Each year, the Carolina Women’s Leadership Council recognizes outstanding faculty members in guiding, mentoring and teaching with a pre-tax award of $7,000. Established in 2006, the Faculty Mentoring Award honors mentoring to undergraduate students, graduate students and junior faculty.

Dr. Shemer has been selected as this year’s recipient of the Faculty to Undergraduate Student Mentoring! “…Students have praised Shemer as clear, informative, funny, fair and extremely willing and available to help them. He uplifts students inside and outside of the classroom and goes above and beyond to help his students succeed.”

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Each semester, on the first day of classes, Laura Ott and Eric Hastie kick off their biology classes in exactly the same way: by gushing over their passion for biology education research.  The field aims to improve learning processes and educational outcomes — and is fueled by teachers like Ott and Hastie, who want their students to engage with and succeed in biology. That’s why the duo cofounded the Carolina Biology Education Research (CBER) Lab.

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The cytoskeleton is made up of distinct systems of filamentous protein polymers, microtubules and actin filaments. The canonical view is that these proteins organize the cytoplasm and mediate intracellular transport as distinct systems, occasionally working together with the assistance of other factors that bridge them together. In collaboration with Andrew Carter’s lab in the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, we found that actin filaments are present INSIDE of hollow microtubules in Drosophila cells. Internal actin filaments are bound as a complex with cofilin – a protein that usually functions to disassemble actin. The next phase of the project will determine how these three proteins cooperate to regulate dynamics of the cytoskeletal network. READ MORE

The ability to create and regulate force production is a fundamental feature of the cell. Specialized biopolymers such as microtubules and their associated motor proteins including dynein are responsible for producing and coordinating force production. Cortical forces generated in mitosis result from numerous short-lived membrane-anchored dynein-microtubule interactions integrated over space and time to position the mitotic spindle for successful division. Here, we use high-spatiotemporal resolution microscopy to create an experimentally-based model capable of classifying the behavior of membrane-bound force generators as they interact with the membrane and cytoskeletal machinery. READ MORE

A new publication by recent UNC Biology PhD Kuangyi Xu and his UNC Biology co-advisors provides theoretical insights into what governs whether small populations succeed or fail in getting “rescued” by natural selection. When small, chance events play a large role in the fate of populations, and the level of genetic variation and the strength of selection interact in ways that can be counterintuitive. So mathematical models are needed to understand the optimal conditions for survival. READ MORE

Karin Pfennig announced as new member of the 2023-2025 class of Thorp Faculty Engaged Scholars. The program brings together selected faculty from across campus in a two-year competency-based experience to advance their engaged research, which is conducted in partnership with communities and addresses issues of shared concern and mutual benefit. READ MORE

Animals display a wide variety of display traits whose function is to attract the opposite sex, yet in many species, female mating preferences are inconsistent both from female to female and over time. Current models of sexual selection cannot sufficiently explain this variation. We propose a new hypotheses, called “Inferred Attractiveness”, that proposes that young females that observe the mate choices of older females may make mistakes in their inference of which traits these older females find attractive. Previous models of social learning of preferences assume young females copy the preferences of older females exactly, as if they were reading their minds. We show with a series of mathematical models that if young females instead infer that the most unusual trait of a chosen male is the attractive one, all of the between-female and temporal variation seen in nature results. PLoS Biology

György “Hínár” Schrader Polczer has worked for UNC-Chapel Hill for 22 years as a technology support analyst for the Department of Biology within the UNC College of Arts and Sciences.

What brought you to Carolina?

I’m originally from Hungary and began my career in information technology in Budapest. After moving to the United States and working in other industries, I was looking to return to the field. In 1998, I was living in Michigan and saw an opening at Carolina’s biology department that fit my experience and interest.

I worked at UNC-Chapel Hill as a computer systems administrator for almost a year before moving back to Hungary to spend time with my family. In that position, I provided technical assistance and support for computers, servers, and other research equipment across the department. I returned to North Carolina 18 months later and eventually found my way back to Carolina in 2002 for the same position I held before — this time as a permanent employee.

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Lilly Papell is a senior majoring in biology and minoring in chemistry and creative writing within the UNC College of Arts and Sciences. She studies how genome organization within microscopic animals called tardigrades plays a role in how they survive the DNA-damaging environments — such as ionizing radiation and desiccation — that would kill most lifeforms. READ MORE