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Congratulations to Brooke Fitzwater and Delaney Peterson for receiving an Honorable Mention on their NSF GRFP proposals!

The NSF GRFP recognizes and supports outstanding graduate students in NSF-supported science, technology, engineering, and mathematics disciplines who are pursuing research-based graduate degrees at accredited US institutions. The Department of Biological Sciences is very proud of Brooke Fitzwater and Delaney Peterson for receiving an Honorable Mention on their proposals. NSF GRFP Honorable Mention Awardees are provided with access to XSEDE, a high-performance computing cluster.

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Model‐based genotype and ancestry estimation for potential hybrids with mixed‐ploidy paper co-authored by Paula Adams

Paula Adams, Ph.D. candidate, was a co-author on “Model‐based genotype and ancestry estimation for potential hybrids with mixed‐ploidy” recently published in Molecular Ecology Resources. This paper presents a software package (ENTROPY) that extends our ability to detect hybrids in populations with mixed-ploidy. Previous work has established methods to assign genome ancestry in haploid and diploid populations, but this process is complicated in autopolyploid and mixed-ploidy species. The hierarchical Baysian model used by ENTROPY has high accuracy at analyzing admixture in […]

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The STEM Garden: Replacing the leaky pipeline [metaphor]

Rebecca Varney, PhD candidate, and Kaleb Heinrich, assistant professor of biology education, have published an article in The Teaching Professor – a journal intended to help college faculty improve their teaching, share best practices, and stay current on the latest pedagogical research. The classic “leaky pipeline” has been justifiably criticized, but now more than ever before this metaphor is failing our students. We cannot solve our problems by “plugging holes”, and STEM was never a pipeline to begin with- there […]

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Registration for the 2021 Bama Biology Bootcamp is open

Bama Biology Bootcamp (B³) is a one-week intensive program run by the Department of Biological Sciences for students enrolled in or planning to enroll in BSC 114 or 118. Its purpose is to help students make a successful transition from the expectations of high school to those of university, setting the stage for a great experience at UA. The 2021 B³ program will run from August 9th to 13th. To learn more and register, visit b3.as.ua.edu.

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Newly published research from the Caldwell lab suggests an answer to a long-standing medical mystery

Newly published research from the lab of Drs. Guy and Kim Caldwell (a.k.a., The Worm Shack) suggests an answer to a long-standing medical mystery: specifically, why it is that tobacco smoking, a well known risk factor for a variety of diseases, actually protects individuals from Parkinson’s Disease?  This research, led by UA Biological Sciences Ph.D. candidate, Brucker Nourse, and performed in collaboration with Israeli neurogeneticist, Dr. Millet Treinin, of Hebrew University in Jerusalem, was published in the journal iScience.  Using the nematode model system, C. elegans, as the experimental subject, […]

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Research on forest structure and composition led by DBS alum Susanne Weisner featured

Congratulations to Starr lab alum Susanne Weisner and her co-authors including Dr. Starr, Dr. Staudhammer, and Dr. Cherry for having their paper Forest structure and composition drive differences in metabolic energy and entropy dynamics during temperature extremes in longleaf pine savannas selected to be featured as one of the AGMET Editors’ choice papers of December 2020. This work shows that longleaf pine energy reserves are built during periods of low precipitation and mild temperatures and that human modification slows their […]

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