Drosophila Research Technician
Email: ehowans@clemson.edu
Elisa Howansky
Biosketch
Elisabeth “Elisa” Howansky graduated with the Honors Medal and Honors Pin from Lander University with a Bachelor of Science in Biology. While a student at Lander University, they studied mammalian behavior with camera traps. They focused on white-tailed deer in Upstate South Carolina, specifically on three behaviors: vigilance, grouping, and diel activity. This project was funded by the TriBeta research grant. They presented their research at USC Upstate’s Research Symposium, Lander’s Academic Symposium, and the Association of Southeastern Biologist’s annual meetings in 2022 and 2023.
Broadly, their research interests span population genomics, behavioral and disease ecology, and evolutionary biology. They are motivated by questions surrounding the drivers of genetic variation across habitats, population dynamics, and how sex and genetic background influence responses to toxins and diseases.
Research
Since joining Clemson’s Center for Human Genetics in 2023, they have been put jointly in charge of a toxicogenomics project funded by the European Commission Horizon 2020 program as part of the international PrecisionTox consortium. Their contribution to this project aims to test the survival of over 200 maximally diverse Drosophila Genetic Reference Panel lines when exposed to different waterborne toxins with the goal of running genome wide analyses and identifying genes with human orthologs that could be driving sensitivity or resistance. Additionally, genes shared between the GWAs of multiple chemicals are to be validated with RNAi to further elucidate the effect they have on toxin resistance.
Publications
Chaturvedi A, Shankar V, Simkhada B, Lyman RA, Freymuth P, Howansky E, Collins KM, Mackay TFC and Anholt RRH (2025) Arsenic toxicity in the Drosophila brain at single cell resolution. Front. Toxicol. 7:1636431. https://doi.org/10.3389/ftox.2025.1636431.
Collins KM*, Howansky E*, Macon-Foley SC, Adonay ME, Shankar V, Lyman RF, Nazario-Yepiz NO, Brooks, JK, Lyman RA, Mackay TFC and Anholt RRH. 2024. Drosophila toxicogenomics: Genetic variation and sexual dimorphism in susceptibility to 4-methylimidazole. Hum Genomics. 18, 119.
*co-first authors