The University of Florida Whitney Laboratory for Marine Bioscience Evenings at Whitney Lecture Series continues TUESDAY, April 7, 2026, at 6 p.m. with the program titled “One, Two, Three: Evolution of Developmental Counting Mechanisms”. Dr. Cassandra Extavour - Investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Timken Professor of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology and of Molecular and Cellular Biology, Harvard College Professor, will be the speaker.
This free lecture will be presented in person at the UF Whitney Laboratory Lohman Auditorium, 9505 Ocean Shore Boulevard, in St. Augustine. Those interested also have the option of registering to watch via Zoom live the night of the lecture.
Register to watch online: https://ufl.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_2nyH6Eq-S0eNSU_9PSXd-Q
Dr. Extavour will talk about her lab’s efforts to understand how complex organisms made of many cells, like animals, manage to make precise numbers of some structures (e.g. the numbers of fingers on a hand) but imprecise numbers of others (e.g. the numbers of hairs on a head).
Cassandra Extavour is a native of Toronto, where she attended the University of Toronto Schools and went on to obtain an Honors BSc at the University of Toronto with a specialist in Molecular Genetics and Molecular Biology, a Major in Mathematics and a Minor in Spanish. She obtained her PhD with Antonio Garcia Bellido at the Severo Ochoa Center for Molecular Biology at the Autonomous University of Madrid. She performed postdoctoral work first with Michalis Averof at the Institute for Molecular Biology and Biotechnology in Crete, Greece, and subsequently with Michael Akam at the University of Cambridge. At Cambridge she received a BBSRC Research Grant and became a Research Associate in the Department of Zoology. In 2007 she established her independent laboratory as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University, where she was promoted to Associate Professor in 2011 and to Full Professor in 2014. In 2021 she became a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator, and was named the Timken Professor of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology and of Molecular and Cellular Biology at Harvard.
The Extavour laboratory is interested in understanding early embryonic development, the genes that control this development, the evolutionary origins of these genes and how their functions have changed over evolutionary time. The lab is particularly interested in the development and evolution of reproductive systems, including both germ cells, which are cells that make eggs and sperm in sexually reproducing animals, and somatic gonad cells, which create the structures to house and protect the germ cells, and regulate egg and sperm production.