by Eva Booth

A little fish helped William Richard Jeffery win a huge award.

Jeffery, a biology professor at the University of Maryland, was a recipient of the 2021 Distinguished University Professor award for his research on the evolution of development with a minnow-like fish found in Mexico. On his journey to study evolution, Jeffery looked all around the world. He tried to find two animals that were closely related but with distinct differences. 

“We found a great one in Mexico,” he said.

That’s where he found the animal that he would focus his future research on: the small teleost fish Astyanax mexicanus. It looks like a minnow that lives in rivers and streams, Jeffrey said.

“But in some places, it’s gone into caves and adapted to life in caves and as a result, it’s lost its pigment and its eyes,” he said. He categorizes the fish into two categories, cavefish and surface fish. 

Jeffery describes one of his biggest accomplishments in life as finding that there’s one gene that causes this fish to lose its pigment and multiple genes involved in the fish losing its sight.

The fish’s eye placement is determined by its genes. The genes in turn determine which proteins are produced. They’re scattered to the left and right of the midline — a line in the middle that runs from head to tail. The specific way the genes are distributed — which side they’re on and how far away from the midline they are — determine where a fish’s eyes are on its body. The cavefish’s gene expression — turning genes on and off to produce a protein — was different. The proteins were further away from the midline than they were for surface fish. That’s one of the reasons why eye development stops — and the eye dies off.

Jeffery discovered that the same genes that control that eye development also control the advantages that cavefish have over surface fish for feeding in the dark — more taste buds, bigger jaws and more teeth. The protein changes that result in an evolutionary advantage for feeding might also destroy the eye, which isn’t necessary in the cave.

The award

Being named a Distinguished University Professor is the highest award that a faculty member can receive at the University of Maryland. Along with the award, winners receive $5,000 to support their professional activities. Winners are recognized nationally and internationally for their scholarly and creative achievements. 

Mandy Ng, a faculty specialist at the University of Maryland Department of Biology and the Lab Manager at Jeffrey’s lab, said Jeffery is involved every step of the way — from getting the animals, coming up with research questions, designing experiments and publishing the results.

“A lot of people focus on just one or two animals. I think he is highly aware or knowledgeable about other systems and that makes him a very well-rounded researcher,” Ng said. 

Eric Haag, a professor in the Department of Biology at the University of Maryland agreed. 

“He’s sort of a fearless scientist. He goes where the data takes him,” Haag said. “He’s not trying to do something that’s fashionable, or that he’s necessarily going to follow the trends that people are working with, he reads the literature and he goes in whatever direction these results take him.”

Haag said Jeffery works “ridiculously hard.” Even on the weekends, he said, Jeffery is often in his office or his lab working. 

“This guy is old enough that he could relax and slow down, but I don’t think he knows how,” Haag said.

Reid Compton, a principal lecturer in the Department of Biology and the director of undergraduate programs, described Jeffery as a remarkable and humble man.

“He’s not a person that’s out in anybody’s face,” said Compton, who advocated for Jeffery to be recognized as a Distinguished University Professor. “He’s not noticed until you start looking at the body of work and you go, ‘oh my goodness this is incredible’.” 

Years earlier in college, biology was Jeffery’s secondary interest. His first interest was archeology. He’s still interested in Egyptology and archeology, but he hasn’t been able to travel to Egypt to pursue his research on the facial characteristics of Egyptian royalty and their relationships because of the coronavirus pandemic.

He only became sold on biology at the University of Illinois. He took a few biology classes and then joined a research lab. 

“The research was really good for me so I decided I’d become a biologist,” Jeffery said. 

He attended graduate school at the University of Iowa, where he became interested in single-cell organisms. Jeffery earned his PhD in the evolution of developmental mechanisms in chordates — which include vertebrates and animals with a skeletal rod — at the University of Iowa. 

After he received his PhD, he continued to study protozoa, single-cell organisms, and later became interested in evolution and taught at several other schools. 

He came to UMD in 2000 as the head of the biology department. Today, he now focuses only on research and teaching. 

“Teaching and research go hand in hand because by teaching things you can sometimes clarify your research,” Jeffery said. “You need to explain your research to other people, particularly students, because without doing that it’s very difficult to know what the next step is.

Featured image: William Richard Jeffery in his lab. Photo courtesy of William Richard Jeffery.