BIOLOGY DEPARTMENTAL NEWS

 

The Biology Dept. currently has two full-time tenure-track Faculty positions open!  One is for a General Biology/Human Biology/ Education specialist, and the other is for Evo-Devo with a significant computational aspect to their research.

 

BIOLOGY STUDENT NEWS:

The Biology Club will be meeting on Wednesdays at 10:30-11AM in JE244 this SPRING 2012 semester.  If you have any questions, please contact the club at scsubioclub@gmail.com, DupontH1@owls.southernct.edu, or Dr. Dunbar.

 

CONNECTING WITH OUR CURRENT BIOLOGY MAJORS & ALUMNI:

The SCSU Biology Department is now on facebook!  Why not check it out, and "like" us!

 

BIOLOGY FACULTY NEWS:

 

SCSU will be breaking ground soon on a new Academic Science Building, which will house faculty from Physics, Chemistry, Earth Sciences, Environmental Science, and the Department of Biology!!!! Several of the Biology Faculty that specialize in molecular biology will have their research laboratories located in the new building.  Check back here soon for drawings of the new building. 

 

The Department of Biology welcomes our latest new faculty member Dr. Rebecca Silady.  She obtained her Ph.D. from Standford University, and then performed her Postdoctoral Research at the Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding in Germany.  Before coming to SCSU, she was a Research Scientist at Monsanto, and a Visiting Lecturer at Connecticut College.  She will be teaching many of our Botany courses, and will be soon looking for undergraduate and graduate students to contribute to her research efforts in plant molecular, cellular, and developmental biology!

 

SCSU has been selected to participate in the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Science Education Alliance's "Phage Hunters Advancing Genomics & Evolutionary Science" (HHMI SEA-PHAGES) three-year program that will create a new one-year phage genomics course for Honor's College Freshman, starting in the Fall of 2011.  Dr. Lewis Roberts and Dr. Edgington will be teaching and participating in the assessment of the courses which will focus on the isolation, purification, and characterization of soil viruses that attack certain species of bacteria (ie bacteriophages).  Last Fall, all 17 students isolated (and named) a bacteriophage from the local SCSU campus soil!  During the Winter break, the "ABCat" bacteriophage was sequenced by a Genomics Center at VCU, and in the Spring term course, the students are analyzing and annotating the resulting "ABCat" genome.  The results of their research will be submitted to NCBI's Genbank database, and will be presented at a HHMI minisymposium in Ahsburn VA in June, 2012 by Dr. Edgington, Dr. Roberts, and one of the students.

 

 Dr. Weinbaum attended and presented data at the 70th Meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology in Pittsburgh PA in October, 2010.

Several SCSU Science Faculty (including Dr. Nicholas Edgington, Biology) have recently been awarded a 5-year National Science Foundation grant for $600,000 to provide ~26 full 4-year Undergraduate Scholarships in the STEM fields.  This exciting program began in February 2011, with the first recruitment class entering in Fall 2011:

"The Pathways to Academic Excellence (PAcE) program at Southern Connecticut State University is an interdisciplinary project (Mathematics, Computer Science, Biology, Chemistry Physics and Earth Science) that awards full scholarships to 26 students.  During the program's first two years, high school seniors are being recruited and then provided, assuming satisfactory progress, with four years of scholarship support.  In subsequent years, local community college students will be recruited and then provided with scholarship support until they graduate.   Student success is enhanced through early student involvement in faculty-mentored research and internships, by participation in a service learning course, through the formation of cohort groups and learning communities, by careful monitoring of student progress during the students' first year and/or while taking "derailment courses," and through extensive career counseling and placement activities.  Focus group participation by PAcE Scholars is an essential program element to remove or minimize roadblocks to student success before the impediment leads to attrition."