lark-Horovitz. His father was a physicist with an interest in biology. Gordon entered the University of Chicago…

As COVID-19 spreads across the world, members of the GSA community have had to face unprecedented challenges in their professional and personal lives. To stay connected during this socially distant time, GSA invites the scientists in our community to share how they are meeting these challenges, as well as their questions and worries.  If you…

Guest post by C. Brandon Ogbunugafor, Assistant Professor at Brown University. John Maynard Smith, born in London on January 6, 1920, was one of the great iconoclasts of the post neo-Darwinian synthesis era, a cult figure whose life was defined by notable contributions across a wide breadth of subfields [1]. He not only authored numerous…