Julius Tabin

Julius is a third year PhD candidate in the Organismic and Evolutionary Biology department at Harvard University, broadly interested in behavioral genetics and parasitic manipulation. He is currently in the Elya lab, working on “zombie” fruit flies infected with the fungus Entomophthora muscae. His main project is to understand the molecular and mechanistic basis of fungally-induced “summiting” behavior (elevation in height before death), but he is also interested in the fungus’s morphological transitions throughout development. In the past, he has studied a variety of organisms, including cavefish, zebrafish, catsharks, gars, skates, big cats, and deer mice. Julius is also trained in Egyptology and, in his free time, continues to research the morphology of ancient Egyptian hieratic.