The Speakers

Karen Sears, PhD

Karen E. Sears earned her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago’s Committee on Evolutionary Biology and is currently a Professor in the Departments of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and Molecular, Cell, and Developmental Biology at UCLA. She is also a Fellow of the AAAS and the California Academy of Sciences. Her lab seeks to harness the diversity of mammals to identify processes driving change in organisms during their lives and in lineages over time and inform challenges in human health. Current topics of study include the developmental basis of the unique phenotypes of bats and marsupials and the developmental, cellular, and molecular basis of aging in bats.

Flora Rutaganira, PhD

Flora Rutaganira, Ph.D. is a Stanford Medicine Faculty Scholar and HHMI Hannah Gray Faculty Fellow in the Departments of Biochemistry and of Developmental Biology at Stanford School of Medicine. Her research focuses on the origin of cell-cell communication in animals and aims to address the origin and core mechanisms of animal cell signaling during the transition to multicellularity. Flora received her B.S. in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from UC Davis and her Ph.D. in Chemistry and Chemical Biology from UC San Francisco under the mentorship of Prof. Kevan Shokat. After completing her postdoctoral fellowship in Molecular and Cell Biology at UC Berkeley under the mentorship of Prof. Nicole King, Dr. Rutaganira established her independent research team at Stanford. Her group, the FUNR lab, uses choanoflagellates to uncover signaling mechanisms that enabled the origin of animals. Members of the FUNR lab use their diverse strengths to conduct and communicate science they are proud of, and to promote the use of non-traditional models that are uniquely positioned to uncover fundamental animal biology.

Leslie Vosshall, PhD

Leslie B. Vosshall is the Vice President and Chief Scientific Officer of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, as well as HHMI Investigator and Robin Chemers Neustein Professor, Head of the Laboratory of Neurogenetics and Behavior at The Rockefeller University. Vosshall is a molecular neurobiologist who studies how behaviors emerge from the integration of sensory input with internal physiological states, with a specific focus on host-seeking and blood-feeding by mosquitoes that spread dangerous viruses. Vosshall received an A.B. in biochemistry from Columbia University in 1987 and a Ph.D. from Rockefeller University in 1993, mentored by Michael W. Young. Following postdoctoral work with Richard Axel at Columbia University, she joined the Rockefeller faculty in 2000. She is the recipient of numerous awards, notably the Lawrence C. Katz Prize from Duke University (2008), the National Academy of Sciences Pradel Research Award (2020), the W. Alden Spencer Award (2021, joint with Kristin Scott), the 22nd Perl-UNC Neuroscience Prize (2024), the Dickson Prize in Medicine (2024), and the Edward M. Scolnick Prize in Neuroscience (2025). Vosshall is an elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Medicine, and the American Philosophical Society.

Mary Gehring, PhD

Gehring began her scientific career at Williams College, earned her doctorate from University of California Berkeley with Robert Fischer in 2005, and continued her studies as a postdoctoral researcher with Steven Henikoff at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. Gehring came to Whitehead Institute and the Department of Biology at MIT in 2010. Among other honors, she received the Rosalind Franklin Young Investigator Award from the Genetics Society of America and the Gruber Foundation in 2013. In 2020 she was named the Landon T. Clay Career Development Chair at Whitehead Institute. In 2023, Gehring was named the Inaugural David Baltimore Chair in Biomedical Research. In 2024, she was selected as an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. She has worked with Arabidopsis her entire career, starting from when she was an undergraduate.

Siniša Hrvatin, PhD

Siniša Hrvatin is originally from Croatia, and earned an A.B. in Biochemical Sciences and a Ph.D. in Stem Cell and Regenerative Medicine from Harvard University. After graduate school, he left academia to start ReadCube/Papers, a technology company that provides access to scientific literature and reference management tools. He went back to academia as a Postdoctoral Fellow in Neurobiology at Harvard Medical School before joining the MIT faculty in 2022.

Hrvatin is an Assistant Professor of Biology at MIT, a Core Member of the Whitehead Institute, and an HHMI Freeman Hrabowski Scholar. He was also named a Pew Scholar, Searle Scholar, McKnight Scholar, and received the NIH New Innovator Award. His research explores biological “states of stasis,” including mammalian torpor and hibernation, aiming to understand how animals and cells achieve profound, reversible reductions in metabolism and temperature. His group studies neural control of torpor/hibernation in rodents and low-temperature resilience across organisms, including tardigrades, with an eye toward applications in medicine including aging biology, and cryopreservation.

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