Allessandra DiCorato, Ph.D.

Q: If I’m sweating a lot when I exercise during the summer, does that mean my workouts are more effective?As the weather heats up, you may find the same jog that was comfortable outdoors a few months ago now leaves you drenched in sweat.Sweating a lot can mean you’re working hard, but sweat alone isn’t necessarily a great indicator of workout intensity, said Mindy Millard-Stafford, an exercise physiologist at the Georgia Institute of Technology. “You can’t really compare one person’s sweat rate...

Sydney Ramirez vividly remembers that Wednesday in March. Her future adviser, scientist Shane Crotty, was supposed to be in Italy for a conference. And Ramirez, a physician and immunologist, wasn’t supposed to join Crotty’s lab at the La Jolla Institute for Immunology as a postdoctoral fellow until July.


But it was 2020, and very little was going as planned.Instead, they were in Crotty’s office, and Covid-19 had just been declared a national emergency; in two days, the institute would shut do...

Scientists at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Harvard Medical School, and McLean Hospital have discovered a surprising mechanism by which the inherited genetic mutation known to cause Huntington’s disease leads to the death of brain cells. The findings change the understanding of the fatal neurodegenerative disorder and suggest potential ways to delay or even prevent it.
For 30 years, researchers have known that Huntington’s is caused by an inherited mutation in the Huntingtin (HTT) gene...

I’d always thought that moving to Boston would be like coming home. Chicago, where I’d spent the previous six years in grad school, had felt overlarge and wide, like a borrowed coat that had warmed to my shape but never really fit. I’d come to love my neighborhood, even the winters, but the city’s sprawling streets never really felt like mine. Boston, by contrast, was as dense as the New England I’d known as a child, the highway leading to it forest-lined and familiar. I’d looked forward to movi...