Joseph Batac ’06 (right) majored in biology and will pursue a medical degree at Tufts University School of Medicine, in Boston, this fall.

“Mitotic Signaling Through Kinesin-Tubulin Interactions”

Jan L. Paluh, assistant professor, biology department

“Mitosis ensures equal distribution of chromosomes to daughter cells. It is vital to reproduction of single-celled eukaryotes as well as to the development of a fertilized egg into a fetus. Joseph chose to investigate mechanisms of force-generating kinesin-like proteins needed to assemble a bipolar mitotic spindle that functions to capture duplicated chromosomes, align them centrally, and then draw single chromosomes to opposite poles before cell division. His work has been published in the journal Cell Cycle, submitted to Nature Cell Biology, and cited in a successful National Science Foundation grant proposal that received three years of funding for further research on topics covered in his paper.”