Cassandra Extavour

Evolutionary developmental biology

Cassandra Extavour studies the development and evolution of reproductive systems. She investigates the functions and evolutionary origins of genes, cells and mechanisms that enable living creatures to reproduce and develop. Her findings show how animals successfully secure their reproduction and improve our understanding of biology and human health.

Fruit flies and roundworms are classical model organisms in developmental biology. The results of simple experiments conducted on them can be transferred to other species. But always concentrating on the same species as study objects can lead to incorrect inferences. Cassandra Extavour and her team have scrutinised such results and been able to correct them. They extended the range of organisms to include, for example, arachnids, crickets and heteroptera and, above all, developed new tools for these models. With the help of molecular markers, functional genetic analyses and cellular analyses to study embryo development and reproduction systems they investigate fundamental biological problems. Amongst other things, Cassandra Extavour became famous for discovering that one of the most conspicuous genes controlling reproduction in animals, the “oskar” gene, originated in bacteria, thus solving a long-standing mystery as to how this gene originated and evolved.
In her leading role in academia, she also actively engages in promoting diversity and breaking down the barriers to accessing the academic system.

As a Humboldt Professor at Kiel, she is invited to close the gap between molecular biology and evolutionary/ecological research and become involved in existing university collaborations with GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology in Plön. From 2026, a new building, the Center for Translational Evolutionary Biology (CeTEB), will pool evolutionary expertise in Kiel.

Brief bio

Having completed her doctorate in genetics at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain, in 2000, Canadian-born Cassandra Extavour initially remained in Europe at the Institute of Molecular Biology and Biotechnology within the Foundation for Research and Technology Hellas (IMBB-FORTH) in Heraklion, Greece, and the University of Cambridge, United Kingdom. She became a research associate at Cambridge in 2004, relocating to Harvard University, United States, as an assistant professor in 2007. In 2014, she was made a full professor in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology and the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology. For her services to teaching, she was named a Harvard College Professor in 2020 and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator in 2021.

Cassandra Extavour has been selected for a Humboldt Professorship and is currently conducting appointment negotiations with the German university that nominated her for the award. If the negotiations end successfully, the award is expected to be granted in 2026.