February 2026: Emma and the graduate students of the Biology Outreach Committee releases SciPosPod! Take a few minutes out of your day to dive into the lives of the humans behind the science being conducted within UW Biology. Listen here on Spotify or YouTube. Bravo, Emma!
January 2026: The Durant Lab and the Laursen Lab celebrate completion day of our brand-new insectary space in the Life Sciences Building at UW. Thank you to facilities manager and master builder extraordinaire, Alex Hansen, for a beautiful job well done! Yay to more mosquito research and extra containment!
January 2026: SICB conference
December 2025: Watching the kids while we are all spending time with our loved ones over the holidays. Happy Holidays from the Durant Lab!
December 2025: Rin has been awarded a Mary Gates Research Scholarship, for the second time! Congratulations to Rin, you are a superstar! This award will support Rin’s ongoing efforts to reconstruct in 3D the morphology of the salt gland of saline-tolerant mosquito larvae. Below is a snippet of Rin’s exhaustive and tedious efforts:
November 2025: Dr. Jamie Cochran is a Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow!!! Congratulations, Jamie, and so very well deserved! This competitive fellowship will provide Jamie with two years of full salary support for her research on amphipod gill physiology. Thank you to the Moore Foundation for supporting this exciting research!
Great timing, as Jamie has recently begun working with Pang, the UW Biology electron microscopy specialist, to characterize the ultrastructure of amphipod gills using transmission electron microscopy.
November 2025: There are lots of November birthdays in this lab, and many treats have been consumed over the past few weeks. Happy birthday, Dr. Cochran, Jaskirat, and Dr. Durant! The birthday wall is almost complete.
October 2025: Annika has graduated and is moving to Georgia! This is a bittersweet moment for the Durant Lab: we are thrilled for all of the exciting things ahead for Annika and we are sad that we won’t get to interact with her daily. Annika was the very first member of the lab and has been invaluable researcher and friend to us all. On to bigger and better things, Annika!
October 2025: Welcome to the lab, Eli! Eli will work with Tori to learn cloning techniques and assist Tori in all aspects of CRISPR/Cas9 mosquito injections, rearing, and screening. Eli took BIOL 350 last Spring with Dr. Durant and his mechanistic way of thinking was nothing short of impressive. We are glad to have you working with us!
September 2025: Emma began her initial Western SARE-funded field trials to test whether her lab results of high shrimp mortality when exposed to a saturated sodium bicarbonate solution can be replicated in the natural mudflat environment. Thank you for your hospitality, knowledge, and expertise with these trials, Dr. Jen Ruesink. Elissa and Andrea lend a (hopefully) helpful hand. Great job, Emma!
August 2025: We are overjoyed for Tori, who has just started micro-injecting mosquito eggs with her CRISPR/Cas9, constructs to begin generating her ammonia transporter mutant lines. Tori has worked tirelessly and diligently this past year to engineer over a dozen different plasmids with the guidance of Dr. Willem Laursen. Thanks, Willem, and bravo, Tori!! Let the mutating begin!
July 2025: Elissa and Dr. Durant attended the 10th International Symposium on the Environmental Physiology of Ectotherms and Plants (ISEPEP 10) at the University of British Columbia, Canada. Andrea gave an early-career plenary talk and Elissa delivered a fantastic talk on her work with insecticide-resistant mosquito larvae and thermal and salinity stressors. What a treat to watch Dr. Ray Huey reflect on a fruitful career!
April 2025: More awards! A huge congratulations to Rin Prabhakaran and Wendy Sanchez for each being awarded the highly competitive UW Mary Gates Research scholarship. These research awards will fund two quarters of research in the lab for Rin and Wendy.
Undergraduate researchers Annika, Rin, and Wendy also presented their research posters at the Mary Gates Research Symposium this Spring. Bravo, to each of you! It was fun to bump into other UW Biology students and faculty at this large event.
Rin also won a competitive UW Public Health recognition award! Congratulations to you, Rin. Highly deserved for your exciting research on how a mosquito adapts to seawater!
April 2025: Awards, all around!
Congratulations to Elissa Khodikian for being awarded a prestigious Canadian NSERC PGS-D scholarship to fund her PhD research on mosquito salt tolerance over the next 3 years.
Congratulations to Emma Guerrini Romano for being awarded a Western SARE research grant to work with Taylor Shellfish Farms to perform field tests of baking soda solutions on burrowing shrimp survival in Willapa Bay, WA.
Congratulations to Wendy, Elissa, and Emma for being awarded UW Biology research prizes!
March 2025: Dr. Durant visited the University of British Columbia to give a seminar in the Department of Zoology and to meet with a new collaborator, Dr. Ben Matthews. I fell in love with this knife sharpener in Dr. Doug Altshuler’s lab. Thank you for inviting me, Ben!
February 2025: Welcome, Dr. Jamie Cochran, as a postdoctoral fellow to the Durant Lab. I am beyond overjoyed that you moved cross-country from North Carolina to share your expertise and your love for aquatic insects and amphipods with us!
January 2025: New year, new and wonderful faces in the lab! Welcome to Biology graduate rotation student, Samuel Opoku Darkwah, who is joining us for a quarter from the Riffell Lab. The lab is buzzing with activity!
December 2024: Overjoyed that the lab’s new scanning ion-selective electrode technique (SIET) system has been installed after 9 months in production. Thank you, Erik Karplus, from Science Wares for spending the week installing the system and training me on how to use it. I look forward to the exciting experiments to come!
December 2024: With the first quarter of the 2024-2025 academic year nearing its end, we celebrated with pizza and bowling at the HUB.
Thank you to Annika for also inviting us to the annual Lucia Celebration hosted by The Swedish Club at UW. It was a blast and it was wonderful to learn more about Swedish tradition (and especially the pastries)!
November 2024: Thank you, Tori, for your work with STEM Pals and for organizing a lab tour and lab activities for Seattle high school students. We had an afternoon of fun on the fluorescence microscope and loading/running/visualizing DNA gels.
October 2024: Andrea neglected our laboratory colony of Aedes togoi mosquitoes, which meant a trip with Elissa to the San Juan Islands to attempt to collect more. Not a bad area to have to do field collections!
September 2024: Congratulations to Annika who delivered the lab’s first conference presentation to an audience of scientists and shellfish farmers. Annika presented her preliminary findings at the Pacific Coast Shellfish Growers Association on the impacts to burrowing shrimp survival and osmo-conforming capabilities with the addition of sodium bicarbonate to seawater. Great job, Annika!
September 2024: A lot is happening this month. A huge welcome graduate students Elissa, Emma, and Tori to the lab! Another huge welcome to research technologist, Jaskirat Kaur, who has also just joined the lab. It is a full house, indeed!
Andrea was caught deep in focus pulling glass for our Ramsay assays!
September 2024: Dr. Durant had an excellent visit to California State University San Marcos, where she gave a seminar to students and faculty and had the opportunity. Thank you for the invitation and for the tacos, Dr. Dennis Kolosov!
August 2024: Yay for funding! Drs. Jen Ruesink and Andrea Durant received an Integrated Pest Management (IPM) Research Grant from the WSDA to study the basic ion and water balance physiology of burrowing shrimpa major pest species for shellfish growers in WAand identify weak points in their physiology with osmotic and pH stress. Annika and
Derek (field assistant with Dr. Ruesink) have been integral in getting this research off the ground. Stay tuned!
August 2024: Congratulations to LSAMP Summer Scientist undergraduate researcher, Wendy Sanchez Garcia, on her presentation of her poster at the UW Summer Research Symposium. Wendy investigated how environmentally realistic levels of road salt (NaCl) and heavy metal (copper) contamination in freshwater impacts the sense of smell of amphipod crustaceans.
June 2024: Andrea had a blast visiting Friday Harbor Laboratories and kicking off their summer seminar series. Thank you for having me!
She found active breeding sites for the rock pool mosquito, Aedes togoi, which I used to establish our laboratory colony in Seattle. Spot the caprellid amphipod, collected by Megan Dethier (FHL Director) for the marine invertebrate zoology class!
May 2024: Dr. Durant taught her very first class this Spring quarter (BIOL 350: Foundations in Physiology) and is in awe at the caliber of knowledge and curiosity of the UW Biology undergraduate students. Thank you to Dr. Mary Pat Wenderoth for her invaluable mentorship, wisdom, and expertise!
It is always a treat to bump into synthesis drawings of the material from class drawn by students in the active learning and study spaces around the Life Sciences Building.
Feb-April 2024: Welcome to the lab, Rin and Annika! These two fantastic undergraduate research assistants have transformed this empty space into a functioning lab. Let the research commence!
I am absolutely thrilled that Tori Armitage, Elissa Khodikian, and Emma Guerrini Romano have accepted their PhD offers to join the lab this coming September 2024!
January 2024: the Durant Lab is officially open for (mosquito) business at the University of Washington! We are located in the beautiful Life Sciences Building on the Seattle campus.
at the University of Washington in Seattle 