Jamie Henzy, As­so­ciate Blog­ger

I grew up in east­ern Ken­tucky. A love of lan­guages, in­clud­ing how they evolve, led me to earn a B.A. in lin­guis­tics at the Uni­ver­sity of KY. Along the way, I hap­pened to read Carl Sagan's book, Broca's Brain, named for the main re­gion of the brain linked to lan­guage pro­duc­tion, and was complete­ly taken by the "ro­mance of sci­ence". Af­ter­wards, I made my way to Boston and weaseled my way into Har­vard via a side door – the Ex­ten­sion School. There I moved one step closer to be­ing a sci­en­tist, writ­ing a master's the­sis that blended Russ­ian, bi­ol­ogy, and sci­ence his­tory. Then, while work­ing as a tech­ni­cian in a gene ther­apy lab, I learned from my su­per­vi­sor that verte­brate genomes are full of retro­virus se­quences. This fas­ci­nat­ing rev­e­la­tion led me to pur­sue Ph.D. work fo­cus­ing on the evo­lu­tion of retro­vi­ral enve­lope pro­teins, in the Cof­fin lab at Tufts. My cur­rent in­ter­ests re­volve around the man­ner in which viruses and their hosts shape one another's genomes, and the mech­a­nisms of evo­lu­tion in­volved in these in­ter­ac­tions. 

Along the way, I've al­ways loved read­ing about sci­ence out­side of the tech­ni­cal jour­nals, where sci­en­tists are free to ex­press their en­thu­si­asm to any­one who will lis­ten. I'm ex­cited to be parti­ci­pating in just such a fo­rum at STC. 

I'm a post­doc­toral fel­low in the lab of Welkin John­son in the Bi­ol­ogy De­part­ment at Boston Col­lege. Find more on my web­site, or on twit­ter.