When Associate Professor Eliezer Calo PhD '11 was applying for faculty positions, he was drawn to MIT not only because it's his alma mater, but also because the Department of Biology places high value on exploring fundamental questions in biology. In his own lab, Calo studies how craniofacial malformations arise. One motivation is to seek new treatments for those conditions, but another is to learn more about fundamental biological processes such as protein synthesis and embryonic development. 'We use genes that are mutated in disease to uncover fundamental biology,' Calo says. 'Mutations that happen in disease are an experiment of nature, telling us that those are the important genes, and then we follow them up not only to understand the disease, but to fundamentally understand what the genes are doing.' Calo's work has led to new insights into how ribosomes form and how they control protein synthesis, as well as how the nucleolus, the birthplace of ribosomes in eukaryotic cells,...
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