In June 2025 Dr Daniel Stadtmauer was awarded a Branco Weiss Fellowship to pursue their project
“How to Build an Embryo Selection Arena: Nature’s Recursive Algorithm”.

Society in Science - The Branco Weiss Fellowship is a 5-year personal grant for non-mainstream, interdisciplinary post-doctoral research. As Branco Weiss Fellow  DAniel Stadtmauer will explore the cellular and molecular mechanisms underpinning the evolution of unusual reproductive traits in mammals. Specifically, he aims to study the evolution of embryo selection - the systems by which animals monitor environmental conditions and embryo signals to regulate how many, and which, offspring to invest in. This process is most pronounced in animals such as elephant shrews, which have evolved to fertilize hundreds of times more offspring than they ultimately bring to term. Mechanistic understanding of how these remarkable contrasts to human reproduction function will hold explanatory potential to make sense of broad patterns in the evolution of mammal life histories, and can open the door to more accurate prediction and clinical control of uterine receptivity to improve human health. Daniel Stadtmauer will be hosted in the Department of Genetics at Harvard Medical School by its chair Clifford Tabin.