Xavier Du Maine (BBS)
Xavier du Maine misses his lab.
“I do mouse research, so the quarantine is going to delay my experiments,” he says. “But it’s giving me more time to think about my science so that when we get back, I can hit the ground running.”
Du Maine is using the time away from the lab to get a jump on his dissertation and a paper he’s preparing for publication. He’s not someone who likes to be idle: In addition to working as a biological and biomedical sciences PhD candidate in the laboratory of HMS neurobiology professor Chenghua Gu, he is a member of Underrepresented Scholars in Neuroscience, Minority Biomedical Scientists of Harvard, and the Christian Medical and Dental Association. Last year, he was named a Diversity and Inclusion Fellow in Harvard’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.
As a biology undergraduate at Columbia University, the St. Louis native spent one summer studying ALS at Washington University and another researching Alzheimer’s disease at UCSF, but when Harvard’s Summer Honors Undergraduate Research Program unexpectedly paired him with Dragana Rogulja, an assistant professor of neurobiology in the Blavatnik Institute at HMS, and into the lab of Rogulja’s frequent research collaborator, HMS neurobiologist Michael Crickmore at Boston Children’s Hospital, he shifted gears academically. The two scientists “just live and breathe science,” says du Maine. “Their passion and enthusiasm were contagious.” They sparked his interest in basic science and his desire to study it “at Harvard in particular.”