Congratulations to these UNC-CH students, enrolled as Biology majors and/or double majors, for their induction into Phi Beta Kappa, the nation’s oldest academic honor society. At the induction ceremony, new members receive certificates and Phi Beta Kappa keys, the organization’s symbol. The new inductees are: Kate E. Aberman, Jamie Christine Antinori, Noah Clark Berens, Joshua Stewart Boone, Phoi Bui, Samantha Nicole Catalano, Michelle Renee Cooley, Nicole Grace DeBruyne, Julia Goncalves, Andrew Brantley Harvey, Jinglin Ji, Royce Thinh Le, Jintong Liu, Kaylene Jiayi Lu, Matthew Addison Moravec, Ashton Brooke O’Hara, Natalie Christine Piehl, Kelly A. Pring, Emily Nicole Reichert, Jared Cliff Richards, Dylan Thomas Schuler, Shreya Ashish Shah, Sania Larab Siddiqui, Claire Thefaine, Matthew Franklin Washko, Elizabeth Deane Wilson, Madison Oihua Woo, and Sarah Yueshan Wu.

Congratulations to Biology Teaching Associate Professor/Faculty Advisor Gidi Shemer, who was honored with a 2019 UNC-CH Chapman Family Teaching Award. The Chapman Family Teaching Award honors a distinguished record of teaching undergraduates at UNC over an extended period of time. The Chapman Teaching Awards were created in 1993 during the Bicentennial Campaign through a generous gift by Max Carrol Chapman, Jr. ’66 on behalf of the Chapman family and honor distinguished teaching of undergraduate students.

Congratulations to Talia Hatkevich (Graduate Student in Jeff Sekelsky’s lab) for receiving the “2019 Delill Nassar Award for Professional Development in Genetics” from the Genetics Society of America.

Congratulations to Diana Chong and Zhixian Yu, both former graduate students in Vicki Bautch’s lab, for their recent publication “Tortuous Microvessels Contribute to Wound Healing via Sprouting Angiogenesis” in ATVB Journal.

Congratulations to Leslie Kennedy and Erin Kaltenbrun, PhD students in the Frank Conlon lab, for their PLoS Genetics publication titled “Formation of a TBX20-CASZ1 protein complex is protective against dilated cardiomyopathy and critical for cardiac homeostasis.” This study brings a labeled quantitative proteomic approach to study the mechanisms of the congenital heart disease dilated cardiomyopathy.

Daniel McKay, Ph.D. (Biology, Genetics, iBGS) has received a 4-year Research Scholar Grant from the American Cancer Society to explore how the switches that control gene expression get turned on and off during development.

Bryan Reatini’s (Todd Vision’s lab) work in the Galápagos Islands this past summer was recently featured in a photo essay in UNC’s endeavors magazine. “Reatini wants to learn more about how invasive and endemic species of guava are evolving on the islands, and whether or not hybridization is occurring between them.”

John Bruno has received a three-year 700K NSF Biological Oceanography award to expand his labs work on temperature, physiology, and metabolic scaling in the Galapagos Islands. Ocean critters including marine iguanas, sea turtles, fishes, and sea urchins consume seaweed in the Galapagos islands. Because the metabolism of these ectotherms is temperature-dependent, cooler upwelled water could reduce their caloric needs and thus the rate at which they consume their prey. Bruno will test the hypothesis that grazing intensity and the biomass of seaweeds is regulated by temperature via the temperature-dependence of metabolic rates. They will also test the hypothesis that grazer populations at warmer sites and/or during warmer seasons are less thermally sensitive, potentially due to acclimatization or adaptation. The grant includes funds to train undergraduate students in predicting the impacts of ocean warming on marine populations.

Tanner Fadero and Paul Maddox published an Insight article in eLife titled “Microscopy: Live imaging looks deeper.” In the paper, they highlight the recent advances made in live cell microscopy to look deeper into organisms with fewer aberrations.

The Todd Vision lab, together with co-PI James Balhoff of RENCI, has received a three year $328,000 award from the National Science Foundation for an Advances in Bioinformatics project entitled “Enabling machine-actionable semantics for comparative analyses of trait evolution”. Additional funded collaborators are at Duke University, the University of South Dakota, and Virginia Tech. The team will extend software technology developed by Vision and colleagues through the Phenoscape project to address three long-standing limitations to comparative studies of trait evolution: recombining trait data, modeling trait evolution, and generating testable hypotheses for the drivers of trait adaptation.