The BSD Chicago Fellows Program is an internationally competitive postdoctoral fellowship program supporting the career advancement of exceptional and creative postdoctoral scientists. We are pleased to announce that four fellowships have been awarded to the following early-career researchers from our most recent competition:
Chicago Fellows
- Aleksandar Radakovic will join the Department of Ecology & Evolution (E&E) this fall after completing his Ph.D. in Biology & Biomedical Sciences at Harvard University. His graduate research focused on the evolution of protein synthesis and understanding how, and why, the initial RNA aminoacylation reaction could have occurred. Under the mentorship of Joseph Thornton (E&E and Human Genetics) and Arvind Murugan (Physics), Aleksandar will be integrating new RNA-based biochemical methods with ancestral sequence reconstruction to generate the first experimental and biochemical knowledge of the expansion of the genetic code.
- Ethan Wold will join the Department of Molecular Genetics & Cell Biology (MGCB) next summer after completing his Ph.D. in Quantitative Biosciences at Georgia Institute of Technology in Spring 2025. Ethan will be co-mentored by Elizabeth Heckscher (MGCB) and Urs Schmidt-Ott (Organismal Biology & Anatomy), and his postdoctoral research will build on his Ph.D. work on the role of muscle in insect flight to investigate the origins of muscular diversity and its consequences for species-specific locomotor patterns.
- Luella Allen-Waller will join the Department of Ecology & Evolution in the fall after completing her Ph.D. in Biology at the University of Pennsylvania this past August. Her graduate work was an investigation of the impacts of photosymbiosis on cnidarians’ response to climate change. Luella will be co-mentored by Cathy Pfister (E&E) and Dakota McCoy (E&E) for her postdoctoral project, which will focus on characterizing how warming alters exchanges between key microbes living in different parts of symbiotic reef animals.
Duchossois Family Institute (DFI) Fellows
- Sambhawa Priya joined the Department of Medicine this summer after completing a postdoc at the Broad Institute. She has a Ph.D. in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology from the University of Minnesota. Under the mentorship of Ran Blekhman, Sambhawa will be developing a deep-learning based computational framework to integrate patient data with gut microbial species, genes, metabolites etc. to accurately predict a patient’s clinical risk and health outcome.
We congratulate the Fellows, and their faculty mentors, for this recognition, and look forward to welcoming them to the University of Chicago!
