BSD alum awarded MacArthur Fellowship

BSD alum awarded a MacArthur Fellowship

BY ALISON CALDWELL, PHD

For geneticist Nels Elde, PhD’05, it wasn’t just the University of Chicago’s reputation as a research powerhouse that helped launch his scientific career. In the lab of his graduate advisor, Aaron Turkewitz, PhD, Elde also found the space to have fun.

“Aaron is also a skilled artist and potter,” said Elde, now an evolutionary biologist at the University of Utah, where he is an associate professor of human genetics. “He encouraged his students to follow our curiosity and have fun. It was a really inspirational, foundational lesson about mixing art and science that taught me how to center creativity in my work.”

Fifteen years after graduation, Elde’s innovative approach to research has landed him a MacArthur Fellowship, which provides a $625,000, no-stringsattached award to individuals who have shown extraordinary originality and dedication in their creative pursuits.

As a PhD student in the Department of Molecular Genetics and Cell Biology, Elde focused his dissertation on understanding how distantly related species evolved unique solutions to solve similar cellular problems, looking far out on the branches of the evolutionary tree to combine cell biology with evolutionary genetics. Elde now studies host-pathogen interactions and ways in which organisms evolve to better attack others or defend themselves. He is particularly interested in understanding how evolution drives rapid adaptations in hosts and pathogens.

Funding from the MacArthur Fellowship will challenge Elde to go “off-roading a little bit” in his scientific perspective—to try and answer “those ‘out there’ kinds of questions.” One line of research he hopes to pursue involves the evolution of the immune system in aquatic species. Since some of

“The wildest ideas you sometimes just don’t explore, because you think they’re probably not going to work, but this is an opportunity to dust those ideas off, shake them up and see if there’s something to them.”

Nels Elde, PhD’05

our oldest ancestors looked more like fish than humans, discoveries in those species could help us better understand the origins of our own immune systems.

He still credits the “breathtaking” intellectual energy he found at the University for helping him first blossom as a scientist.

“The faculty and students there were more than just advisors,” Elde said. “They’re lifelong friends and now my colleagues. I wasn’t just trained in research techniques while I was there; I was trained in how to pursue a scientific life.”

GRADUATE EDUCATION

BSD entering Class of 2020

78 graduate students

60

undergraduate institutions

16

University of Chicago Biosciences doctoral programs

27%

from backgrounds underrepresented in science 19

international students

The incoming class participated in the first remote iteration of the National Science Foundation-funded Quantitative Approaches Boot Camp.