Dr. Magwene is a yeast geneticist whose work uses both wet lab and computational approaches. He is also the director of the Computational Biology and Bioinformatics Ph.D. program at Duke.

Dr. Armstrong is a developmental biologist, and studies the connection between nutrition/diet and stem cells. She focuses on trying to understand how fat cells in the fruit fly Drosophila communicate with stem cells in the ovary to impact egg production. She is currently a McCausland Fellow, a three-year program for promising early-career faculty at the University of South Carolina.

Dr. Alemseged is a paleoanthropologist, studying human evolution. In 2000, he discovered an almost-complete Australopithecus afarensis skeleton fossil. This fossil came from a young female (~3 years old) from the same species as Lucy, but had lived ~150,000 years earlier. He named her Selam.

Dr. Johnson is a molecular biologist who studies the effects of diet and nutrition on the microbiome. She is particularly interested in the role that breast milk may play in the establishment of the infant microbiome.

Dr. Applewhite is a cell biologist who studies the cytoskeleton. As a faculty member at a small liberal arts college, he works to tightly integrate his research and teaching. You can read about his some of his thoughts on being a Black and gay scientist here.

Dr. Pinkett is a biochemist and biophysicist, working to understand the structure and function of cellular transport proteins. She was named a Pew Scholar in the Biomedical Sciences by the Pew Charitable Trusts in 2010.

Dr. Gaoue is an ethnoecologist, meaning he studies the interaction between humans and their environment, and how that differs in different places. His particular interest is in figuring out systems for more sustainable forest management.

Dr. Gordon is an evolutionary biologist and behavioral ecologist, interested in why and specific color patterns have evolved in different species and how that is related to the threat of predators.

Dr. Alabi is a biomedical engineer, whose work focuses on how to assemble synthetic macromolecules with precise control. His work is applicable both to creating new tools for research and to more efficient drug delivery.

Dr. Gibbs is a microbiologist, who is interested in the social behavior of the bacteria Proteus mirabilis, a leading cause of urinary tract infections.

Dr. Wheaton is a neuroscientist interested in how the brain controls arm movements, with the goals of better understanding what goes wrong after stroke and of improving adaptation to prosthetics. In addition to his research, Dr. Wheaton was elected to the City Council of Smyrna, GA, in 2019.

Dr. Williams-DeVane uses computational approaches to study medical data, with a particular focus on health disparities that impact African-Americans.

Dr. Priestley uses physics, chemistry, and engineering to help design new nanomaterials, which can be used for better drug delivery.

Dr. Barrow, a recent hire in the College of Human Ecology at Cornell, received an exploratory R21 grant ($566,000 over three years) from the National Institutes of Health in 2019. Her research focuses on human metabolism, metabolic disease, and obesity.

Dr. Thornton works to develop new statistical methods to analyze the associations between genes and complex traits, particularly in situations complicated by the fact that people in the study are related to one another and/or are of mixed ancestry.