聚光灯下的研究生。

IF 1.8 3区 生物学 Q3 DEVELOPMENTAL BIOLOGY
Harsha Sen
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引用次数: 0

摘要

Harsha是NIH F31奖学金的获得者,并因其在进化发育生物学部门的最佳学生演讲而被授予2024年SICB奖。网站:https://harsha-sen.weebly.com/I我来自印度加尔各答,从我记事起就热爱大自然。我在蹒跚学步的时候就痴迷于迪士尼的恐龙电影,从小就抓虫子,看大量的动物星球,和我周围的城市野生动物密切互动。当我还在上中学的时候,我记得我被一部自然纪录片震惊了,这部纪录片解释了一群冒险进入北极的棕熊是如何在数千代的时间里积累了越来越多的有益突变,进化成北极熊的。我想那一刻让我真正了解了进化是如何运作的,从那以后我就很喜欢理解导致自然多样性的过程。我搬到美国上大学,很幸运地在本科期间参与了两个(广义上说)进化项目,一个是遗传学家,另一个是统计学家。在我大四的时候,我选修了一门发育生物学的课程,因为我开始意识到它是进化和遗传学之间的桥梁。甚至当我大学毕业后在一个开发神经基因组技术的实验室做研究助理时,我发现自己被古怪生物的分子生物学所吸引——我记得我读过关于鳞足蜗牛(它可以长出铁矿化的鳞片!)的基因组的文章,我还会和实验室的同事谈论温度依赖性性别决定的分子基础。我想大概是在那个时候,我意识到我想成为的那种生物学家是能够整合进化、发育和基因组研究线,以更好地理解生物体及其生物学的人。我的研究生专业是分子生物学,我来普林斯顿的时候并没有想过要选择一个特定的实验室——这个项目要求学生在第一年进行三次轮转,以决定加入哪个实验室进行论文工作。由于我在毕业后很喜欢开发一种基于测序的技术,所以我轮岗的前两个实验室都是基于crispr的技术开发实验室。一时兴起,我决定最后一次加入马拉里诺实验室,以便能够研究一种新的生物系统。很快,我意识到我很享受与实验室同事的互动,他们中的许多人,像我一样,对生物多样性充满热情,并且很高兴使用尖端技术来更好地了解它。正是这种共同的激情和实验室里的社区最初吸引了我到EvoDevo攻读博士学位。对我来说,我认为这三者是相互交织的。我喜欢使用新技术来更好地理解生物系统,信息丰富的数据集可以帮助产生新的问题。我也非常喜欢研究未被充分研究的生物,利用技术来阐明它们的生物学特性,以及它与传统模型的不同之处。使用这些技术和研究系统来提出好问题是很重要的——选择一个有趣的系统通常意味着有很多好问题要问,这些问题即使一开始非常广泛,也经常是我们首先选择新系统的原因。
本文章由计算机程序翻译,如有差异,请以英文原文为准。

In the Spotlight—Graduate Student

In the Spotlight—Graduate Student

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.

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来源期刊
CiteScore
4.80
自引率
9.10%
发文量
63
审稿时长
6-12 weeks
期刊介绍: Developmental Evolution is a branch of evolutionary biology that integrates evidence and concepts from developmental biology, phylogenetics, comparative morphology, evolutionary genetics and increasingly also genomics, systems biology as well as synthetic biology to gain an understanding of the structure and evolution of organisms. The Journal of Experimental Zoology -B: Molecular and Developmental Evolution provides a forum where these fields are invited to bring together their insights to further a synthetic understanding of evolution from the molecular through the organismic level. Contributions from all these branches of science are welcome to JEZB. We particularly encourage submissions that apply the tools of genomics, as well as systems and synthetic biology to developmental evolution. At this time the impact of these emerging fields on developmental evolution has not been explored to its fullest extent and for this reason we are eager to foster the relationship of systems and synthetic biology with devo evo.
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