So proud of Autumn for representing Georgia Tech College of Sciences and Center for Microbial Dynamics and Infection at the ABRCMS conference! To any prospective grad students reading this, I’m happy to tell you more about opportunities at both QBioS PhD @ GT and in Biology. Just ping me here or via email.

We’ve got a new preprint addressing a basic question: how much does it cost a bacterium to constantly fire a T6SS? We’ve always assumed it’s expensive, as it’s huge (the width of a cell!), ballistic, and tightly regulated. 1/18 biorxiv.org/content/10.110…

Hey folks, we have a new preprint out. How hard is it to give a eukaryote a supplemental biological solar panel (aka, become facultatively phototrophic)? We stuck a rhodopsin, which pumps protons when hit by green light, into yeast to find out. 1/24 biorxiv.org/content/10.110…

I’m delighted that our paper on the Multicellularity Long Term Evolution Experiment (MuLTEE) has, at long last, been published. This paper establishes the foundations of what I’d like to work on for the rest of my career. 1/25 Free, full access link: rdcu.be/dbPA9

close up of rhodopsin-bearing yeast 🤩

I am happy to announce that I am a 2023 HHMI Gilliam Fellow I am extremely grateful to my advisor Will Ratcliff for his guidance and immense support throughout my academic journey. I also want to S/O my amazing support network! I’m very excited to join the @HHMINews community!

Congratulations Autumn, and thank you HHMI #gilliamfellows! I am thrilled to join this vibrant community. Looking forward to growing as a mentor and igniting meaningful change within our institutions.

Provost Steve McLaughlin and I had a blast this morning with Profs Will Ratcliff Yunker Lab + their students, who are answering truly fascinating questions about how multicellular life came to be, how a clump of individual cells can form an organism. Blown away by their work!

POV: you are presenting in lab meeting next Monday and need data

I had an amazing time at the 2023 ABRCMS conference! I am extremely grateful for the opportunity to present a poster & assist in GT grad school recruitment as an exhibitor. I am also a new fan of Phoenix 😎🌵 #ABRCMS #CPIES

Sounds like a great conference (and Phoenix is so nice this time of year!).

Hi folks, I’m excited to share a whale of a tale (sorry, bad pun), where we engineer snowflake yeast to express sperm whale myoglobin, and explore how oxygen-binding proteins may have helped overcome anatomical limitations to early multicellularity. biorxiv.org/content/10.110…

Hey, our phototrophic yeast paper is now out in Current Biology. sciencedirect.com/science/articl… This work was led by grad student Autumn and research scientist Tony Burnetti, and we had help from Center for Microbial Dynamics and Infection' Carina Baskett.

My first, first-authored paper of my PhD is officially out! You can check it out along with a cool press release here ⬇️

Our latest paper on "Morphological Entanglement in Living Systems" just dropped Physical Review X. We're diving into the wild world of entanglement – not the quantum kind, the physical tangling up of life itself. journals.aps.org/prx/abstract/1…

Very excited to announce I’ll be joining UofSC Biological Sciences as an assistant research professor through the Bridge to Faculty program! Looking forward to using this time to prep for the opening of the Lewis Lab in 2 years😊. #newpi

Happy Gilliam Day! Congratulations to all of the new #GilliamFellows 🥳🎉!!

Extremely pleased to be able to share this at last, our work on the Last Universal Common Ancestor: nature.com/articles/s4155… We estimate LUCA's genome, metabolism and age. Thanks to Sandra Álvarez Tom Williams Phil Donoghue Anja Spang (she/her) Tara Mahendrarajah Gergely J Szöllősi and many more!

I had an amazing time at the #SMBE2024 Conference in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. I got to connect and learn from many scientists, present an oral talk on my dissertation work, and spend a lot of time at the beach! Thank you OfficialSMBE !

Autumn will be presenting in the Hamilton symposium on her work examining how obligate vs. facultative multicellular life cycles impact multicellular adaptation.