The 4th National Climate Assessment, coauthored by Biology Professor John Bruno, was recently released. The report describes the growing impacts of climate change on America, including human health, economics and natural resources like coral reefs and fisheries. The report was widely covered in the press and lays the groundwork for America’s Green New Deal being developed in congress.
To see more, check out the report!
Congratulations to Vicki Bautch Lab’s Postdoc Dana Ruter and Grad Student Danielle Berlin on their recent Fellowship Awards from the AHA (American Heart Association)! Dana’s project is “NOTCH1 and SMAD6 Regulatory Mechanisms Governing Flow-mediated Vascular Function“ and Danielle’s project is “Centrosome Number as a Regulator of Endothelial Cell-Cell Junctions and Lumenization.”
Congratulations to these UNC-CH students, enrolled as Biology majors or second majors, for their induction into Phi Beta Kappa, the nation’s oldest academic honor society. At the induction ceremony, new members received certificates and Phi Beta Kappa keys, the organization’s symbol. The new 2018 Fall inductees are: Vikram Aikat, Abby Jean Bergman, Caroline Elizabeth Butler, Allison Anne Carter, Nicholas Kenneth Chamberlain, Shivani Desai, Hope Mccleese Gehle, Emily Suzanne Long, Sabrina Corin Madrigal, David Joseph Near, Michala Sterling Patterson, Katherine Mae Spencer, Grace Darby Tan, Benjamin Walzel, Yunfei Wang, and Larry Yang.
Congratulations to Celia Shiau for being awarded an NIH Equipment Supplement Grant to acquire an automated lab-dedicated single and bulk cell sorter for multi-functional use. The Shiau lab will use this technology for high resolution cell-specific investigations in coordination with in vivo approaches.
Pat Gensel and Alan Weakley received a 3 year NSF grant (Advanced Digitization of Biological Collections) to digitize parts of the critical fossil collections (all non-seed producing plant fossils) of Pat Gensel, as well as extant fern and lycophyte components of the UNC Herbarium (a unit of the NC Botanical Garden located in Coker Hall). The grant, Digitization TCN: Collaborative Research: The Pteridological Collections Consortium: An integrative approach to pteridophyte diversity over the last 420 million years, is a multi-institutional collaborative, led by U Cal Berkeley, with 8 collaborating institutions (UNC being one) and up to 30 associated institutions, forming the Pteridological Collections Consortium. The project focuses on integrating fossil (deep time) and extant data about ferns and lycophytes that will enable researchers to better address the ecology, biogeography, and evolution (characters and genes) of these plant groups through time, from the Devonian to the present and to develop greater public appreciation of these plants and topics. The images and data will be served in a new portal, representing the first such consortium to integrate fossil and living plant data in one database. The NSF-ADBC grant is the 4th over the last 7 years that the UNC Herbarium (the largest in the southeastern United States) has received. The work facilitates research, collaboration, and conservation by vastly increasing the accessibility to researchers and the public of the mass of data held in herbaria like UNC’s.
Congratulations to Biology postdoctoral researcher Fletcher Halliday(Charles Mitchell Lab) who won the “2018 Outstanding Student Paper Award” from the Disease Ecology Section of the Ecological Society of America. The award was for his 2017 paper, coauthored by James Umbanhowar and Charles Mitchell, and published in Ecology Lettersentitled “Interactions among symbionts operate across scales to influence parasite epidemics.”
The Zachary Nimchuk lab has been awarded a 3-year NSF funded grant as part of the ERA-CAPs program that promotes European-US research collaborations. The Nimchuk lab will join 4 European labs to study the molecular mechanisms of receptor signaling in plant development and disease resistance.
Jill Dowen and Bill Marzluff have secured a supplement from NIGMSto purchase an instrument for single cell isolation and recovery. This instrument will allow for more rapid and efficient genome editing of mammalian cells than current methods, and can also be utilized for single cell genomics. The instrument combines immunofluorescence imaging, robotic plating, and a special array that holds single cells. The technology was developed at UNC in the lab of Dr. Nancy Allbritton.
Congratulations to Nicole Arruda, a GMB graduate student in the Jill Dowen Lab, who was awarded a prestigious and highly-competitive three-year fellowship from the National Science Foundation. Nicole’s project is entitled “Cis-Regulatory Elements Connect Gene Expression and Genome Organization.”
Congratulations to Dr. Daniel McKay, Assistant Professor of Biology and Genetics and Integrative Program for Biological and Genome Studies (iBGS), who was Awarded an Early Stage Investigator MIRA Award (R35). This 5-year Maximizing Investigators’ Research Award (MIRA)from the NIH was given for his project titled “Genetic and Epigenetic Mechanisms of Developmental Gene Regulation”. McKay’s proposed studies will investigate how the transcriptional programs underlying tissue identity are deployed in the proper temporal sequence during development.