Congratulations to UNC graduate student Brian Lerch for being interviewed on NPR’s All Things Considered! Lerch was interviewed about a study that he has out in Proceedings of the Royal Society with Susan Alberts from Duke University. The study found that “the fission of social groups in baboons is best described by egalitarian decisions where each community member contributes to the outcome, rather than decisions driven primarily by a single individual.”

Listen to the NPR segment here and read the article here.

Congratulations to UNC Biology’s own Jean and Peter DeSaix on their winning the first annual Clark Kessler Mentorship Award!

According to the announcement, “In honor of Fred Clark and Frank Kessler’s dedication to mentorship among our Carolina Covenant Scholars over the last seventeen years, we wanted to pay tribute to a mentor annually by creating an award known as the Clark Kessler Mentorship Award. This award will recognize mentors who go above and beyond in exhibiting the best characteristics of a strong mentoring relationship among our Covenant scholars, including but not limited to commitment, care, connection, initiative, and endorsement.” Congratulations!

An article on UNC’s Campaign website outlines the success of Carolina Covenant’s Rural Medicine Pathway Program. The Rural Medicine Pathway Program supports Covenant Scholars as they pursue health careers in rural areas. UNC Biology’s own Drs. Jean and Peter DeSaix helped found the program and were mentioned in the article by a student: “‘I had so much support from mentors like Jean and Peter DeSaix,’ Aslam said. ‘We would have meetings at their house and they would give me great advice about different opportunities that were available or how to connect and network with people in the medical profession.’”

Read the full article here: https://campaign.unc.edu/story/creating-a-pathway/.

UNC undergraduate alumnus Will Larsen has been featured on the UNC Center for Galapagos Studies’ website for his work in the Galapagos Islands! Read the full profile here: https://galapagos.unc.edu/how-one-unc-undergrad-merged-science-with-the-great-outdoors-in-the-galapagos/

The Copenhaver lab, including postdoctoral associate Dr. Jiyue (Jeff) Huang, has published a paper in PNAS entitled “Regulation of interference-sensitive crossover distribution ensures crossover assurance in Arabidopsis” together with their colleagues from Fudan University in Shanghai. The paper explores how the physical exchange of DNA between chromosomes during sexual reproduction is regulated at a genomic scale in plants. The research provides new insights into fundamental reproductive mechanisms that are shared broadly by animals, fungi and plants.

https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2107543118

Undergraduate Research is a point of pride in the Biology Department. Each semester, over 180 undergraduates do supervised research in Biology for academic credit.

Some of these seniors go on to do a Senior Honors Thesis. These truly outstanding students must complete a research project of considerable depth and significance and give an oral presentation at our Koeppe Biology Undergraduate Honors Research Symposium.

These students have earned the Distinction of Highest Honors or Honors in Fall 2021.

Highest Honors:
Angel Scialdone
Sabrina Yang

Honors:
Andrew Burciu
Cinthya Plazas
Khushmi Shah
Vaishnavi Siripurapu
Emma Welter
Yeofang Zhong

Congratulations!

Dr. Allen Hurlbert has been featured in UNC’s The Well for his work on the Avian Diet Database, “the first comprehensive online database of North American bird diets to standardize data and streamline research.”

Read the full article here!

The 2021 Hettleman Talks will take place virtually on Tuesday, November 9th at 12pm as part of University Research week. Please register at https://researchweek.unc.edu/event/hettleman-talks/ to receive the zoom link.

Attend these TEDX-style presentations from the 2021 winners of the Phillip and Ruth Hettleman Prizes for Artistic and Scholarly Achievement – one of the most distinguished awards our early-career faculty can receive. The talks will provide an engaging look into these distinguished early career scholars’ work in the fields of astronomy, biology, communications, and public health equity.

This year’s Hettleman Prize awardees are:

Nicholas Law
Associate Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy
“The Entire Sky Every Second: UNC’s New High-Speed Telescopes”

Alice Marwick
Associate Professor in the Department of Communication
“Morally-Motivated Networked Harassment as Normative Reinforcement”

Daniel Matute
Associate Professor in the Department of Biology
“The Origins of Biological Diversity”

Cleo Samuel-Ryals
Associate Professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management
“Getting into Good Trouble: Centering Racial Equity in Cancer Care Quality”

Dr. Frank Conlon‘s research has been featured in a post on UNC Health’s website! The article, titled “Male-Female Differences in Heart Disease Could Start Before Birth,” goes into Conlon’s research, in which Conlon and Dr. Wei Shi “conducted a first-of-its-kind analysis to discover differences in how particular proteins in heart cells are expressed in genetically diverse male and female mice during the earliest embryonic stage, well before sex hormones influence cells.”

Read the article here.

Check out Public Radio East’s post on UNC researchers studying why sea turtles die featuring Dr. Ken Lohmann! Read and listen here.