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 […]

Read More from The STEM Garden: Replacing the leaky pipeline [metaphor]

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, […]

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

Early Promise for Natural Compound in Combatting Parkinson’s

Read More from New paper led by Dr. Urmila Maitra (Ciesla Lab) highlights value in studying naturally occurring compounds

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 […]

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

2020 Darden Lecture Pandemics and Biodiversity: The Ecology of Infectious Disease by Dr. Felicia Keesing Thursday 10/29/20 at 6:30pm Zoom link: https://uasystem.zoom.us/j/92703968262 Dr. Keesing: https://www.feliciakeesing.com/

Read More from Don’t miss the 2020 Darden Lecture by Dr. Felicia Keesing on 10/29/20

Dr. Kocot and his team are currently on board the RVIB Nathaniel B. Palmer and underway to study the biodiversity of deep sea invertebrates in waters off Antarctica. Typically Antarctic research expeditions are executed from Chile, New Zealand, or Tasmania, Australia, but the COVID-19 pandemic made this a difficult year for the National Science Foundation, the United States Antarctic Program, and researchers to execute Antarctic research. Instead of flying to a port in the southern hemisphere and taking a ship […]

Read More from Dr. Kocot’s team took the long way to Antarctica

Dr. McKain has been awarded an NSF Rules of Life grant entitled “RoL: RUI: Collaborative Research: Understanding the Ecological and Genomic Bases of Local Adaptation in an Obligate Pollination Mutualism”, led by colleagues at Willamette University with collaborators at California State University—Northridge, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, and the US Geological Survey Western Ecological Research Center. This four year project will investigate patterns of genetic and physiological variation in Joshua trees (Yucca brevifolia and Yucca jaegeriana) as they have adapted […]

Read More from Dr. McKain awarded NSF Rules of Life grant

Climate warming not only threatens individual species, but also disturbs entire ecosystems. A new study in Nature Climate Change by Dr. Sasha Greenspan and other Becker Lab members and collaborators explored how warming effects on ecological communities influence the animal gut microbiome, a group of microbes that helps animals stay healthy. They set up miniature aquatic ecosystems with tadpoles, bacteria, worms, mosquito larvae, and other insects within water-holding tropical plants called bromeliads and exposed them to a warming gradient. They […]

Read More from Climate change disturbs animal microbiomes

Coastal wetland restoration is increasingly utilized to offset wetland loss and degradation and to recover ecosystem services, making it important to evaluate the relative effectiveness and times to functional equivalence of different restoration strategies. Two critically important services provided by coastal wetlands are carbon storage and nitrogen removal. By restoring or creating wetlands, it is possible to recover these functions and services, thereby promoting more resilient coastal watersheds. As part of a new Mississippi-Alabama Sea Grant project, entitled “Assessing Recovery […]

Read More from Drs. Cherry & Mortazavi awarded grant to study recovery of restored tidal marshes