Michael received his B.S. from the University of Florida, where he worked at the Florida Museum of Natural History and the McGuire Center for Lepidoptera Research. While there he counted and collected butterflies in the field at sites that ranged from the Rocky Mountains to the cloud forests of Costa Rica. To begin to understand the molecular origins of the diversity he encountered in the field he shifted his focus to developmental biology and gene regulation during his Ph.D. at UC Berkeley under the mentorship of Mike Levine and Nipam Patel. He was able to combine his diverse interests in evolution and developmental biology as a postdoctoral fellow with Claude Desplan at New York University. Michael established his lab at the University of California San Diego in 2019 and is interested in the evolution and development of the nervous system and brain, and his lab uses the insect visual system as a model.
Antoine got a Masters in Developmental biology at University Pierre et Marie Curie in Paris. He did his PhD at Université Pierre et Marie Curie in Paris in Sylvie Schneider-Maunoury’s lab, working on the planar polarization of the ciliated cells of the Zebrafish embryo neural tube floor-plate. He is now working on the Love Spot project as a postdoc in the lab.
Ke did his PhD in the Evolutionary and Population Biology group at the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. His PhD project worked on the causes and consequences of variation in sexual signals and responses in the night-active moths. He is now testing the function of candidate genes in color vision in the day-active butterflies.
Takami is a Chinese-Japanese Postdoc at Perry’s lab. He got his PhD degree in Cell Biology at Tsinghua University in China. He used to study a migration-dependent secretory pathway contributing to lysosomal homeostasis. So far he focuses on developing a gene-editing tool in ticks for further scientific research and application.
Julia graduated from UCLA with a B.Sc in Molecular, Cell, and Developmental Biology and a Masters in Biology from Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet in Munich. She is currently a graduate student in Biological Sciences at UCSD.
Tim started as an undergraduate volunteer and later as a technician in the Perry Lab. He began his Ph.D. program in Fall 2022. His research mainly investigates the mechanisms of stochastic cell fate decisions and temporal regulation of neurogenesis in Drosophila development.
Riley is a “tall beagle” who thinks people food is the best. Hobbies: following the scent of bunnies and chasing lizards. Research Interests: Squirrel behavior.
