Articles by Guest Author (138 results)

Quick tips for making vaccine science understandable to non-scientists. Guest post by Elisabeth Marnik, Ph.D. It’s been more than a year since the world started shutting down in the wake of widespread COVID-19 cases. We are still living through a pandemic, but the United States is finally starting to see a light at the end…

Insider tips on how to make your postdoc application stand out from the pack. Guest post by B. Duygu Özpolat. While some graduate students have resources and institutional support to help them navigate the transition to postdoc life, not everyone has a mentor to guide them through the many unwritten rules of this complex system.…

For every rule, there are exceptions. The same is true for how organisms organize their genomes. From how DNA is packaged in the nucleus to what genetic code is used for translating proteins, notable exceptions are found all across the tree of life. Most organisms use the standard genetic code. A few, such as ciliates,…

When you’ve been in science long enough, you become part of a certain generation: people with whom you were roommates at Gordon conferences as postdocs, discussed your latest data and shiny ideas during session breaks as a young faculty, and looked forward to seeing at meetings as established scientists. Angelika was part of my generation;…

GSA member Lea Kanner Bleyman died on November 6, 2020, three days short of her 84th birthday. Lea was a Professor Emerita in the Department of Natural Sciences at Baruch College and a past-President of the International Society of Protozoologists (now the International Society of Protistologists).  Lea was born in Halle, Germany on November 9,…

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…