The Breakthrough Stars Award recognizes relatively early-career assistant and associate professors who demonstrate considerable contributions to their field in terms of research and scholarly activity while at USC. This recognition can contribute to recipients' career advancement and retention, and helps the university attract the best and brightest young faculty to join UofSC.

Dan Speiser, assistant professor in the Department, specializes in marine invertebrates with many eyes — sometimes hundreds of eyes distributed across their bodies. His work uses integrative and comparative approaches to study the evolutionary physiology of marine invertebrates and aims to understand how individual eyes work and where they come from in an evolutionary sense. Lean more about Dan's amazing research here!