Whitman Fellows Find Community & Collaboration at the MBL

Collaboration, cross-training, and connections with colleagues are all key components to scientific discovery and exploration. Whitman Fellow Mubarak Hussain Syed, the “Fly Guy,” an associate professor in the Department of Biology at the University of New Mexico, understands this well. Two years ago, Syed participated in the Building Innovation Through Diversity (BID) fellowship program, a weeklong MBL program that brought faculty from universities around the country to Woods Hole to build connections and explore new research collaborations with MBL resident scientists. While waiting in line for lunch one day, he struck up a conversation with MBL Director Nipam Patel. As they talked, they made an unexpected discovery—they share a scientific lineage.

“Syed did his postdoc with Chris Doe, and Chris and I were good friends in graduate school. We were in the same lab and collaborated,” Patel explains.

The connection was fitting. Syed, often referred to as the "Fly Guy," has built his career studying how diverse cell types are generated in the nervous system of the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster, one of biology's most important model organisms. Now, he has returned to the MBL as a Whitman Fellow, building on the relationships and research collaborations that began during his BID Fellowship to advance his work.

Like many developmental biologists, Patel has also worked with Drosophila. When he discovered that Syed wanted to test whether the rules governing the generation of cell types extended beyond fruit flies, Patel suggested Parhyale hawaiensis, a small crustacean, as a research organism. The idea resonated with Syed, and the two soon began collaborating.