Assistant Professor, Genetics and Genomics

B.Sc., College of William and Mary

Ph.D., Johns Hopkins University

In the last months of 1944, towns in Western Netherlands plunged into the Hongerwinter, a six-month period of acute famine brought on by World War II. Nearly six decades later, a landmark study revealed that descendants of the Dutch survivors suffered adverse health effects two generations down. How did hunger impact their grandchildren’s lifespan?

External factors such as diet and stress have been linked to adverse consequences transmissible to offspring. This notion that environmentally-induced changes in an organism’s physiology can be passed on to offspring—once dismissed as heresy—has now gained widespread acceptance. However, critical questions on the prevalence and stability of such induced traits remain. Whether mechanisms driving these seemingly non-genetic changes could enable more rapid evolution in response to new environments than genetic alterations alone remains unclear. Addressing these questions drives research in the Wahba Lab, where Lamia Wahba and her team seek to answer a fundamental question facing biologists today: Do we need to radically rethink our views on inheritance to account for nongenetic mechanisms?