Joining the Ruvkun lab
We are recruiting graduate students, postdocs, and technicians to work on the small RNA and viral immunity, and the mitochondrial, ribosomal, and proteasomal surveillance projects. We are a launchpad for a career that uses genetics, phylogenetic comparison, and functional genomics. A background in genetic analysis, such as yeast genetics, bacterial genetics, Drosophila genetics, or of course C. elegans genetics is the best preparation for the lab. We are also interested in people who have studied the genetics of diverse bacteria, as well as bioinformatics. Many of our projects require interrogation of the C. elegans genome and comparisons with other genomes, so computational skills are valuable. If you are applying for a postdoc or a technician position, send a CV and letters of recommendation to Ruvkun@molbio.mgh.harvard.edu. If you are interested in joining the Ruvkun lab as a PhD student, apply to the Harvard BBS, Harvard Biophysics, or other Harvard chemical biology, systems biology, or microbial biology graduate programs.
Diversity and career trajectories: The lab recruits from diverse training institutions and in this era of racial reconciliation we have redoubled our efforts in this. The career trajectories of the nearly 100 people who have spent time in the Ruvkun lab are listed below. Many have taken the academic track and are respected members of faculty at universities, colleges, and medical schools. But many have also chosen careers in pharmaceutical and biotechnology research. Training in the Ruvkun lab can launch you in a variety of directions.
Reasons to join the Ruvkun lab:
1. How we configure our science: The Ruvkun lab is best known for its work on microRNAs and their role in translational control and on insulin regulation of C. elegans lifespan. But over the past two decades, we have discovered that a variety of ancient cellular pathways are surveilled for disruption by microbial toxins to trigger immune responses that include production of antiviral siRNAs. We are developing those pathways now. The engine of the lab has been genetic analysis, genome analysis, and functional genomics. We were early users of full genome RNAi libraries for surrogate genetics. Over the past five years, many projects have been empowered by full genome sequencing of newly generated mutations in large-scale genetic screening. In this era of full genome sequences of 100 mutants in parallel, genetics has become literally 50x more productive. We now transition from a collection of mutants to gene identification, with lesions in dozens of different open reading frames identifying key amino acid residues in addition to the gene, in a period of weeks after the screen. Our genetic analysis shows how single mutations can disrupt biological pathways. Satisfyingly, we have found that the protein sequence alterations that our genetic screens select are found in phylogenetic variation between organisms as distant as bacteria in the proteins in these pathways as well. Thus, our Mendelian genetics intersects with the sweep of Darwinian genetics recorded in the Tree of Life. Notice also that our genetic pathway discovery papers of 2016 to 2021 are two to three author papers. These are not hundred author Big Science papers.
2. The training environment: Because our genetics constantly sends the lab into new fields, diverse fields are explored in the lab. This has many dividends. First, it means that the lab has more scientific fields that it explores so that even if a student or postdoc is working on a tiny RNA project, they become fluent in the mitochondrial biology or sulfite detoxification pathway work of others in the lab, and vice versa. Second, there is less competition between people than in more standard focused labs that divide up one pie into 20 slices----the lab is actually a consortium of three or four 1-2 person labs. Third, there is cross-fertilization of concepts and approaches between the many fields being explored in the Ruvkun lab. Importantly, the diverse science is stimulating to everyone.
3. Mentoring style: The training in any lab is often ascribed to the various styles of the head of the lab. But while the lab heads are important to the scientific navigation and the lab ethos, the teaching and the culture from the past in the lab is spread out over all the current students and postdocs, as well as to the 100 people who generated the Ruvkun lab culture over the last 35 years. This can be roughly quantitated: we sum to over 600 person-years of science— 6 person-centuries of science!!! Ruvkun is 36 of those person-years, 6%. Even if you multiply years by some metric of discovery such as authorship, Gary Ruvkun sums to a fraction of the total lab scientific culture of the lab. Projects in the Ruvkun lab are generally conceived in consultation with Gary, but he does not look over shoulders for day to day progress. His management style is consultation on a biweekly basis, approximately. Group meeting presentations are generally about every six weeks with much discussion. The scientific culture of the lab is heavily influenced by recent lab discoveries, but the contributions of students and postdocs from 30 years ago continue to reverberate (love those hundred row Excel spreadsheets of strong hits from RNAi screens, abundant tiny RNAs, etc).
4. The Department of Molecular Biology at Massachusetts General hospital: The training environment is the broader Department of Molecular Biology at Massachusetts General Hospital. This department was founded in the early 1980s and has had about a dozen faculty members ever since. The Ruvkun lab is adjacent to Luke Chao’s lab studying bacterial and mitochondrial fission, Radhika Subramanian’s lab, working on kinesin motor proteins, and Josh Kaplan’s lab, studying synaptic signaling in C. elegans. Also in the department is Vamsi Mootha's lab working on mitochondrial biology---Josh Meisel is a postdoc in both the Mootha and Ruvkun labs, Bob Kingston's lab working on chromatin regulation of transcription, and Jeannie Lee's lab working on X chromosome inactivation by the Xist non-coding RNA. An impressive list of scientists did their graduate or postdoctoral work in our department: Andrew Murray, Jennifer Doudna, Rachel Green, Dave Bartel, Andy Ellington, and Vicki Lundblad trained in the Szostak lab; Dan Voytas, Joanne Chory, Dennis Kim, and Emily Troemel trained in the Ausubel lab (so did I), Jerry Workman and Geeta Narlikar trained in the Kingston lab. There is a spirit of collaboration and sharing supplies, equipment, and ideas between labs. We have outside seminar speakers invited by our postdocs and graduate students, and we are 15 minutes walk or one stop on the Red Line from daily seminars at MIT and the Whitehead and Broad Institutes. The Ruvkun lab is part of the Broad Institute with MIT. As a postdoc here, you would be a member of Harvard University and have access to all its facilities and the surrounding intellectual community. Our department at MGH constitutes half of the Harvard Department of Genetics.
The Ruvkun lab also has an outstanding record of postdoctoral achievement and continuation in academic molecular genetics or biotechnology, as shown below:
Postdocs from the Ruvkun lab over the years (in order of departure)
Kai Mao Assistant Professor Northwest Agriculture and Forestry University, Shaanxi China
Kurt Warnhoff Sanford Research Institute, Sioux Falls, SD
Wei Wei Assistant Professor College of Life Sciences, Capital Normal University, Beijing
Nic Lehrbach Assistant Professor, Basic Sciences, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center
Chris Carr Assistant Professor Georgia Institute of Technology, Aero Astro department
Maria Armakola Research associate, Krainc lab, Northwestern University
Amaranath Govindan President, MarvelBiome
Sylvia Fischer Assistant Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School
Martin Newman Research Associate, University of North Carolina
Susana Garcia Assistant Professor, Institute of Biotechnology, Helsinki Finland
Robbie Dowen Assistant Professor, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Natasha Kirienko Associate Professor, Rice University
Buck Samuel Assistant Professor, Baylor College of Medicine
Carolyn Phillips Assistant Professor, Biological Sciences, University of Southern California
Yuval Tabach Assistant Professor, Hebrew University Hadassah Hospital
Ying Liu Assistant Professor, Beijing University
Eyleen O’Rourke Assistant Professor, Dept of Biology, University of Virginia
Taiowa Montgomery Assistant Professor, Dept of Biology, Colorado State University
Yan Qi former Assistant Professor of Biology, Amherst College; now patent law in Bay Area
Justine Melo former Asst Professor Biology, Haverford, Canisius College, now Univ Buffalo Law School
Christian Riedel Group Leader, Karolinska Institute, Stockholm
Chi Zhang Research scientist, Argos Therapeutics, NC
Xiaoyun Wu Associate Principal Scientist, AstraZeneca
Sean Curran Associate Professor, University of Southern California
Meng Wang Professor and HHMI Investigator, Baylor University School of Medicine
Alex Soukas Associate Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School/MGH
Andy Samuelson Assistant Professor, University of Rochester
Devin Parry Biology Teacher, The Lakeside School, Seattle
Alison Frand Associate Professor of Biochemistry, UCLA
Ho Yi Mak Associate Professor, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
John Kim Associate Professor, Johns Hopkins University Department of Biology.
Ilya Ruvinsky Research Associate, Northwestern University
Patrick Hu Associate Professor, Hematology/Oncology, Vanderbilt University
Weiqing Li former Assistant Professor, University of Washington, now in Hangzhou, China
Scott Kennedy Professor, Dept of Genetics, Harvard Medical School
Tom Isenbarger Attorney, Casimir Jones, Madison WI
Sylvia Lee Professor, Dept of Molecular Biology and Genetics, Cornell University
Kaveh Ashrafi Professor, Dept of Physiology, UCSF
Amy Pasquinelli Professor, Dept of Biology, UC San Diego
Cathy Wolkow former investigator, National Institutes of Aging, now Nursing Educator
Man Wah Tan Senior Scientist, Genentech
Raymond Lee Curator, Wormbase C. elegans database, Caltech
Sarah Pierce Senior Research Associate, King lab at University of Washington
Frank Slack Professor Harvard Medical School and Director of the Institute for RNA Medicine, BIDMC
Oliver Hobert Professor of Biological Sciences and HHMI at Columbia University
Ji Ying Sze Associate Professor of Pharmacology, Albert Einstein School of Medicine
Ilho Ha Research Director, Cancer Research Center, Theragen Etex, Suwon, Korea
Scott Ogg Founding Partner DWSO Biopharma Consulting
Koutarou Kimura Professor, Nagoya City University, Japan
Garth Patterson Assistant Dean, Rutgers University
Ralf Baumeister Professor, University of Freiburg, Germany
Ann Sluder Project Manager, Vaccine and Immunotherapy Center, MGH
Tom Barnes CEO, Orna Pharmaceuticals, Cambridge MA
Shoshanna Gottlieb High school teacher, Philadelphia.
David Greenstein Professor of Genetics and Dean, University of Minnesota
Prema Arasu Professor of Veterinary Medicine, Kansas State University, Olathe
Thomas Bürglin Department of Biomedicine, University of Basel
Michael Finney Managing Director, Finney Capital, San Francisco
Graduate students ( in order of departure)
Zhen Shi Staff Scientist, Genentech
David Shore Choate, Hall, and Stewart, Boston, patent law
Sascha Russel BioBus biology outreach to high schools, New York City.
Harrison Gabel Assistant Professor, Department of Neuroscience, Washington University
Maurice Butler Associate Medical Director at BGB New York
Duo Wang Director, Global Market Strategy, Abbott Labs, Chicago
Gisela Sandoval Child Psychiatrist, Stanford University
Gabe Hayes died October 2013
Brenda Reinhart Research Associate, Roland Martin lab, University of Zurich
Suzanne Paradis Associate Professor, Brandeis University
Heidi Tissenbaum Professor, University of Massachusetts at Worcester
Jason Morris Professor, Fordham University, New York
Allison Koweek Schnipper Professional Organizer Services
Bruce Wightman Professor of Biology, Muhlenberg College
Undergraduates who did theses and projects
Eric Lai Harvard, now a miRNA geneticist at Sloan Kettering NYC
Arthur Wong Harvard
Kristen Tessmar professor in Germany
Andy Tolonen MIT
Alexia Hwang Harvard
Ryan Klimczak Harvard, lawyer in NYC
Ellen Rim Harvard, graduate student at Stanford, postdoc at UC Davis
Xinrui Zhang Harvard, medical student Case Western Reserve University
Elina Thadhani Stanford University
Lab Manager
Peter Breen Dowen Lab at Univ of North Carolina
Shorter stays in the lab
Josh Holtzman Technician
Eric Chan Harvard Undergraduate
Annie Class Harvard undergraduate
Sandra Wellner Haike Antelmann Group at the Institute of Biology – Microbiology, Freie Universität Berlin
Antonia De Maio Cell Press
Elamparithi Jayamani Vice-President, MarvelBiome
Noelle Bryant NASA Ames
Alexandra Pontefract Georgetown University research associate
Jacob Carlson Knight lab UCSF
Nabanita De Research Scientist, Beryllium Discovery
Aditya Bhattaru Blue Horizons
Angel Mojarro Grad student in Earth and Planetary Sciences, MIT
Sarah Stewart Johnson Assistant Professor at Georgetown Univ.
Jacopo Tani ETH Zurich Artificial Intelligence Unit
Ting Zhu Assistant Professor, Tsinghua University, Beijing
Ravi Kamath Radiologist
Chris Li Professor of Biology, City College of New York
Ruvkun plans for 2022 to 2036:
From the 2016 to 2021 publications, the papers are in a variety of fields, from surprising RNA interference pathways to miRNAs to bacterial genetics to sulfite biology to mitochondria. Genetics and comparative genomics brings us to new fields naturally. It is a GREAT time to be a geneticist. The lab will continue at this 10-12 person effort for another 15 years.
