Chandler M. Fulton

Weston - Chandler Fulton joined the biology faculty at Brandeis in 1960, where he taught and maintained a laboratory for over sixty years. His research spanned a range of disciplines, including developmental, genetic, evolutionary, cellular, and molecular biology. His intense interest in life sciences began in the woods around Naugatuck, Connecticut, where he became an ardent naturalist and ornithologist in his teenage years. When studying at Brown University in the 1950s, Watson and Crick’s discovery of DNA’s double helix galvanized his interest in questions of life’s origins, genetic reproduction, and evolution. He pursued a PhD at the Rockefeller Institute (now Rockefeller University) in New York City and took a teaching assistantship at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, later becoming a member of the MBL Corporation.

At Brandeis, Professor Fulton’s laboratory worked on a single-celled ancient amoeba that lives in freshwater, Naegleria gruberi. He was instrumental since 1970 in heralding Naegleria’s phenotypic change between two life forms, amoeba to flagellate, as a research organism to study cell differentiation and gene expression. In addition to many published scientific papers, Chandler wrote a major textbook with his colleague Attila Klein, Experiments in Developmental Biology (Harvard University Press, 1976).

In the 1960s and 70s, Professor Fulton lived within a few stone throws of Brandeis on the banks of the Charles River and then built a mountain house on a pond in the Maine woods. In 1980, he moved with his wife and scientific collaborator, Elaine Lai, to a passive solar biospheric home he designed in Weston, Massachusetts. In the next few decades, Chandler and Elaine continued collaborative work using Naegleria to investigate questions of programmed cell death (apoptosis), gene silencing in collaboration with New England Biolabs, and de novo-mentored centriole formation with the Gönczy Lab in Switzerland. At Brandeis, Professor Fulton was an avid supporter of undergraduate research, served as a member of the university planning board, and chair of the biology department.

His last few months were spent in his home study and library attending to religious and scientific questions, family and friends, and the great diversity of birds outside his window, including an elusive bluebird he hoped would settle in the house he built for it. Chandler was born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1934. He died peacefully in his home in Massachusetts on February 21, 2026. He is predeceased by his sister, Margaret Fulton Fels, and former wife, Margaretta Lyon Fulton. He is survived by his brother William, his three children, Thomas, Margot, and William, his five grandchildren, Gi, Levi, Gabriel, David, and James, and by his wife and research partner of over forty years, Elaine Lai Fulton.

A Celebration of Life will be held on April 11, at 2:00 pm at Saint Peter’s Episcopal Church, 320 Boston Post Road, Church, Weston.

In lieu of flowers, memorial donations “In Memory of Chandler” may be made to Mass Audubon Society and mailed to: Mass Audubon, 208 South Great Road, Lincoln, MA 01773, or made online at https://www.massaudubon.org/