McFall-Ngai is a scientist and educator, renowned for her work on symbiosis between animals and bacteria, particularly the symbiosis between the bobtail squid and V. fischeri.
Many invertebrates and most, if not all, vertebrates acquire their bacterial symbionts by horizontal transmission; the symbionts are not present during embryogenesis but are recruited from the environment during or after birth or hatching. This presentation will cover how the embryo prepares the host animal for the first interactions with environmental V. fischeri and then how specific selection of this bacterial species occurs “against all odds.”
The model symbiosis between the Hawaiian bobtail squid Euprymna scolopes and its luminescent bacterial partner V. fischeri offers the opportunity to study the underlying mechanisms of the symbiont-acquisition process in the marine environment.
McFall-Ngai has also contributed to understanding how tissues interact with light, discovering the first protein-based animal reflector called reflectin, which has applications in industry and biomedicine.
McFall-Ngai was a Guggenheim Fellow in 2010, a Caltech Moore Scholar from 2011-2013 and an Andrew D. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University between 2010 and 2016. She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy of Microbiology.
She is a Senior Staff Scientist at Carnegie Science and a Faculty Associate in Biology and Biological Engineering at Caltech. She was the first hire for Carnegie’s newly launched research division for Biosphere Sciences & Engineering in November 2021. Before joining Carnegie Science, she was a professor and director emerita at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa’s Pacific Biosciences Research Center.
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