Zachary Kelso
Research assistant
E-mail: zkelso@fas.harvard.edu

I am a research assistant revisiting sensational 20th century reports of RNA-mediated memory transfer between individual planarian flatworms. I’m broadly interested in the evolution of information processing and that mysterious gray area where “just physics” starts to look like cognition. I aim to identify fundamental molecular memory mechanisms in planarians and describe the kinds of information processing those molecules instantiate, with hopes to generalize to metazoa writ large. Outside of the lab, I spend my time reading fiction, learning about hominin prehistory, and tromping through the wilderness.