Adam Carte is a PhD candidate in Harvard University’s Systems, Synthetic, and Quantitative Biology Graduate Program and a visiting student at the Biozentrum of the University of Basel in Switzerland. He was born and raised in rural Southern West Virginia and went on to study biochemistry at West Virginia University (WVU), where he graduated summa cum laude in 2014. At WVU, Adam worked in a fruit fly genetics and biochemistry lab and served as a strong advocate for expanded University investment in undergraduate research. He spent the summer of 2013 interning at Harvard Medical School, where he studied how fruit fly embryos turn genes on and off at the right time and in the right places. In graduate school, Adam has been working with zebrafish in Dr. Alexander Schier’s lab to learn about the signals that instruct embryonic stem cells to become different types of cells. In his free time, Adam enjoys traveling, hiking, SCUBA diving, playing soccer and volleyball, and reading too many Wikipedia articles.