James O’Connor
James was an undergraduate at University of Miami (Ohio), and he joined the Page-McCaw lab in 2017 from the Chemical and Physical Biology umbrella program at Vanderbilt. He was attracted by the opportunity to work collaboratively with Andrea and biophysicist Shane Hutson. Initially funded by the Program in Developmental Biology T32 training grant, James won an American Heart Association pre-doctoral fellowship to continue his studies on the early signaling around epithelial wounds. He has presented his work in an oral talk at a Drosophila Conference workshop in Philadelphia, and he will be a session leader at the Gordon Research Seminar on Tissue Repair in June 2019. James also won a medal in the 2019 Science Slam competition at the Philadelphia fly meeting, for a poem about his work entitled “The Watchtower” (see photo).
