Amy Gargis has been awarded a postdoctoral fellowship at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta. She will be working in the Laboratory Research and Evaluation Branch, Division of Laboratory Science and Standards Office of Surveillance, Epidemiology, and Laboratory Services. (8/10)
Graduate students Adam Knight (Caldwell) and Gavin Daigle (O’Donnell) have co-authored a research review “Reprogramming Parkinson’s disease research” for the journal Disease Models and Mechanisms. The review resulted from an assignment in a graduate class taught by Dr. Guy Caldwell.(8/10)
Nathan Whelan, a graduate student in Dr. Phil Harris’ lab, won the Best Student Oral Presentation at the 2010 American Society of Malacologists meetings in San Diego for his talk, “Life History of Leptoxis (Gastropoda: Pleuroceridae).” (7/10)
Dr. Joe Brown is part of an interdisciplinary team awarded a Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation grant to develop simple, inexpensive methods to detect fecal coliform contamination in drinking water (7/10)
Drs. Mortazavi and Sobecky have received an NSF grant to study effects of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill(7/10)
The Lopez lab and the red algal Tree of Life. (6/10)
Graduate student Shaw Gargis has been awarded an ASM Postdoctoral Fellowship to work at the Centers for Disease Control. (5/10)
Professor Emeritus Harriett Smith-Somerville spent most of the spring semester teaching Cell Biology at the University of Alabama at Huntsville, filling in for faculty lost in the tragic shooting there. (4/10)
Congratulations to Daryl Lam! Dr. Lam is the recipient of the 2010 Distinguished Alumnus award by California State University – Fresno. He will be recognized during the Biology graduation banquet on May 14, 2010. (4/10)
Research from the Caldwell lab – Movement disorders are ameliorated by an antibiotic. (4/10)
Graduate student Boopathy Sivaraman’s talk won the Grand Prize for platform presentations in the Natural Sciences at the 13th Annual Research & Thesis Conference at the University of Alabama. (4/10)
Possible treatments for epilepsy from the Caldwell lab. (2/10)
Brook Fluker won Best Student Talk for his presentation in November at the Southeastern Fishes Conference. Brook’s paper was “Comparative Phylogeography of Etheostoma boschungi and E. tuscumbia: Assessing Habitat Preference and Dispersal Ability.” (12/09)
The laboratories of Drs. Guy Caldwell, Kim Caldwell, Julie Olson and Robert Findlay have found that asoil bacterium produces a chemical that causes neural degeneration. The study was published in the journal PLoS One.(10/09)
Dr. Juan Lopez-Bautista has been awarded an NSF grant from the “Assembling the Tree of Life” (AToL) program to construct a phylogenetic tree of red algae. The three million dollar grant is a collaborative project with other three research institutes: Rutgers University (Debashish Bhattacharya), Ohio University (Morgan Vis-Chiasson), and Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences (HwanSu Yoon).(9/09)
Dr. Matthew Jenny has joined the department as Assistant Professor. Matt received his Ph.D. from the Medical University of South Carolina and was most recently at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Matt’s research area is molecular toxicology. (9/09)
Dr. Patricia Sobecky has joined the department as Professor and Chair. Patty comes to us from the Department of Biology at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Patty’s research interests are in microbial ecology and bioremediation.(9/09)
Congratulations to Kim Caldwell, Juan Lopez-Bautista, Katrina Ramonell and Leslie Rissler, who have been promoted to Associate Professor with tenure, effective 16 August 2009. (7/09)
The research labs of 16 faculty members, the departmental administrative office and most of the teaching labs have moved (or will be moving shortly) to the newly completed (and unimaginatively named) Science and Engineering Complex. (7/09)
Five undergraduates have been named the 2009-2010 Alabama Dystonia Scholars and Parkinson’s Association of Alabama Scholars. The five students work in the laboratory of Drs. Kim and Guy Caldwell. (7/09)
Dr. Kim Caldwell has won an NSF Career Development Award. (7/09)
UA researchers have developed a new approach to screen Parkinson’s Disease therapeutic drugs. (7/09)