Celebrating Our Graduates: Felix and Kausthubh

In the past year Felix and Kausthubh successfully defended their PhD theses!

Felix defended his thesis last February. He investigated the temporal and spatial dynamics of the distribution of nuclear pore complexes in diverse eukaryotes, ranging from three different fission yeasts to two ciliates to one diatom, using expansion microscopy. He also investigated how the nuclear pore complex can be compositionally heterogeneous within the same species by using different perturbations in the fission yeast Schizosaccharomyces pombe. 

This January, Kausthubh defended his work on cytoskeleton evolution using phylogenetics and comparative genomics. He built a semi-automated workflow to retrieve protein orthologs at the tree-of-life scale using statistical models of protein sequence variation called Hidden Markov Models and trace the evolutionary history of different parts of mitotic cytoskeleton. 

We wish both of them lots of exciting projects in the future.