Shoshana Daly is a senior studying biochemistry on the pre-med track. She can be reached at shoshana.daly@tufts.edu
Journalism was probably the last thing on my radar when I walked through the club fair as a first-year. And for most of my time at Tufts, it stayed that way. My best friend Carmen was super involved in that world, but her involvement was the closest I got to that space.
The Tufts Department of Biology offers four undergraduate majors — biology, biochemistry, biopsychology and biotechnology — which, combined, account for roughly 12% of all majors completed by Tufts students over the past five years. Biology is the fourth largest major at Tufts, and the biology department has expanded rapidly in recent years, with five new, full-time faculty joining in the 2025–26 academic year alone.
It was 6 p.m. on a Thursday in November, and I was heading to a hidden gem of Cambridge: the MIT Museum. Getting off the Red Line at Kendall/MIT, I was surrounded by darkness, but as soon as I walked through the doors to the museum’s After Dark Series event, I was met with a rush of light and excitement. A monthly adults-only program, After Dark lies at the intersection of art and science. Each month has a different theme, with past events ranging from artificial intelligence to rhythm, birds, oceans and beyond. This November’s session, “Sleep, Dream, Wake,” accompanied the launch of a new exhibition, “Lighten up! On Biology and Time,” which explores the connection between living organisms and cycles of light and darkness.
The clinical approval of penicillin in 1945 kicked off a 25-year period that is now commonly referred to as ‘the golden age of antibiotic discovery,’ in which antibiotic discovery progressed at a dizzying pace. In the nearly 80 years since antibiotics emerged on the scene enmasse, their usage has ballooned. Now antibiotics can be found in a plethora of industries, from human medicine to agriculture to livestock.
On Wednesday, Jane Goodall passed away. She was 91. I was one when I first heard Jane Goodall speak. It was at my father and aunt’s Ph.D. graduation at Syracuse University in 2005. While I do not remember that speech, I think it may have unconsciously seeped into my little brain and shaped me into the person I am today.
In this second installment of “Dissertation Diaries,” we highlight Amarachi Osuji, a fifth-year chemistry and biotechnology Ph.D. candidate in the lab of Professor Joshua Kritzer here at Tufts. Originally from Nigeria, Osuji earned her bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from the University of Debrecen in Hungary. For her Ph.D., she chose to shift her focus, moving away from engineering to delve more deeply into chemistry.
Welcome to the first installment of “Dissertation Diaries,” a new column where we will highlight different doctoral candidates from various science and engineering departments at Tufts! Our first student profile spotlights Kevin Smith, a doctoral candidate in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering.
People will always tell you to “network” and “get involved in research,” but it isn’t always clear what that actually looks like. As a senior biochemistry major at Tufts, I’ve figured out some effective ways to do both, so here are my four tips for first-years pursuing a STEM major or minor.
In a lab in the heart of Boston, professor Bree Aldridge leads a team of researchers trying to understand a threat that is both microscopic in size and global in consequence. The subject of Aldridge’s research is the bacterium Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the causative agent of tuberculosis. In 2023, TB made 10.8 million people sick and killed around 1.25 million people.
One of the first things that students learn when they enter a biology class is the central dogma: DNA → RNA → Proteins. Proteins are the workers of our cells. From signaling cascades to intracellular transport, from energy metabolism to DNA repair, proteins are behind it all. In most intro level biology courses, we learn simply: amino acids dictate a protein's structure and thus determine its function as a result. However, there is another piece to this story: namely, what happens to proteins after they are formed. Post-Translational modifications are chemical changes that can change a protein's function, inactivate it or activate it.
