News

The Pittsburgh Center for Evolutionary Biology and Medicine (CEBaM) is pleased to announce its Catalyst Award Program. The Mission of the Center is to advance the fields of evolutionary biology and medicine by catalyzing research at their interface. The Center serves to cultivate educational and scientific collaborations between evolutionary biologists and biomedical researchers. In 2020, we will award 2 (or more) fellowships of up to $10,000 to trainees (Ph.D. students or postdoctoral researchers) to support a new or existing project…

Evolution is a fundamental unifying principle of biology. This class takes a broad approach to illustrate…

Anne-Ruxandra Carvunis was nominated Outstanding New PI of the Month by New PI Slack (NPIS), an international group of early stage faculty. For more information, and the full article, please click here.

Bacterial Lifestyle Alters the Evolution of Drug Resistance 10/23/2019 PITTSBURGH – How bacteria live — whether as independent cells or in a communal biofilm — determines how they evolve antibiotic resistance, which could lead to more personalized approaches to antimicrobial therapy and infection control.  University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine researchers repeatedly exposed bacteria to the antibiotic ciprofloxacin to force rapid evolution. As expected, the bacteria developed resistance to the drug, but surprisingly, their lifestyle affected which specific adaptations emerged, according to a…

Dr. Anne-Ruxandra Carvunis was recently featured in Nature and Science magazine articles which highlighted her work on de novo gene birth. While one talks about how evolution builds new genes from scratch, the other focuses on the presence of tiny proteins which surprisingly have important phenotypic effects. These articles bring into light the role of Dr. Cavunis’s proposed proto-genes in the two phenomena. Click the images below to view the full articles.

Evolution is a fundamental unifying principle of biology. This class takes a broad approach to illustrate how an evolutionary perspective augments medical research and practice. Topics covered range from the evolution of human populations, to antibiotic resistance, and include medical conditions as diverse as diabetes, cardiovascular disease, cancer or aging. Course Director: Anne-Ruxandra Carvunis. Lecturers: Vaughn Cooper, Erik Wright, Dennis Kostka, and Matt Nicotra Link to the course description: https://psmobile.pitt.edu/app/catalog/classsection/UPITT/2204/31677

Congratulations to Dr. Anne-Ruxandra Carvunis for being a recipient of a 2018 Trailblazer Award from the Ladies Hospital Aid Society!