“I got interested in octopus, honestly, because it’s octopus and it’s really cool,” says Nicholas Bellono, MCB Associate Professor. We agree, and apparently, Nick’s obvious enthusiasm for his leggy research subjects is catching on with news stories about his work.
A recent piece in the University of Chicago’s Marine Biology Lab News describes Nick’s start to becoming an MCB scientist after spending a summer during college working with Heather Eisthen (Michigan State) at the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. His interest in forming his own MBL-inspired lab was met with success when he interviewed for MCB believing “an open-minded exploration of signal transduction in the octopus arm would be unique and informative for connecting the evolution of proteins to cellular and organismal function.”
You can also read about Nick’s projects in recent Harvard Magazine and Harvard Gazette pieces.
“My work is a great example of where following one’s curiosity about an interesting animal with interesting biology can lead to some broad insights into how proteins adapt to do new functions,” Bellono says. “I think that biology should be driven by curiosity, that we don’t always have a grand plan for how things are going to go, we should just explore, and that’s what being a scientist is about.”
