Dr. Courtney Clark-Hachtel Seminar Title: “Mechanisms of extreme survival: Uncovering how tardigrades can tolerate extreme radiation” Bio: Dr. Clark-Hachtel received her BA in Science Education from Miami University (Oxford, Oh) in 2012. She stayed at Miami University to complete her Ph.D. in evolutionary developmental biology (2018) where she studied the evolutionary origin of insect wings and used insects and a crustacean as model systems. Prior to starting her position at UNC Asheville, Dr. Clark-Hachtel was a postdoctoral researcher at UNC Chapel Hill where she began working on understanding the mechanisms of ionizing radiation tolerance in the lab-reared tardigrade Hypsibius exemplaris. She started at UNC Asheville in the Fall of 2023 where she and her students have been expanding our knowledge of tardigrade ionizing radiation tolerance beyond traditionally used lab species, interrogating the gene expression changes that facilitate this tolerance, and exploring the mechanisms that tardigrades use to survive other genotoxic stresses.