The 2024 Charles H. Turner Award Ceremony
On June 10th, 2024, the Biological Sciences department gathered to celebrate the third annual Charles H. Turner Award for Postdoctoral Studies in Biological Sciences. Recognizing a postdoctoral scientist in the department for their outstanding work, this award is named in honor of a pioneering zoologist of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Charles H. Turner. This year’s award goes to Dr. Astrid Deryckere for her research in the Tosches lab on neural development in Pleurodeles waltl salamanders through an evolutionary lens.
Dr. Oliver Hobert opened the event, speaking on Turner's scientific career. In 1907, Turner was one of the first African Americans to receive a PhD, and he went on to achieve significant scientific milestones while facing institutional barriers and lacking support due to racial discrimination. Despite being barred from engaging in research at prestigious academic institutions after completing his graduate studies, he went on to groundbreaking discoveries in animal cognition, including demonstrating Pavlovian conditioning in insects and discovering color vision in honeybees.
Dr. Maria Tosches, Dr. Deryckere’s postdoctoral mentor, followed Dr. Hobert with an introduction of Deryckere’s research career. She emphasized that in addition to being a rigorous scientist, Deryckere undertook the brave, substantial task of pioneering techniques and establishing husbandry protocols in non-model organisms both during her graduate studies at KU Leuven in Belgium, and now as a postdoctoral fellow at Columbia University. Importantly, Astrid transferred developmental biology techniques to an unusual and unexplored model system: salamanders. As a final tribute to Deryckere’s intrepid endeavors in the lab, Dr. Tosches emphasized, “Astrid is one of those very rare people that when she sets out to do something, she goes for it. She really is one of those people that is clear headed, knows what she wants, and is fearless.”
If the idea of venturing into the unexplored world of the salamander brain had not yet piqued the audience’s interest, Deryckere opened her presentation with an assortment of charming photos of organisms spanning the breadth of the animal kingdom. Like many neurobiologists, Deryckere has been curious about animal behavior from a young age. Referring to the animals gazing down at the audience, each exhibiting their own distinct repertoire of behaviors that enables them to succeed in their unique environments, Deryckere said, “the first question that pops into my brain is: how do all these animals do what they do?”
She went on to explain that the vast extent of behaviors that we see in the animal kingdom are coordinated by neurons, the cellular building blocks of our nervous system. Deryckere emphasized that the brain, the central hub of the nervous system, is not an innate engineer of animal behavior, but a product of evolution. “In order to understand how [the brain is] built, and how it has evolved, we can trace its evolution by studying the animals that are currently alive, and making inferences on how the ancestral brain would have looked,” she said.
Until now, comparative studies have largely focused on mammalian brains. But the first brains appeared long before animals even set foot on land. Because evolution acts mostly on developmental programs, many processes in developing embryos are conserved across species, which allows for easier comparison. Additionally, the salamander offers a brain which has the main characteristics of vertebrates, but it is much smaller. This enables faster analysis of the numerous cell types found in the vertebrate brain.
Those of us lucky enough to be in the audience for the Charles H. Turner Award ceremony received an inside look into the unpublished, cutting-edge research Deryckere is performing in salamanders to better understand vertebrate brain organization and function, including how cell types have diverged during evolution. “The switch in lifestyle from water to land was accompanied by a lot of new innovative behaviors, as well as changes in the brain,” said Deryckere, as she pointed to cross sections of different animals’ brains. “Studying [salamanders] can help us to better understand the vertebrate brain organization and function, including how cell types have diverged during evolution.”
The ceremony left the audience inspired by Deryckere’s groundbreaking research and her dedication to advancing our understanding of neural development across the tree of life. It celebrated Deryckere's remarkable achievements thus far in her postdoctoral work but also honored the legacy of Turner, a pioneering figure who overcame significant obstacles to contribute profoundly to the field of biological sciences, serving as a testament to the enduring importance of scientific curiosity. Attendees left with a renewed appreciation for the intricacies of the animal brain and the evolutionary processes that shape it.