Team
The MuLTEE has run since 2018, and it requires a transfer every single day. The experiment is maintained by a small permanent core, a rotating group of graduate and undergraduate researchers, and collaborators on three continents.
The roles below are based on authorship of the papers that use MuLTEE populations. Full author lists are on the Publications page.
Leads and contacts
Professor, School of Biological Sciences, Georgia Tech
Co-founder of the MuLTEE. He developed the snowflake yeast system from around 2010 as a postdoc in Michael Travisano's lab at the University of Minnesota, where daily settling selection was first used to evolve multicellularity de novo, and moved to Georgia Tech in 2014. Senior author of the 2023 Nature macroscopic-size paper and co-PI on the NSF LTREB award that funds the experiment.
Senior Research Scientist, Georgia Tech
Co-founder of the MuLTEE, and the person who runs it day to day. He proposed and designed the metabolic treatment scheme that removed the oxygen limit on cluster size, founded the fifteen populations in 2018, and continued transferring them past the end of the original experiment, which is what made the MuLTEE a long-term experiment. First author of both the 2021 oxygen paper and the 2023 Nature macroscopic-size paper, and PI on NSF award 2452109, the LTREB grant behind the 2025–2035 decadal plan.
Strain requests · scientific scoping
Research Scientist, Georgia Tech
Joined the lab in 2021. She manages strain distribution and leads omics data collection, and is studying the role of Hsp90 in macroscopic adaptation through a replay evolution experiment. Co-author on the 2023 macroscopic-size, 2024 coexistence, 2024 Hsp90 and 2025 genome-duplication papers.
Strain requests · logistics and shipping
Strain requests reach both: Dung Lac handles the paperwork and shipping, Ozan Bozdag scopes the science of the request. Start on the Data & Strains page.
Current contributors
Research Scientist, Georgia Tech
Co-author on the 2023 macroscopic-size paper, the 2024 Hsp90 paper and the 2024 entanglement paper. His own line of work is the mechanisms life uses to overcome oxygen limitation on multicellular size, including phototrophy and oxygen-binding globins. PhD at Duke on the yeast metabolic and cell division cycles.
PhD student, QBioS
Co-author on the 2025 genome-duplication paper and on the 2025 super-resolution imaging paper that phenotyped evolved and ancestral anaerobic strains. He works on the life history of nascent multicellular yeast and the evolution of cell differentiation. BS-MS from IISER Pune.
PhD student, QBioS
First author of the 2025 paper on coordinated cell division, which showed that the anaerobic lines lost the ancestral first-division delay by day 200 and stayed synchronous through day 1,000. He began on evolved trade-offs in snowflake yeast during a year-long internship before the PhD. Genomic Sciences, UNAM.
PhD student, Biology, Georgia Tech
Working with Dung Lac and Ozan Bozdag on emergent gene expression patterns in S. cerevisiae under anaerobic, mixotrophic and aerobic regimes.
Bachelor's and Master's student, Georgia Tech
The lab is larger than this list. Named here are the members whose MuLTEE contributions are evidenced by authorship; the full roster is on the Ratcliff Lab people page.
Alumni credits
An experiment that runs for decades outlasts most of the people who work on it. Much of the work described on this site was done by researchers who have since moved on, and the credit is theirs. The contributions below are taken from the author lists of the papers that use MuLTEE populations.
This is the MuLTEE subset of a much longer alumni list. The lab's pre-2018 snowflake yeast work, which built the model system these populations were founded from, carries its own set of names; those papers are grouped as foundational on the Publications page.
Collaborators
Recurring co-authors outside the lab, each listed with the MuLTEE work they appear on.
Any population from any archived timepoint can be requested, and sharing the archive is a central aim of the project. Requests go through the Data & Strains page. Dung Lac handles logistics and shipping, and Ozan Bozdag scopes the science of the request. For anything else, write to Ratcliff or Bozdag at the addresses above.