Nils Morin, intern student at the Irwin Lab, won the best poster prize at the Mendel Early Career Symposium 2024 for his presentation on his work looking at the function and evolution of bacterial-derived cell adhesion proteins in green algae. Nils has been in the Irwin lab for the last five months doing an internship as part of his Masters degree in the IMaLiS program at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris.

By using a combination of cell biology experiments and evolutionary analyses in the model alga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii, Nils has been studying how bacterial genes can be acquired and co-opted by eukaryotic organisms to evolve new functions. His work is providing new insights into the role of horizontal gene transfer in evolution of multicellularity, environmental response, and eukaryotic evolution more broadly.

Nils will be returning to Paris in the Fall to continue his program and we’re excited to see what he does next.