Anthony Moss, PhD, College of Sciences and Mathematics Faculty and Staff

Short Bio

A first generation immigrant from Yorkshire, England, I attended grade school in Canada, Vermont, and New Hampshire. Attended an entirely new high school in Montgomery County, Maryland and from there attended Johns Hopkins where I studied cell biology, neurobiology and physiological psychology. I spent a summer at the Gerontology Research Center, working for Edward Schneider on chromosomal mechanisms of ageing; it was there that I first fell in love with fluorescence microscopy. After graduation, I worked for Frank Adkinson at the JHU Medical School, Division of Clinical Immunology, learning clinical assays for IgE and IgG, and conducting research on the 'Slow Reactive Substance" of delayed hypersensitivity, using a guinea pig lung parenchyma model. I entered Boston University Marine Program (BUMP) with Arthur Humes as director, and joined Sidney Tamm's lab in spring of 1981. There I studied the ciliary basis of feeding behavior in the ctenophore Pleurobrachia pileus. The MBL short-course 'Biophysics of Neural Function' led by Dan Alkon was my first direct experience with cellular neurophysiology and after that I was hooked on cell physiology. Based on that training, and with Sid Tamm's constant intellectual support, I elucidated the neuronal pathways leading to the now-famous ctenophore rolling behavior while feeding. I was the first person to record directly from cilia, recording en passant, as if they were axons, and the first to describe rhythmic patterns in neural function in ctenophores. I was very excited by the motility research going on about me at the Marine Biological Laboratory and moved on to study ciliary and flagellar motility with George Witman of the Worcester Foundation for Experimental Biology, where I was involved in the discovery of flagellar dynein structure and structure/function mechanisms in trout, sea urchin and Chlamydomonas and studied phototaxis mechanisms in the latter. In recent years I have returned to the ctenophore and salps as sources of inspiration with regard to their neuronal and structural modifications.

ORCID #0000-0001-7303-4285