Instructor biographies

Andrew Murray

I grew up in England as the child of expatriate, American parents. When I was six, I used to orbit the back yard, pretending to be Yuri Gagarin, and when I was twelve I wanted to be a race car driver. No coordination and slow reflexes persuaded me that studying might be a useful back up plan and by the end of high school I’d decided that I might want to be a scientist, even though I’d stopped studying math when I was sixteen and had remarkably little idea of what scientists actually do. Through a series of lucky accidents, I spent six months as a volunteer in a lab at MIT between high school and college. The experience changed my life. Scientists were no longer distant and inaccessible. They talked, they laughed, they swore, they got mad, and even though 95% of their experiments failed, they kept going because of their passion for discovering how things worked and their pride in figuring out how to build clever experiments. Many years later, I’m still hooked on doing and talking about science. Our goal is to give you the same sense of excitement and possibility by showing you that science is an indivisible whole and giving you the weapons that you will be able to use to attack problems you choose.

Ben de Bivort

When I was eight years old, my scientific curiosity began to diverge from the ubiquitous interest in dinosaurs of my peer group. I developed a particular fondness for rocks and minerals, and began punctuating family trips by making my parents lug heavy bags of specimens back home. When I was eleven, a couple months before the dissolution of the USSR, we visited Kiev, Ukraine. Drawn by my geophilia, we went to an exhibit on oil extraction technology at the science museum, by chance meeting there three elder statesmen of the Kiev Geological Institute. I was given an honorary membership in the KGI when I put on a great show producing generally correct identifications of minerals pulled from their vaults. Soon however, my interests drifted in a more biological direction, to mycology. From 1992 to 1998, I was an artist-in-residence at the Telluride Mushroom Festival under the tutelage of Art Goodtimes (currently the Green Party member holding the highest elected office in the country). From there, my scientific career flowed naturally to majors in math and biology at Duke, grad school in neuroscience at Harvard, an independent fellowship, and now a professorship investigating the genetic and neuronal basis of behavioral differences between fruit flies, yada yada. If this job permitted more substantial hobbies, I would take up sailboat racing and backpack more often. I love all branches of science except biochemistry and can’t wait to integrate science with you in LS 50.

Michael Desai

I grew up in a small town in southern Illinois – my high school had some of the top-ranked football and basketball programs (but worst-ranked academics) in the state. So while I liked reading about science as a kid, and always said I wanted to be a biologist when I grew up, I really had no idea what I was talking about. When I got to college I signed up for the freshman science courses and realized within the first few days that I was totally out of my depth. But I also really enjoyed them, and managed to hang in long enough to catch up. I particularly loved the simplicity and elegance of physics, the clarity of thought it required, and I just enjoyed solving all the puzzles. So eventually I wound up in graduate school in physics, at which point I started getting fed up with the current state of theoretical physics (at the time it was almost pure math). I switched back to biology and it’s been fantastic – the problems are exciting and ripe for attack with the kind of quantitative background I built up. I’m hoping to convey some of that background and excitement to you in this course.

Doeke Hekstra

I grew up in a tiny village in the Netherlands, surrounded by cows, sheep, cabbage, potatoes, and canals. My father had attended college but did not like it and left as soon as he qualified to become a preacher. My mother wished she had attended but never did. I learned little about the sciences until high school. There, I gathered that (somehow!) I might gain some insight about the nature of the world reaching beyond my rural, religious upbringing---a pie-in-the-sky dream! That curiosity drove me to study chemistry. I found college to be an intellectual thrill---the stunning scope of the theory of evolution, the bewildering universe of quantum mechanics, and the amazement that a few simple postulates enabled a link between the jostling of atoms and our understanding of limits on what cells and machines alike can and cannot do (we'll take a look at this last bit!). Since then, I've followed my curiosity --- I came to the New York to learn more about biology during my PhD--learning how to make small microbial microcosms in the process, and trying to relate their population dynamics to evolution. I then went to Texas to understand how the physics of proteins relates to their evolution---a question that still fascinates me. In the process, I came to enjoy the practice of science: a mix of lofty dreams, stubborn realities, lots of failure, occasional success, and fascinating people.

Kara McKinley

I was born in the US, but my family moved to London, UK when I was four. Although my high school’s great claim-to-fame was that Rosalind Franklin had been a student there in the 1930s, I didn’t really fall in love with science until my junior year of college. After a summer internship in Washington DC convinced me that I did not have a bright future in politics, I decided to try joining a lab and got hooked on research. After graduation, I went straight to graduate school and became captivated by microscopy and the amazing ability to actually see what is happening inside a cell. After my PhD, I followed my love of microscopes and started using them to watch cells repair our organs after damage. Now, my lab studies how the uterus repairs after two major damage events: menstruation and childbirth. I also care a lot about the intersections of science with social and ethical issues, particularly around reproductive health. I feel incredibly privileged that my job is to study how big experiences in our lives arise from tiny cells making decisions and am excited to share the joy of scientific discovery with you!

Emma Nagy

I don’t have that classic story where I can say I fell in love with science at a young age, discovered the beauty of research early and marched towards the goal of being a scientist – my path here is much more circuitous.  I always loved school and the natural world, but most of my free time was spent at the barn with horses.  I was lucky enough to have many fantastic teachers in school that were willing to feed and indulge my curiosity in many different areas.  Heading off to college was overwhelming because I felt that I had to choose one topic for a major when I enjoyed so many.  I had always loved math, but despite doing well in courses, in my mind I wasn’t very good at it.  So, I told myself that in college I would take math classes until I couldn’t do the work anymore, at which point I would stop.  Funnily enough, one math course turned into two and then three and eventually enough for a math major.  Despite also majoring in biology, I did not begin to explore research until the end of my undergraduate time and though I enjoyed it, I felt like I never had any idea what I was doing and was always confused about my project.  Unsure about graduate school, I spent three years working in a synthetic chemistry lab.  There I realized that being confused is pretty much standard for research, but that the unknown is a lot more fun when it is your own project and you can work on it all day, every day.  I moved on to graduate school, shifting gears back into biology, where I fell in love with bacteria and thinking about how they work.  This course integrates research with many of the topics that I love, and I look forward to sharing them with you.