As an MCO graduate student in the Murray Lab, Alexa Pérez Torres is investigating what happens when you break the cell cycle rules in yeast. She also serves as the MCB department’s Media and Design Fellow (MDF) in the Bok Center’s Learning Lab.
“Alexa is a fantastic young scientist,” says MCB faculty and Pérez Torres’s adviser Andrew Murray. “She has the courage to work on a risky project, the dedication and technical skill to make difficult experiments work, and she gives some of the clearest and most engaging talks that I’ve heard.”
Hailing from a small town in Puerto Rico, Pérez Torres has been curious about science and the natural world for as long as she can remember. At age three, she was already wearing a lab coat and safety goggles to peer through a microscope. Her scientific curiosity led her to major in biology as an undergraduate at the University of Puerto Rico in Cayey.
Determined to continue in science, Pérez Torres did a post baccalaureate research project in neuroscience at Johns Hopkins. There, she joined Loyal Goff’s lab and studied the effects of cell cycle length on developing mouse embryos’ brains. “It was really helpful for me narrowing down what I did or didn’t want to do,” she says.
MCB’s diverse research was part of what drew Pérez Torres to the MCO program, as well as the focus on communicating science clearly. “When I came here to interview, one of the components was this journal club where the students instead of having digital slides, they made these hand drawn slides,” she recalls. “And that was also aha moment for me. The design of your slide, because it’s hand drawn, has to be very intentional. You have to extract all of the salient points from the topic that you’re trying to talk about. It made a difference for me thinking about MCO and Harvard versus other programs.”
Pérez Torres is a member of the Murray Lab. “I feel like Andrew and I are a pretty daring duo, and we had to choose a project that matched that energy from us,” she says. For her thesis research, Pérez Torres chose a project that “breaks all the rules in the game.” She is investigating what happens in Saccharomyces yeast cells when a type of gene regulation called phase-dependent transcription is shut down.
She likens cells with phase-dependent transcription to a Ferrari, while cells without it are more like a 1996 Nissan Sentra. One has more “bells and whistles” than the other, but both are cars that will get you to a destination, she says. Thus, her project is to turn “a Ferrari of a cell” into a “1996 Nissan Sentra” and see what happens.
“We want to know how much of the complexity of biology is essential as opposed to things which aren’t necessary but conferred an advantage as they evolved,” explains Murray. “It’s like asking which of the things that induced you to buy your last car (from heated seats to video screens for kids in the back) could you remove and still be able to get from Boston to the Cape. Because some cells, like frog and sea urchin eggs, don’t have messenger RNAs whose abundance goes up and down in the cell division cycle, we wanted to ask what would happen to yeast cells if you removed the fluctuations of the messenger RNAs that do go up and down in the yeast cell cycle.”
What happens in yeast cells without phase-dependent transcription resembles some cancer cells. “All restrictions are lifted, and everything starts kind of operating in a way that everything’s happening without consideration for what’s happening in the rest of the cell,” Perez-Torres says. “All hell breaks loose, and it’s really fun to look at.”
When she’s not studying yeast cells, Pérez Torres often works on graphic design projects in her capacity as a Media and Design Fellow (MDF) in the Bok Center’s Learning Lab. MDFs are typically graduate students from various departments who look into ways to apply different media in learning. They experiment in the Learning Lab and share strategies and tools they’ve learned with their home department. MDFs typically serve for one academic year, but some, like Perez-Torres, choose to re-apply and work as MDFs for multiple years. Applications for the position are handled through the Bok Center. Perez-Torres says working in the Learning Lab is “incredibly challenging and so fun.”
Pérez Torres has taught herself graphic design as a way to make science more accessible. Her accomplishments as an MDF include designing the template for the 30th anniversary MCB lab posters. The posters remained on display in the BioLabs first floor hallway throughout the summer. “This poster session was quite different because it addressed the big-picture questions: ‘What do you—the lab do?,’ ‘Why do you do it?,’ How do you go about it?” says Director of Scientific Graphics and Communications Renate Hellmiss.
“The viewer didn’t have to be a scientist to grasp the overall concepts of the posters,” Hellmiss continues. “Since my office is down the hallway from where those posters were hung, I saw how many people stopped by the posters and most took time to walk from poster to poster. MCB should consider having a permanent display of lab posters and update them on a regular basis. It is a wonderful way to share the wide range of research that is conducted in MCB, but also to make it understandable to a wider audience. These posters will not replace the research posters that are geared towards scientists because data needs to be shared, and conclusions need to be drawn. However, Alexa did a great job to make this happen. I would really like to thank her for spending the time to design this poster session and for guiding the labs through the process of creating their posters.”
Alexa next to the Murray Lab poster
Pérez Torres has also hosted a workshop to help graduate students prepare for Chalk Talks and will throw a workshop to train MCB scientists to use graphic design tools like Blender. Another key project was collaborating with MCB faculty Amanda Whipple on the course MCB 197, where they incorporated graphic design into assignments such as posters and graphical abstracts.
She will continue on as MCB’s MDF for another academic year. “Alexa excels at aligning her designs for a workshop with the course’s goals for students,” says Assistant Director of the Learning Lab Christine D’Auria, who works closely with MDFs. “Alexa is consistently willing to try new things in the service of getting to this future of academic communication, and she collaborates with other MDFs and with our Learning Lab staff to ensure that the experience for students is as academically rich and engaging as possible. She’s a true team player and an innovative instructor, and we’re beyond lucky to work with her.”
Going forward, Pérez Torres plans to stay in academia but says she wants science communication and design to remain major aspects of her career. She sees being intentional about communicating science as essential to the practice of science.“We can really even out the playing field for me if you put it in a way that’s digestible, simple to understand, and really neatly packaged,” she says. “Not only do I see a direct correlation between how well you’re showing me your research and how well I’m understanding, but I see that across the community.”
