PI: John Young, PhD
John is a developmental biologist with broad interests in vertebrate embryology and evolution. He loves all things frog and really likes birds.
Samantha Royle
Sam is a Graduate Student at Harvard University. Her interests in limb development in amphibians brought her to us here at Simmons where we collaborate on unraveling the earliest steps in amphibian limb initiation. As a founding member of the Young Lab, Sam provides both experience and a fun atmosphere in the lab.
Kate Konshina
Kate joined the lab in the fall of 2019 during her first year at Simmons. She is excited about how differences in pH affect the development of frog embryos. Kate’s interests range from neurobiology to finding frog embryos in the wild!
Maggie Clancy
Maggie joined the lab in the Spring of 2020. She is very interested in methods to reduce plastic waste in research labs without sacrificing experimental reproducibility. She is currently designing protocols that labs can employ to re-use their culture dishes.
Maya Baskin
Maya joined the lab in the fall of 2020 and graduated with a BS in Biology in the Spring of 2021. She is interested in understanding the effects of PFOA on embryonic development. Her work has revealed that PFOS alters fin formation in Xenopus tadpoles.
Michelle Balcarcel-Monzon
Michelle Joined the lab in the fall of 2020 and graduated with a BS in Biology in the spring of 2021. She is interested in the development of limbs in the frog and used both genome editing along with transplantation to look for the limb forming region of tadpoles.
Nada Sehli
Nada joined in the fall of 2020 and graduated with a BS in Biology in the spring of 2021. She investigated the role of Sall4 in patterning the neural plate in response to Wnt signaling.