UNC School of Medicine student, Yasemin Cole, 2016 graduate in biology, is one of 28 individuals chosen nationwide for the prestigious Gates Cambridge scholarship. Yasemin will be attending the University of Cambridge pursuing a doctoral degree in genomic sciences. Read more about Yasemin here!
Biology Teaching Associate Professor Jennifer Coble has won the 2020 Chapman Family Teaching Award! CONGRATULATIONS JENNIFER!!!
Chapman Family Teaching Awards: The Chapman Teaching Awards were created in 1993 with a gift during the Bicentennial Campaign from Max Carrol Chapman Jr. ’66 on behalf of the Chapman family. The awards were established to honor distinguished teaching of undergraduate students. The award carries a stipend of $30,000 to be used over the period of five years.
Teaching Associate Professor of Biology
Faculty member since 2007
Hometown Charleston, South Carolina
Read more about Dr. Coble HERE
Professor Ken Lohmann, working with a team of collaborators in South Korea, has published a new study in Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). The paper, titled “Behavioral evidence for geomagnetic imprinting and transgenerational inheritance in fruit flies”, reports that fruit flies can learn to recognize and remember the magnetic fields that exist in different geographic areas when exposed to the fields during a critical period of development. Lohmann’s group has previously developed the concept of geomagnetic imprinting in the context of sea turtles and salmon, which imprint on the magnetic field of their home areas and use this information to migrate back as adults. The new study reveals that non-migratory animals are also capable of geomagnetic imprinting and suggests that the phenomenon may be widespread in the animal kingdom.
Kayla Goforth, a Biology graduate student (Lohmann Lab), received the Marlene Zuk Award at the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology (SICB) in Austin, Texas. The Zuk Award is given for the best student talk in the Animal Behavior division of SICB. Kayla’s talk, titled “The Role of Magnetic Field Detection in Foraging Site Fidelity of Sea Turtles”, described experiments revealing that captive loggerhead turtles that are fed in a magnetic field characteristic of a specific coastal location can learn to recognize that field and associate it with food. The results provide insight into how turtles learn the locations of particular foraging sites and can navigate to them across hundreds of miles of open sea.
Todd Vision coauthored a letter that appeared last week in the online biomedical magazine STAT, written together with a number of other leaders in open and reproducible science, in opposition to the EPA’s proposed “Strengthening Transparency in Regulatory Science” rule. They argue that the proposed rule “won’t do what it alleges to do: increase transparency or improve the health and safety of people or the environment.” Read more >>
A team led by Peifer lab postdoc Teresa Bonello has a new paper in Development entitled: “Scribble and Discs-large direct initial assembly and positioning of adherens junctions during the establishment of apical-basal polarity”. The team included former Peifer lab postdoc Wangsun Choi. The paper examines the mechanisms underlying apical-basal polarity in epithelial tissues and was also honored with the cover of the issue. Dr. Bonello is now a senior scientist in the Thompson lab at EMBL Australia. Read more >>
The “My Life as a Plant” coloring book that teaches pre-readers complex topics in plant biology was created in 2013 by UNC Biology and Arts majors. This book has been translated into 24 languages including recently the African language Bemba and Latin. These educational books are used all around the world by children and by college students learning second languages. Read more >>
Congratulations to Karin Pfennig, who is among the 443 scientists selected this year as fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Karin was honored for her research on the role of behavior in adaptation and biodiversity, particularly on the importance of understanding the role of hybridization under changing climatic regimes. Karin will receive an official certificate and a blue and gold rosette pin at a ceremony on Feb. 15 during the 2020 AAAS Annual Meeting in Seattle, Washington. READ MORE >>
David and Karin Pfennig’s research on spadefoot toads was recently featured in an excellent video made for the National Science Foundation. The Pfennigs and their research teams study spadefoot toads to better understand the role plasticity plays in adaptive evolution. Watch the video >>
Congratulations to Jeff (Jiyue) Wang (right), a postdoctoral associate in Gregory Copenhaver’s (left) lab, for publishing a new paper in Plant Physiology that extends their earlier work on meiotic small RNAs from the model plant Arabidopsis into the crop species soybean and cucumber. This line of research in the Copenhaver lab, lead by Jeff, is revealing exciting and novel roles for small RNAs during plant reproduction. Read more about the work here >>