Diego Rivera Gelsinger, PhD ’20, is now a postdoctoral researcher at Columbia University in New York. During his time at JHU, he studied how life can live on little water. Extreme measures Chile’s Atacama Desert is one of the driest places on earth. It averages 15 millimeters—about half an inch—of rain a year. Some weather […]

Annie Vemu, PhD ’20, is an associate at Longwood Fund in Boston, MA. At Johns Hopkins, she studied microtubules, the skeleton of the cell. A structured environment Microtubules provide the fundamental structure of a cell. They’re small, cylindrical structures that contribute to its shape. Microtubules also work like mini-highways within a cell, transporting cargo from […]

Gabby Vidaurre examines one region of the genome and how it’s regulated and replicated.  When a stem cell divides, it creates two cells. One will remain a stem cell, and the other will differentiate into a cell type that particular stem cell is used for. This is particularly interesting in Drosophila, the common fruit fly, […]

Color Guard Sarah Hadyniak studies how cone cells in the retina develop Colors matter to fifth-year Johns Hopkins Ph.D. student Sarah Hadyniak. And what especially matters to her is the order in which they develop—and why that’s potentially important to treat health disorders affecting vision. Humans have trichromatic color vision, which comes from the presence […]

Aurelia Mapps studies satellite glia, the “babysitters” of our sympathetic nervous system Most of us know the nervous system as the electric wiring of the body. Its cellular unit, neurons, transmit chemical signals to other neurons. But neurons also have support cells, called glial cells, or glia, from the Greek word for “glue,” suggesting they […]