Dr. Dorothy G. Mitchell of the Martindale Lab Defends her Ph.D.!

Please join the entire Whitney family in congratulating Dr. Dorothy G. Mitchell for the successful defense of her Ph.D. dissertation on March 4^th 2024.

Dorothy’s dissertation is entitled, “Assessing the transcriptomic response to injury and the onset of regeneration in the ctenophore Mnemiopsis leidyi’ and is the culmination of years of hard work in the Martindale Lab here at Whitney on one of Dorothy’s favorite animals, the ctenophore Mnemiopsis leidyi.  Although it has been known for almost a century that adult ctenophores are highly regenerative, Dorothy was the first to attack techniques for fixation of adult material and isolation of tissue for sequencing of transcripts at different stages of the wound healing and regenerative processes, Dorothy was able to characterize the wound healing and onset of the regenerative process in these animals using a technique called RNAseq.  Interesting genes that Dorothy discovered by RNAseq were validated using the newest methods of in situ hybridization to allow her to determine where in the regenerating animal these genes are expressed. One of her significant discoveries was that new gene transcription began within the first 10 minutes following a wounding event. In addition, she found that ctenophores share many of the same cellular and molecular ”early response” genes during wound healing in other multicellular animals.  This provides strong evidence of a conserved molecular response to wound healing that may have of been present in the last common ancestor to all animals. Her work provides insight into the signals that initiate a full body regeneration response and open the doors for a multitude of follow-up experiments in the near future.

Dorothy has been an active participant in the Whitney intellectual community.  She has given talks on her research at both national and international meetings and taken classes at several marine labs around the United States.  She has participated in the Whitney Graduate Student Association and Outreach community and proactive in welcoming new researchers to Whitney.  Dorothy had several offers of postdoctoral scholar positions and recently accepted a position to work on total body regeneration in colonial ascidians (sea squirts) at the University of California Santa Barbara!  We all wish her the best of luck and look forward to following her future scientific career.  Congratulations on a job well done Dorothy!