October 16, 2026
1 pm – 2 pm
Foege South Auditorium (Genome Sciences 060) & Streamed on Zoom Webinar

“The thermosensory specializations of soil-transmitted parasitic nematodes”

Research Overview

Soil-transmitted parasitic nematodes infect over a billion people, primarily in the world’s most socioeconomically disadvantaged communities, causing devastating and sometimes fatal illness. Despite this massive health burden, we lack basic knowledge about the sensory behaviors and physiological specializations that enable parasitic worms to locate and infect humans – processes that could be targets for novel therapeutic interventions.

Dr. Bryant has developed Strongyloides stercoralis, a human parasite that infects around 610 million people and can be fatal, as a powerful new organism for performing mechanistic studies of human parasitism and the evolution of sensory behaviors. The S. stercoralis nervous system is remarkably similar to that of the non-parasitic nematode Caenorhabditis elegans, with common identifiable cell types. Despite these similarities, the sensory behaviors exhibited by S. stercoralis and C. elegans are significantly different. The central hypothesis of the Bryant Lab is that parasitism of mammals requires dramatic shifts in thermal behavior and physiology that arise from molecular and neural adaptations of the conserved nematode nervous system. The Bryant lab uses a range of techniques, including high-resolution behavioral quantifications, tools for neural silencing and imaging, functional genomics tools, bioinformatics, comparative phylogenomics, and optimized methods for transgenesis and stable line generation.

During her lecture, Dr. Bryant will describe the lab’s efforts to identify the molecular and neural mechanisms that underlie the dramatic attraction of S. stercoralis infective larvae to human body heat. She will also present in-progress work that asks whether similar mechanisms underlie the temperature-driven behaviors of other nematode species that independently evolved to parasitize mammalian hosts, including human hookworms.

Biography

Dr. Bryant is a neuroscientist and a parasitologist specializing in the thermal physiology of soil-transmitted parasitic nematodes. She is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Neurobiology & Biophysics at the University of Washington. She received her B.A. in Biology from Bryn Mawr College and a Ph.D. in Neuroscience from Stanford University. She entered the field of nematode neuroscience as a postdoc in the lab of Dr. Elissa Hallem at UCLA, where she established the first methods for quantitative and mechanistic analyses of neural function in parasitic worms. At UW, her team uses an interdisciplinary, multi-scale approach combining expertise in neuroscience, parasitology, molecular biology, bioinformatics, and genetics to understand the thermosensory mechanisms that enable medically important soil-transmitted parasites to locate and infect human hosts.

Dr. Bryant is a 2026 McKnight Neuroscience Scholar, and the recipient of a 2024 NIAID New Innovator Award (DP2). She has also received several research awards, including the 2021 Boyer/Parvin Award for Excellence in Molecular Biology research, the 2020 Arnold Scheibel Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellow Award, and the 2020 M. John Pickett Award for Outstanding Achievement in Postdoctoral Research.