2025

June

Northeastern represents at Evolution 2025

We had a good showing at Evolution this year, with 10 people from our department traveling to Athens, GA for the conference. Research that the Lotterhos Lab presented included new insights into the biology of oyster and cod, while the other labs presented research on new genomes and the discovery of a coral pathogen.

From left: Meghan Ford, Jiseon Min, Lei Curtis, Kiran Bajaj, Annabel Hughes, Madeline Eppley, Camille Rumberger, Emily Trytten, Katie Lotterhos, Allie Gallagher

Camille's talk showed that an existing model for genomic forecasting does not perform well at predicting oyster performance in the field

Jiseon presented a model that significantly advances our understanding of how organisms evolve thermal adaptation

Lei showed that small inversions are common in the cod genome, and may be often overlooked as a source of variation

Kiran showed that the geographic origin of oysters affects the success of their offspring in the field, but that differences in performance cannot be easily predicted from genetics or the environment

Katie attended a monster truck rally with current and former Editors in Chief at the American Society of Naturalists

Former undergraduate Elisabeth Leung presented her proposed graduate research on Island Foxes

Madeline discovered introgression of Gulf alleles in the Cheaspeake Bay oyster population

Annabel from the Gatins Lab presented Angelfish Genomes, which will be an important resource for their conservation

Meghan from the Trussell Lab presented the Nucella genome, which will be a great resource for this intertidal predatory snail

Emily from the Vollmer Lab presented evidence for a causal agent of coral White Band disease

Allie from the Gatins Lab presented her poster on planned blue crab research in the Gulf of Maine

Undergraduate Research Symposium

Undergraduates in the lab presented at the Undergraduate Research Symposium. Nour presented his research on "The Metadata Project: Large language models faciliated alignment of datasets to International Data Standards". Eshna presented their research from the Stubbin's Lab.

Nour's presentation

Nour's results show that a (small) large language model can have ~80% or higher accuracy at matching custom datasets to international standards

May

Continued monitoring of oyster populations in the field at Chesapeake Bay

We continued monitoring oysters in the Cheasapeake Bay as part of our NSF-funded Model Validation Program. This program is evaluating the ability of machine learning and AI models to predict the performance of populations in the field based on their genetics.

Katie, Madeline, Anna, and Eshna

As a lab tradition started by Zea, at the end of every day we take a picture in front of this sign

Anna and Eshna measuring oysters

We measure oysters from each population to monitor their growth and condition

Eshna and Anna counting oysters

We count the number alive and dead oysters in each bag. We will use this data to understand how genetics is linked to survival.

A tagged oyster

Last year we tagged individual oysters and biopsied them for genetics. By tracking the survival and growth of tagged individuals, we will be able to link their genetics to their performance in the field.

Dead oyster shells support life

Dead oyster shells provide important habitat for new life. These are the eggs of a tiny fish called a clingfish, which lives inside dead oyster shells.

Parasitic worms

The black scars on the inside of this oyster shell are the "mud blisters" from boring holes of parasitic worms. The worms bore into the oyster shell to make a home for themselves. Some dead oysters had a large number of worm scars.

Lei wins award

Undergraduate Lei Curtis is awarded a "Shout it Out" Award from Northeastern University to present their research on the genomics of inversions at the Evolution Conference in July 2025. Lei's research is giving new insights into how inversions - large regions of DNA in which the sequence has been reversed - evolve in genomes. Lei will present a method that we developed to improve inversion calls.

Celebrating graduating seniors

Congratulations to 2025 graduates Kiran Bajaj, Zea Segnitz, Lee Fennucio, and Nicole Mongillo! All lab members were honored with awards from the department. Zea won an outstanding GPA award, and Kiran, Lee, and Nicole won an MES Excellence Award for their research and teaching.

We are so proud of all of the students in the graduating class and are excited to see where their career takes them!

Kiran, Zea, and Nicole

Kiran, Katie, Zea, Lee, Nicole, and Madeline

Graduate student symposium

Madeline Eppley and Camille Rumberger presented their research at the annual MSC Graduate Student Symposium.

Lotterhos Lab welcomes new undergraduate researchers

We are excited to welcome Northeastern undergraduates Anna Eaton, Eshna Kulshreshtha, and Mariana Kaulbach to the lab! We are also excited to welcome back Lisa Gouralnik, a former high school intern and now undergraduate at McMaster University.

April

Lei Curtis defends their Senior Honors Thesis

Lei's research project entitled "Chromosomal Inversion Size Distribution and Overlapping Breakpoint Evolution in Atlantic Cod (Gadus morhua)" is giving new insights into the evolution of structural variation in genomes. Lei's resesarch has been supported by PEAK awards from Northeastern University.

Our lab's research is featured on the Cover of Molecular Ecology Resources

Check out our recent paper The accuracy of predicting maladaptation to new environments with genomic data, highlighted in this perspective by Rellstab and Keller. Within a species, individuals differ in their ability to grow and survive in different environments due to underlying genetic differences. Thus, being able to predict survival and growth of individuals in a specific environment, based on their genetics, could substantially improve agriculture and aquaculture practices. This research, funded by the National Science Foundation, evaluates the ability of statistical and machine learning / AI models to predict how well genetic data predicts the success of organisms in different environments. We illustrate conditions in which the predictions are accurate, as well as inaccurate. These results have implications for matching genotypes to environments for agriculture and aquaculture.

Former lab undergraduate Elisabeth Leung was awarded a Graduate Research Fellowship from the National Science Foundation! Elisabeth's PhD will study the genomics of Channel Island Foxes.

Additionally, former high school intern Nina Johnson was accepted to Stanford University and is planning to attend!

Zea presents her senior thesis at the Northeastern RISE conference.

February

Camille successfully defends her PhD proposal and advances to candidacy

Congratulations Camille!

New lab publication: "Responses of Littorina spp. Intertidal Snails to Thermal Extremes Indicate Countergradient Variation in Fitness"

Congrats to former undergrad Dylan Titmuss for publishing their senior thesis!

Snails were laboratory-acclimated for several weeks before undergoing exposures to extreme heat, extreme cold, or ambient conditions, and individual mortality was recorded after each exposure. In line with common predictions, we observed that the degree of population divergence in survival under thermal extremes was negatively related to dispersal potential, and that populations from the colder latitude generally had higher survival of sub-freezing temperatures. Contrary to common predictions, however, we observed greater survival after extreme heat in populations from colder latitudes than in their warmer-latitude counterparts, a pattern known as countergradient variation. This experiment highlights counterintuitive responses to thermal extremes, emphasising that colder-latitude populations could experience population growth under more extreme climates due to higher survival at both hot and sub-freezing thermal extremes.

Graduate student Madeline Eppley publishes their first manuscript in Conservation Genetics! "DNA barcoding reveals mislabeling of endangered sharks sold as swordfish in New England fish markets"

Graduate student Camille Rumberger publishes her first manuscript in Molecular Ecology! "Selection Over Small and Large Spatial Scales in the Face of High Gene Flow"

January

Zea and Lei win PEAK awards from Northeastern

PEAK awards provide funds for student research.

Congrats to Zea for winning a PEAK Experience Summit Award for her project “Impacts of Local Adaptation and Genetic Diversity on Eastern Oyster Body Condition”

Congrats to Lei for winning a PEAK Experience Summit Award for their project “Chromosomal Inversion Breakpoint Evolution in Atlantic Cod (Gadus morhua)”

Madeline and Camille attend the Milford Aquaculture Seminar

Camille

Madeline

Lab welcomes new members

We are excited to welcome new people to the lab!

Jiseon Min is a new postdoc working on our new NSF project that will be modeling organism responses to climate change.

Nour Shoreibah is a new co-op in collaboration with Serena Caplins from research computing who will be developing semantic matching algorithms to map datasets to Darwin Core standards.

Maya Krattli is an undergraduate volunteer and participant in the LAb Meeting Program that Dr. Lotterhos is running at Northeastern University.

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