Bio-philia

UAB Department of Biology Newsletter

Fall 2014

Welcome Back, Biology Alums! Alas, we lost contact with many of you until recently, but now that we found you, we are hoping to catch

you up on what we are doing. With the passage of time, some things change, others remain the same. For instance, I’m new here -- from the beginning of 2014. I study the biology of aging, which is appropriate because although Campbell Hall is still here, she is beginning to feel her age. We have some outstanding new faculty, some of whom you can read about in this issue of the newsletter. Others will be featured in future issues.

We are now part of the relatively new College of Arts and Sciences and the Departmental office suite is now where the Dean’s office of the College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics used to be. Dr. Wibbels is still saving sea turtles all over the world, Dr. Watts is now growing sea urchins for Master Chefs, and we still boast the best students on campus. We’ve featured several of our exceptional students in this issue. I hope you enjoy reading about them. We also boast the most interesting alumni on campus. We’ve featured several of those in this issue too. We’d like to feature you in the future. Give us a shout (biology@uab.edu) and let us know what you’ve been up to since you graduated. Keep an eye out for future newsletters too. We’re back “on the air” for the foreseeable future.

Sincerely,

Dr. Steven Austad, Department Chair & Distinguished Professor

FACULTYFOCUS

In March of this year, Dr. Karolina Mukhtar received a National Science Foundation CAREER Award, given to faculty who are at frontiers of innovative research, community service, and leadership. Dr. Mukhtar’s $1.1 million research grant, Regulatory Mechanisms of Pathogen Mediated Cellular Stress Signaling in Arabidopsis: Taking Plant Molecular Biology to the Urban Garden, includes her educational program, the OUTPACE Summer Research Institute. This innovative educational program supports her vision of training the next generation of minority scientists and engaging an urban community in citizen science. For more on what Dr. Mukhtar and her OUTPACE students were up to this summer, please visit outpaceatuab.tumblr.com.

Dr. Nicole Riddle received the Provost’s Faculty Excellence Award, an award established by Dr. Linda Lucas, Provost of the University of Alabama at Birmingham that recognizes faculty members who have demonstrated extraordinary commitment to engaging undergraduate students in research, scholarship, creative activities, and study away experiences.

Arabidopsis:A plant used in botany research. Dr. Mukhtar has been working with her Arabidopsis plants for 10 years.

“Dr. Riddle has been helping me build my academic profile and prepare me for graduate school. As a result, I feel better prepared and more confident about graduate school.” – Sophomore Olivia Delmas

“Students Say”

Emeritus Professor, Dr. Ken Marion, is still as busy as ever! He continues to teach in UAB’s Study Away Program in the Bahamas, Costa Rica, and the Galápagos Islands with Dr. Jim McClintock. Also, just this Sepetember, Dr. Marion oversaw his 20th Welcome Back Picnic, for returning students.

J. Bree Latner (Class of ‘08) currently teaches math at the Alabama School of Fine Arts. She fondly recalls the many hours she spent in the Department’s Human Anatomy lab organizing bones in bone boxes, spraying cadavers down with body spray, and talking science with Dr. Bej while setting up PCR reactions. Her true passion was teaching though. After graduation, working at the McWane Science Center through UAB Community Outreach and Development allowed her to put her biology degree and love of teaching to good use. She is deservedly proud of the hands-on labs and summer camp curriculum that she personally developed during that time. As for her time here in the Department, she tells it best. “I feel like I grew up in the Department of Biology. I came in as a 17 year old and left as a fully grown professional, an experience I wouldn’t trade for the world.”

Peter Hardin (Class of ’93) currently practices corporate and tax law as a shareholder in the Birmingham office of Sirote & Permutt, P.C. He also spends a significant amount of time helping private landowners protect important conservation resources on their land while still qualifying for tax deductions. He serves the community as President of the Board of Directors of St. Anne’s Home, a non-profit residential drug and alcohol rehabilitation home as well. Mr. Hardin’s fondest memories of the Biology Department include a class trip to Dauphin Island Sea Lab and his Field Botany course which not only introduced him to many native plants but also introduced him to his future wife, Lynn Beasley Hardin. Mr. Hardin notes that a number of his favorite professors, including Drs. Bej, Cusic, Jones, McClintock, and Watts, are still exciting students in the Department about the joys of biology.

Alumni Highlights

We are pleased to congratulate one of our new faculty members, Dr. Daniel Warner, who was selected as a winner of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology’s 2014 Bartholomew Award. The George A. Bartholomew Award recognizes outstanding achievement in comparative or integrative biology. Dr. Warner’s research combines field and laboratory studies of reptiles to investigate how the environment they experience as embryos affects their later growth and fitness.

Dr. Asim Bej is an honoree of the President’s Excellence in Teaching Award for 2014. Dr. Bej will be going into his twenty-fourth year with the Department of Biology here at UAB. When asked, how he does it Dr. Bej, modestly attributes

this outstanding recognition to the importance of ”upholding the values of this edcuational institution. Families entrust you to mentor and prepare students for their professional careers. If you have a passion for passing on knowledge and exciting students about the future, you will be successful. Teaching is a nobel profession.”

Where are they now ?Dr. Anne Cusic is still teaching courses BY 123 & 124 and oversees the merit-based scholarship established in her name, The Anne M. Cusic Scholarship in Biology. Please take a look at our most recent recipients at the end of this edition.

January 2014 Dr. Charles

Amsler became the first person from UAB to

set foot on the South Pole!

FUN FACT !

2014 Goldwater RecipientBliss Chang

2014 UNCF Merck Scholarship

Quincy Jones

2014 Clinton ScholarsLeah BerkebileCharity Ryder

2014 Howard Hughes Medical

Institute FellowTimothy Fernandez

DAAD-Rise Scholarship

Michael Longmire

National Award WinnersSTUDENT’SCORNERPh.D. candidate CJ Brothers, (pictured right), spent two months in Australia this summer (their winter) drawing “blood” from sea urchins thanks to support of the U.S. National Science Foundation and the Australian Academy of Sciences. Why? She and her mentor, Dr. Jim McClintock, are investigating how climate change – which is warming and acidifying the Southern ocean – may affect various forms of sea life. Stress of all kinds is known to suppress animals’ immune systems, so by doing laboratory experiments this summer CJ hoped to discover whether future changes in the ocean are likely to suppress the sea urchin’s immunity as well. Stay tuned for her final results, but so far it looks like this purple urchin species may be able to handle these changes better than she expected.

Mr. Shah, a senior Biology major and this year’s winner of a College of Arts & Sciences Dean Award, carried a 4.0 grade point average throughout his college career while working on an accelerated Master’s Degree in Public Health. In his spare time, Mr. Shah does a little research. For instance, he presented results on the genome sequence of a new virus at the 2012 National Collegiate Honors Conference in Boston and at the Howard Hughes Medical Institutes Research Campus, Janelia Farm, Virginia. In addition, he was the only student from Alabama invited to present at the Step-Up Undergraduate Research Symposium at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. In his spare time, Harsh managed to serve as a UAB Ambassador and Trailblazer as well as on the editorial boards of Inquiro, the UAB undergraduate research journal, and Sanctuary Literary Journal, the journal of the Southern Regional Honors Conference. To help fill up those other idle hours of the day, Harsh founded and is choreographer for two campus dance groups. We wonder when (and if) he sleeps.

Inquiring minds want to know… how many Harsh Shah’s are there?

Ms. Courtney Rutherford - The Anne M. Cusic Scholarship in BiologyMs. Jessica Lopez - Biology Student Leader Scholarship (Formerly Luke Gallahger)

Mr. Chapelle Ayers - The Ken R. Marion Biology Career AwardMs. Marlee Hayes - The Ken R. Marion Ecology/ Enviromental Science Career Award

Congratulations to our 2014-2015 Scholarship Recipients and a special thank you for your generoity that made it possible!

Steven Austad, Ph.D. Editor-In-ChiefDeja Dowdell Editor, Content Development & Design

Upcoming Events

Please join us on Feburary 12, 2015 for our third annual Darwin Day! Award-winning, New York Times science writer, Carl Zimmer will be our keynote guest lecturer. Please stay tuned to uab.edu/biology for more information.

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UAB Department of Biology Study Away in Costa Rica

For more than 20 years, the Biology Department has offered study away experiences to some of the world’s great ecosystems. This coming May, we are offering BY 269/569 (Rainforest Ecology—3 semester hours), which includes a 10-day trip to four sites in Costa Rica, one of the world’s centers of biodiversity. We will visit cloud forests, lowland rainforests, and coastal ecosystems. Monkeys, parrots, sloths, toucans, caimans, poison dart frogs, leafcutter ants, and beautiful butterflies are among just the many organisms students will see. For more information, contact Dr. Ken Marion at kmarion@uab.edu.