Dr. Mary Sunderland
Dr. Mary Sunderland served as graduate student coordinator for the first three years of the Embryo Project, working on articles, helping to design the database, and serving as the connection between the project team and the library. She received a Master’s degree from the University of Toronto carrying out stem cell research, then wrote her dissertation on the history of regeneration studies.
Mary received her Ph.D. from our Biology and Society Program in December 2008, and she now has an exciting position as postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Berkeley. She is putting her research and management expertise from the Embryo Project to work there. Congratulations Mary!
Technology
The Embryo Project is committed to open standards and thus makes use of open-source technologies to store, manage, and disseminate its digital content — encyclopedic entries and scholarly interpretive essays, digital images, timeline visualizations, and videos. The Project is part of a large and growing community of educational, research, and government institutions that utilize the Fedora repository system.
In conjunction with the ASU Library, the MBL, and the Max-Planck Institute for the History of Science, the Embryo Project is developing not only a repository of digital objects centered around embryo research, but also new solutions to bridging the divide between traditional scholarship in the humanities and the explosion of information in the digital world.
The MBL
The Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts is a partner with Arizona State University for the Embryo Project. Together, we are highlighting over a century of embryology courses at the MBL and making thousands of vintage photographs available for researchers. In addition, we have new articles on the people at the MBL and the research and literature produced over the years.
Today, the MBL is a mecca for developmental biologists who teach, take courses, visit the library, or spend the summer in a lab. The Embryo Project is documenting the MBL’s role in the history of embryological studies, ranging from the early work on cell lineage by Edmund Beecher Wilson, Edwin Grant Conklin, or Thomas Hunt Morgan to the theoretical work of Eric Davidson on gene regulatory networks to recent interest in regenerative medicine.