In the Spotlight—Graduate Student

Abstract

Harsha is a recipient of an NIH F31 Fellowship and has been awarded the 2024 SICB price for the best student presentation in the Evolutionary Developmental Biology Division.

Website: https://harsha-sen.weebly.com/

I am from Kolkata, India and have loved nature for as long as I can remember. I was obsessed with Disney's Dinosaur movie as a toddler, and grew up catching bugs, watching tons of Animal Planet, and interacting closely with the urban wildlife around me. When I was in middle school, I remember being amazed by a nature documentary explaining how a population of brown bears that ventured into the Arctic accumulated incrementally beneficial mutations over thousands of generations to evolve into polar bears—I think that was the moment that got me to really understand a bit of how evolution works, and I've enjoyed understanding the processes that lead to natural diversity ever since.

I moved to the United States for college and was lucky to work on two (broadly speaking) evolutionary projects as an undergrad, one with a geneticist and another with a statistician. In my senior year, I took a course in developmental biology since I started recognizing it as the bridge between evolution and genetics. And even when I was a research assistant after college in a lab developing neurogenomic technologies, I found myself drawn to the molecular biology of quirky organisms—I remember reading about the genome of the scaly-foot snail (which can grow iron-mineralized scales!) and would chat with labmates about the molecular basis of temperature-dependent sex determination. I think that it was around then that I realized the type of biologist I want to be is one who can integrate evolutionary, developmental, and genomic lines of inquiry to better understand organisms and their biology.

My graduate program is in Molecular Biology, and I came to Princeton without a specific lab in mind—the program requires students to do three rotations as first years to decide which lab to join for their thesis work. Since I had enjoyed developing a sequencing-based technology during my post-bac, the first two labs I rotated in were CRISPR-based technology development labs. On a whim, I decided to join the Mallarino lab for my last rotation, to be able to study a novel biological system. Pretty soon, I realized that I enjoyed my interactions with labmates, many of whom, like me, were passionate about biodiversity, and were excited to use cutting-edge technologies to better understand it. It is this shared passion and the community in the lab that initially drew me to EvoDevo work for my PhD.

For me, I think the three are intertwined. I enjoy using novel technologies to better understand biological systems, and information-rich datasets can help generate new questions. I also really enjoy working with understudied organisms, using technology to shed light on their biology and how it differs from more traditional models. It is important to use these technologies and study systems to ask good questions—picking an interesting system usually means there are many good questions to be asked, and these questions even if very broad at first are often why we pick novel systems in the first place.