The Endless Frontier screening at Princeton

Over 3 months after the DC premiere of The Endless Frontier, the documentary in which we and our mice are featured, we’re finally hosting a screening at Princeton! Please check out the flyer & use the QR code to book tickets!

It’s been quite a year of excitement, definitely highlighted by the early-year arrivals of Jasmine & Ian! A hearty welcome to you both!!!

And then, to wrap up the academic year, we celebrated the DC/DOX premiere of The Endless Frontier, a documentary about science, scientists, and the need for sustained funding of science. Our rewilding work is featured, as you can see in this trailer and this movie review. Such an honor and delight to join the outstanding Director Marilyn Ness and Producing Team of (from left in the photo, interspersed with Andrea & Billy) Beth Westrate, Aaron Mertz, Shruti Naik, & Ted Richane for this important, (re)wild ride!

Yes, it’s another long-overdue newsflash, confirming that some good science things are happening in the midst of the horrors of 2025. For example, we have welcomed an outstanding team of undergraduate researchers for the summer, along with Sam, our wonderful new Lab Manager & Research Specialist! And at the very end of the academic year, Andrea was honored to the bottom of her soul to receive a Phi Beta Kappa Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching. Thank you to the students and teaching assistants who have made Immune Systems, from Molecules to Populations such a joy to teach!

Yes indeed it does, with the aim to recruit and retain talent in biomedicine and behavioral sciences! Check out the eligibility requirements here, and don’t be shy about applying. Loan repayment support can improve your quality of life and reduce stress while enabling you to focus on your science. Win-win-win!

As we celebrate the impending publication of Alec and Bola’s paper on how immunologically similar mice become when they spend time together outdoors, a fascinating glimpse into the world of you-are (immunologically)-with-whom-you-spend-time (!), we also look back over a year of attention to our group’s research:

Please check out Alec’s radio appearance and Brian Levinson’s TAPintoPrinceton article that features Scientists in the Suburbs, as well as Sonia Shah’s New Yorker article on The case for free-range lab mice! We’re glad that people far beyond campus appreciate our attempts to naturalize “mouse models” for immunology and neuroscience.

Biggest news of the summer is that the outrageously talented and insightful Alec Downie successfully defended his Ph.D. and is now officially Dr. Alec!!! His dissertation is possibly the only one in the universe that includes data on both mice and elephant seals — but of course there may be a Dr. Alec in a parallel universe who also has such broad interests and such a wide size range of study organisms?!? Congratulations to you, Alec — we will miss you when you head to Germany.

In the past year, I fell far, far behind (even more so than usual) on posting exciting news here. But we’ve had some fabulous new arrivals to the group during the 2022-23 academic year who each deserve great fanfare!!! Please see further details of these marvellous individuals via the People page.

Graduate student Charlotte Knopp

Postdoctoral scholar Dr. David Chang van Oordt

GHP postdoctoral scholar Dr. Esther Annan

GHP-Mpala postdoctoral scholar Dr. Gugulethu Moyo

Graduate student Yoon Chang

Belated but HEARTFELT welcome to you all!!! It’s an honor and delight to work with you!

Exciting news this week: the brilliant Liana Wait successfully defended her Ph.D. thesis and morphed into Dr. Liana Wait!! Congratulations on your important work on parasite-vaccine interactions, Dr. Liana, and all the best in your onward adventures in science writing! We will miss you and those clever raccoons.

It’s been far, far too long since I posted, I know… good grief! but here I am to tout 2 preprints that I just posted on the publications page, both hugely interdisciplinary and fascinating!! Each is stuck in >1 year (and counting) of peer review cycles, so please enjoy them now: Ed’s excellent preprint on fruitful analogies between organismal and computer defenses, and Carrie’s cracking preprint on surprisingly powerful and consistent worm-germ interactions within non-human primates. An honor and delight to work with them both!