Spotlight On...
The Spotlight series was created in 2009 as a way of building camaraderie in our department and as a way of communicating our unique departmental culture to prospective students and visitors. Featuring current graduate students, postdoctoral associates, technical staff, and administrative staff it showcases the broad interests and talent of our many department members. In April of 2015, we launched our first online version.
Archives: 2018 | 2017 | 2016 | 2015
Matthew Simon
August 2020
My current research focuses on the LINE1 retrotransposon and how its activity impacts aging. These genetic elements like to make copies of themselves and stick them into our genomes, causing DNA damage and sometimes causing mutations. Recently, we’ve found that our ability to silence these elements and prevent them from running amok decreases as we get older. My work has recently shown that LINE1s can actually drive aging-related pathologies and are active contributors to the aging process, as opposed to a side effect of the aging process. My research hopes to better understand why this deregulation occurs and how we might combat it in order to help extend healthy aging.
Fiona Palardy
July 2020
I’m a Data Entry Clerk in the Business Office. I dabble in supply ordering and
reimbursements as well.
John Bettinger
June 2020
My research is one developing the methodology for quantifying in vivo methionine oxidation levels on a proteome wide scale.
Lauren Gregory
May 2020
I work with asexual, female pea aphids. These insects produce clonal daughters that are winged or wingless, depending on the environment that their mother experiences. If a wingless mother resides on a crowded plant, this induces a stress response, and she will produce a high proportion of winged daughters who can disperse to a more suitable host. I’m working on understanding the hormonal regulation of this morph determination.
Tiffany Dias
April 2020
I’m currently using yeast to study how selective history can impact an organism’s ability to adapt to stress and changing environments. By using experimental evolution techniques, we can examine how the frequency and intensity of exposure to stress in a strain’s evolutionary history impact its performance in different environments, and explore whether an adaptation to one environment is costly under different conditions. We can also investigate the underlying genetic basis of these adaptations by sequencing and analyzing the strains’ genomes.
Morgan Brady
March 2020
I’m currently working on a bioengineering project to further develop a FRET-based single-molecule protein sequencing assay. More specifically, we hijacked the bacterial ClpXP protease to “read” the order and distance of a polypeptide’s fluorescently-labeled cysteines and lysines as these labeled residues are passed through the fluorescently-labeled protease core. These read-outs can then be compared to proteomics databases for identification. One of the benefits of this method is that you could quickly and accurately detect proteins with dynamic range in complex samples, so you wouldn’t need a large amount of known sample for correct identification. Eventually, single-molecule protein sequencing could be used for basic research, medical diagnostics, synthetic biology, and more.
Rose Driscoll
February 2020
I study wing plasticity in pea aphids. Females of this species can be either winged or wingless, depending on the environment their mother experienced – a mother aphid living on a plant that’s crowded with lots of aphids will produce winged daughters that can fly away to find a new host plant, while a mother living on a less crowded plant will produce mostly wingless daughters. We’ve noticed, however, that some aphid lineages have a strong response to crowding and produce many winged daughters, while other aphid lineages have a weak response to crowding and produce few winged daughters. I’m working on understanding the genetic basis of these differences.
Christian Cammarota
January 2020
I’m studying biological physics. Specifically, I am studying how new cells are added to an existing epithelial tissue. These tissues need to maintain integrity to function properly and newly born cells need to incorporate themselves into the tissue. I am studying how changing physical properties of epithelial tissues affect the incorporation of newly born cells.
Moriana Garcia
December 2019
I am the librarian for biology and have been in this position since I arrived at the University of Rochester in November of 2015. I support the information needs of the department, teach students strategies and tools to search more efficiently, and maintain the River Campus Library collection in biology and related sciences. I also support biomedical engineering and brain & cognitive sciences, so I like to say I am the “BBB librarian”.
Marcus Kilwein
November 2019
I am researching how Drosophila embryos utilize their fat reserves. Our lab and others have demonstrated that lipid droplets (fat storage organelles) are highly motile, but little is known about the functions of this motility. I am investigating how this lipid droplet motility affects fat utilization throughout embryonic development.
Xiaolu Wei
October 2019
I work in the Larracuente lab and am interested in the male meiotic drive system in fruit flies called Segregation Distorter (SD). In this system, the driver SD can manipulate meiosis to favor the transmission of itself at the cost of the other allele. The consequence is a lower fertility of the fly and almost all its offspring will have the driver. I am working to understand the molecular mechanism of this selfish behavior.
Jonathan Gigas
September 2019
I work in the Gorbunova/Seluanov lab where we study mechanisms of aging. I work on a protein called Sirtuin6 and its role in human aging by studying a variant found in people who’ve lived over 100 years.
Lindsey Perrin
August 2019
I’m a laboratory technician in the Chen Lab and I’ll be joining the department as a PhD student this fall. The Chen lab studies population genomics using pedigree data from the Florida Scrub Jay, an endangered species of bird endemic to Florida. Using this unique combination of pedigree and genomic data, we can ask questions about evolutionary biology and conservation genomics that wouldn’t have been possible otherwise.
Jillian Ramos
July 2019
I work in Dr. Dragony Fu’s lab where I look at a population of people that have intellectual disability due to a mutation in a protein that is known to modify tRNA. I am trying to determine why a single mutation in a protein leads to this disorder.
Vamsi Kovelakuntla
June 2019
I work in the Meyer lab. We use synthetic biology techniques to engineer bacteria to produce composite materials. We are also developing new methods to combine with 3D bioprinting to produce patterned biologically active materials.
Rachel Hammelman
May 2019
I work in the Brisson lab and we are studying evolutionary genetics and genomics in the pea aphid. Currently one of the big questions we are working on is the evolution of wings and their developmental mechanisms.
Thomas Lyon
April 2019
I’m the lab technician for the Teaching Labs. Basically, we prep and manage all of the undergraduate biology labs.
Beatriz Navarro Dominguez
March 2019
I work in both the Presgraves and Larracuente labs and am interested in the evolution of selfish DNA, which is a general term to describe several kinds of genetic elements that spread within the populations without contributing to the fitness of the organisms carrying them. I am currently working on population genomics and transposable element load of the Segregation Distorter (SD) system of Drosophila melanogaster, a gene complex that achieves high transmission rates to offspring causing alterations during meiosis in its favor and in detriment of other genes. I am also interested in the roles of satellite DNA and transposable elements in hybrid incompatibilities between related species of Drosophila.
Nicholas Macoretta
February 2019
I work in the Gorbunova lab, so my general interests lie in aging. Now, there are many different aspects to this generalized process, so I have to narrow my focus when asking questions about aging organisms. So I focus on the epigenetic components of aging organisms. I am particularly interested in histones, the proteins that form the primary organizational unit of DNA organization (the nucleosome). These proteins have several isoforms, variants, and post-translational modifications that seem to change during aging processes. These affect DNA organization and chromatin overall. If I had to summarize what I study in one sentence, though, I would say that I am interested in how a long-lived rodent species, the naked mole rat, maintains its epigenetic memory during aging processes compared to short-lived species, such as the mouse.
Cordelia Forkpah
January 2019
I am currently working in the Werren Lab as a lab technician so apart from working to keep the lab going, I am working on finding the genetic differences in learning and aggregation behavior in Nasonia, a kind of wasp.