Burcu Erdogan and Julian Kimura

Dr. Burcu Erdogan is a post-doctoral fellow in the Whited Lab. She received her B.S degree in Genetics and Bioengineering from Yeditepe University, Istanbul, Turkey. She studied the role of ETS transcription factors and identified their potential targets involved in neuronal differentiation in the lab of Isil Aksan Kurnaz. Then she stayed there for a bit more to earn her M.S degree. She then came to Boston to work on optic nerve regeneration as a research intern at Larry Benowitz’s lab. She fell in love with Boston and decided to stay to do her PhD. She received her PhD from the lab of Laura Anne Lowery at Boston College and studied how microtubule dynamics are regulated in the neuronal growth cone during axon growth and guidance in developing Xenopus laevis nervous system. Burcu joined the Whited lab in the summer of 2019 and she is very excited to study the role of bioelectrical signaling during axolotl limb regeneration as well as the establishment of positional information in regenerating limb-tail transplants.

Julian Kimura is a graduate student in the Srivastava Lab in the department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology. Julian received his BS in Biology at Duke University. His undergraduate research with Dr. David McClay looked into how developmental gene regulatory networks were re-deployed during regeneration in sea urchin embryos. At the Srivastava lab, he is interested in studying how neoblasts are specified during the embryonic development of Hofstenia. He will be presenting a talk titled “Uncovering the embryonic origin of stem cells in the acoel worm Hofstenia miamia”.