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Graduate Course in Biological Resilience: BIO 263 Special Topics (Spring 2021, Spring 2022)

Biological systems are dynamic, but inherently stable within bounds. This applies across the levels of biological organization; but, these bounds can change across time (such as seasonally), or with developmental stage, so they are not static. However, within normal bounds, biological systems can resist change caused by external forces, and they are resilient – that is, they can recovery from perturbations, or disturbances. Resilience is pervasive in living systems, but many important problems in biological resilience remain unresolved.  Our goal in this seminar is to explore resilience in biological systems at multiple levels of biological organization.

Visit the SIS course page for the full description: https://sis.uit.tufts.edu/psp/paprd/EMPLOYEE/EMPL/h/?tab=TFP_CLASS_SEARCH#search_results/term/2212/career/ALL/subject/BIO/course/0263/attr/keyword/instructor

Graduate Resilience Fellowships

In Fall 2021 and Spring 2022, we offered four, one-semester BRII fellowships to provide RA support to Ph.D. students during the ’21-’22 academic year.  Students on these RA-ships conducted integrative research projects on biological resilience, attended and participated in monthly meetings with other BRII fellows throughout the year, and contributed to writing an essay about their experiences doing cross-disciplinary work within Biology.  Fellows were asked to identify two sponsors for their project: one (most commonly) their Ph.D. advisor and the other from a different subdiscipline within biology. 

As a guide to “integrative research”, BRII Fellowship projects spanned topics covered by two NSF clusters.  Top-priority projects were those that spanned multiple NSF Divisions within Biology. 

2021-2022 Graduate Resilience Fellows

Emilie Jones

Project Title: “The Resilience of Tissue Remodeling”

Isaac Weinberg

Project Title: “Self Organization Facilitates Resilience Across Biological Scales”

Ursula Beattie

Project Title: “Investigating the Cause of Stress-Induced DNA Damage”

Brendan Carson

Project Title: “How does host-range overlap contribute to the resilience of insect viriomes?”

2022-2023 Graduate Research Projects

Adam Eichenwald

Project Title: “Calculating the impact of microclimate on the persistence of the avian Mojave Desert bird community”

Jonah Levy

Project Title: “Responses of a boreal bird community to thirty years of change in forest management”

Nicolas Louw

Project Title: “Investigating microbial trade-offs in traits within the model cheese rind microbiome”

Tyler Maclay

Project Title: “Testing for MiDAS at the expanded CAG/CTG repeat associated with myotonic dystrophy”