Chapel Hill is a great place to do biology and a great place to live. Start early in 2026 to maximize overlap with three senior grad students who are getting ready to move on to their own postdocs. Please share widely!

Thanks Mark and Maureen! It was really fun to pull everything together.

Thanks Mark, Eric and Rob set the bar high! I'm excited to get to tell everyone what we've been up to.

This was a HUGE effort, taking years of diligent work. Hongfei was a true leader, and I'm really proud of this cool piece. We'd love any feedback y'all might have. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

We worked our way down from this organismal fitness phenotype to rapid, environmentally responsive signaling protein dynamics in the stem cell niche.

I'm so proud of Fred, and Camille Miller, and excited about the new line of research that this project opened up for us!

It all started as a rotation project that identified that early dauers (the first to form under conditions of starvation and crowding) had large gonads with lots of germ cells, while "late dauers" from old, long-starved plates had small gonads with few germ cells, and had fewer offspring post-dauer.

This project took a few twists and turns, until a careful and clever experiment of Fred's blew it wide open (see Figure 2). It was kind of a dream experience, to have a student present elegant and irrefutable evidence that changed the whole direction of the study.

Congratulations Talia!

In addition to revealing an important player in niche migration, our paper also demonstrates the utility of published single-cell datasets for hypothesis generation. Thanks to Eyleen O'Rourke and Abbas Ghaddar for their really useful study and app! wormseq.org www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...