The MIT biology community recently welcomed eight postdocs - Catalyst Fellows - to campus as part of the inaugural Catalyst Symposium.
Catalysts speed up reactions, and the symposium aims to accelerate progress in inclusive diversity - not just at MIT, but at top research institutions across the country, according to Professor Amy Keating, head of the Department of Biology.
"To make new discoveries and expand our understanding of life, we seek colleagues and trainees who are curious, persistent, creative, ingenious, insightful, determined, collaborative, generous, and ambitious," Keating says. "To find these exceptional people, we have to look broadly. We have to look further than we have in the past."
The symposium is part of an effort to expose outstanding candidates from backgrounds traditionally underrepresented in academic research to the biology department. The three-day symposium included research talks by the Catalyst Fellows, one-on-one meetings with faculty members, panel discussions on the faculty search process and the experiences of junior faculty in the department, and social events. Each Catalyst Fellow was paired with a faculty mentor.
The research talks ranged from molecular to behavioral: Krishna Mudumbi from Yale School of Medicine presented "Probing the kinetics of EGFR signaling: Why timing is important;" Coral Yishan Zhou from the University of California at Berkeley presented "Mechanisms of mitotic chromosome scaling in Xenopus;" Andre Toussaint from Columbia University presented "Neurobiology of addiction and tactile sensation;" Sofia Quinodoz from Princeton University presented "Probing nuclear organization and functions of condensates at genome-wide scale;" Junior West from Johns Hopkins School of Medicine presented "Claudin 7 restricts cancer invasion and metastasis by suppressing smooth muscle actin networks;" Shan Meltzer from Harvard Medical School presented "Molecular and Cellular Mechanisms of Touch Circuit Formation;" José Reyes from Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center presented "Catching p53 in the act of tumor suppression;" and Begüm Aydin from The Rockefeller University presented "Cellular Plasticity in the Enteric Nervous System."
Iain Cheeseman, associate department head, Herman and Margaret Sokol Professor of Biology, and core member of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, says what stood out about the event was the "fantastic celebration of amazing science."
"I loved the presentations as well as the beautiful range of different science approaches, research questions, and ideas," he says. "These talks focused on research areas that are not currently represented in our department, so it was great to have this exposure to these new ways of thinking and to hear from these future leaders."
Cheeseman was also a faculty mentor for Catalyst Fellow Yishan Zhou. Each Catalyst Fellow was paired with a faculty member based on shared scientific interests and matched with those who could provide support and feedback on the fellow's academic journeys.
