Community Voices

Dick on sabbatical and my good fortune Guest post in memory of Richard Lewontin by Thoru Pederson. When I was a graduate student in the Zoology Department at Syracuse University, a visiting professor took an office across the hall from the lab where I was stationed. He came “across” to me (not a cis-trans test…

From a Kyoto garden to scientific discoveries.  Since the 17th century, medaka fish have been bred for their beautiful colors. Shortly after the 1900 re-discovery of Mendel’s laws of inheritance, medaka began to be used for genetic studies. Recessive inheritance of the orange-red (b) and white (r) variants, female-limited appearance of the white phenotype, and an…

We’re taking time to get to know the members of the GSA’s Early Career Scientist Committees. Join us to learn more about our 2021 early career scientist advocates. Melissa Drown Career Development Subcommittee University of Miami Research Interest  For my thesis, I study the evolution of complex traits such as metabolic rate and thermal tolerance in a…

We’re taking time to get to know the members of the GSA’s Early Career Scientist Committees. Join us to learn more about our 2021 early career scientist advocates. Madhumala K. Sadanandappa  Co-Chair, Career Development Subcommittee  Member, Steering Committee  Postdoc at Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth  Research Interest  “Nothing in neurobiology makes sense except in the light of behavior,” a quote…

Jean Robert David, the last active member of the French generation who significantly contributed to the establishment of the nine species in the Drosophila melanogaster subgroup as a model for evolutionary genetics, passed away on June 19, 2021, aged 90. Jean dedicated his 70-year academic career to studying Drosophila biology and evolution, starting as an…

We’re taking time to get to know the members of the GSA’s Early Career Scientist Committees. Join us to learn more about our 2021 early career scientist advocates. Jiae Lee Multimedia Subcommittee University of Washington and University of California, Irvine Postdoc Scholar Research Interest  For more than 15 years, flies have been my science partner. With flies,…

Guest post by A.J. Marian Walhout, PhD. Massachusetts, March 2020: The early days of the COVID-19 pandemic that would profoundly affect us all. Labs shut down abruptly, assay trials were disrupted, some experiments in progress were thrown out. Now what? With pipettes unused on the bench and the foreseeable future unclear, how long would this…

Join us for the PMI Expressions series, where we will get to know the 2021 cohort of GSA Presidential Members. Xin Jin Assistant Professor Department of Neuroscience The Scripps Research Institute What is your current research? My longstanding interest is to understand how brain development is shaped by genes and environment, and how these factors…

We’re taking time to get to know the members of the GSA’s Early Career Scientist Committees. Join us to learn more about our 2020 early career scientist advocates. Katherine Maniates Policy and Advocacy Subcommittee  Department of Biological Sciences, Marquette University Waksman Institute of Microbiology, Rutgers University Postdoc Research Interest For my dissertation research, I focused on understanding how the…

Kellyann Jones-Jamtgaard is a Biological Sciences Specialist at the USDA, where she supports education grant programs. Here, she talks about her passion for communicating the value of science to society and how that led her to pursue a career in science education and policy.  In the Decoding Life series, we talk to geneticists with diverse…

This is a guest post by Sarah Marshall, originally published in the Undiagnosed Disease Network’s Participant Engagement and Empowerment Resource (UDN PEER). In April 2021, I had the pleasure of interviewing Drs. Hugo Bellen [2021 GSA President] and Shinya Yamamoto about their work at the Model Organisms Screening Center (MOSC) at Baylor College of Medicine,…