News Stories
McNamee Heads to Tech Territory
Craig Benham First Hire For Genome Center
News Briefs
Wise New Dean
Medical Informatics Moves In
CBS Grads Well Prepared
Research News
Competing Fruit Flies Show Evolution in Action
Pesticide, Urbanization Linked to Frog Declines
UC Davis, Santa Barbara Get $6 million To Help Estuaries
Opportunities for Distinction
Building Boosters
Features
The Ants Are Marching
Micro Science, Macro Art - Heiko Greb
Focus on Faculty
A Chalkboard for a Canvas: Robert Thornton Reflects
Dean Mark McNamee left UC Davis to become provost at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, Va.
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Craig Benham, a mathematical biologist, has been selected as the founding associate director of the UC Davis Genome Center.
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An experiment by graduate student Daniel Bolnick has captured evolution in action, provided support for a long-standing hypothesis in evolutionary biology.
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According to a study conducted by H. Bradley Shaffer and Carlos Davidson, population declines of the California red-legged frog may be due, in part, to pesticide use. full story
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University of California researchers at the Davis and Santa Barbara campuses will receive $6 million in federal funds to develop much-needed health assessments for estuaries, the critical coastal ecosystems where fresh water meets salt water.
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Phyllis M. Wise, professor and chair of physiology at the University of Kentucky, succeeds Mark McNamee as dean of the Division of Biological Sciences. Wise assumes her new post January 1, pending approval by the UC Board of Regents.
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Most recent UC Davis biological-sciences graduates are working in their chosen field or studying for a postgraduate degree-and they feel well prepared, according to a university survey.
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Medical informatics, a master's degree program created at UC Davis 2 ½ years ago, has moved its administrative home to become the Division of Biological Science's 12th graduate group.
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Faculty and staff members, alumni and other supporters are among the latest contributors to the Division of Biological Sciences' "Opportunities for Distinction" campaign.
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Two UC Davis postdoctoral fellows have collected thousands of invasive Argentine ants, isolated and compared their DNA, observed their intercolony fights and other behavior, and traced the historical paper trail to document their spread across the United States.
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Microbiologist Heiko Greb wields a 2.2-horsepower chainsaw to sculpt works out of tree stumps and logs. His first American piece, created at the east end of Storer Mall, is a comment on the double-edged power of technology.
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Although mining and teaching biology appear wholly unrelated, plant physiologist Robert Thornton sees an analogy between the two. "The deeper you dig in a mine," he says, "the more time and energy it takes to get people to its face, where mining takes place. Similarly, biology is advancing so rapidly that it takes increasingly more time and resources to get students to a place where they have the tools to make their own creative contributions to science. This is why we need the best minds in science thinking about how to teach biology."
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Tung-Tien Sun
Alice Alldredge
Sharon Erickson
Dan Blumstein
Timothy Gilbertson
Tung-Tien Sun, Ph.D., Biochemistry, 1974, better known to his UC Davis friends as Henry Sun, was a doctoral student from 1969 to 1974 in the Department of Biological Chemistry-part of the then relatively new UC Davis Medical School-under the tutelage of Dr. Robert Traut, who was working on the structure of ribosomal proteins. He is currently Rudolf L. Baer Professor of Dermatology; professor of pharmacology and urology; and director, Epithelial Biology Unit, Department of Dermatology.
Alice Alldredge, Ph.D., Ecology, 1975, says, "I had wanted to be a marine biologist since I was 11 years old and by sheer luck and good fortune ended up as a student in the Graduate Group in Ecology at UC Davis back in the early 1970s. I say luck because my major professor, William Hamner of the zoology department, had the then-outlandish idea that biologists could jump into the ocean and view plankton with their own eyes. He invited me to spend my first year in graduate school scuba diving and floating around in the open water of the Gulf Stream with him and his other students studying zooplankton in situ for the first time. How could I refuse such an offer? With sharks, marlin and jellyfish swimming by, and the ocean floor nearly three miles below us, it was quite an adventure for a young woman raised in Colorado!
Sharon Erickson, B.S., Genetics, 1977; M.S., Genetics, 1978, is a senior scientific manager with Genentech Inc. "I spent an enjoyable six years at UC Davis in the 1970s," says Sharon, "making many lifelong friends as well as earning a B.S. in genetics. During my years in Davis, I gained valuable lab experience as both an undergraduate and graduate student in the lab of Dr. G.A.E. Gall, the lab in which I also earned my M.S. in genetics. From Davis I moved with a college friend to San Diego, where I began my first scientific job as a laboratory technician at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, studying secretion and phosphorylation in vitro responses to fibroblast growth factor (FGF).
Dan Blumstein, M.S., Animal Behavior, 1990; Ph.D., Animal Behavior, 1994 reports "My Ph.D. work in animal behavior at UC Davis under the tutelage of evolution and ecology professors Judy Stamps and Brad Shaffer, and professor of psychology Don Owings, focused on the antipredator, social and communication behavior of marmots-large alpine ground squirrels with a particularly fine aesthetic sense. Marmots are well suited for such studies: they follow the academic calendar, hibernating during the fall and winter quarters; they live in permanent burrow systems so that they're easy to find-once you know where they are; different species have different sorts of social organizations ranging from long-term monogamous relationships to more fleeting sexual and social encounters; and they have loud, piercing alarm calls to warn others about danger.
Timothy Gilbertson, M.A., Zoology, 1988; Ph.D., Zoology, 1991, is an assistant professor of biology at Utah State University. He was one of 29 faculty members from seven of the university's academic colleges to receive a New Faculty Research Grant. The research interests in Gilbertson's laboratory range from the basic mechanisms of mammalian taste transduction to the mechanisms that post-ingestive chemosensory cells use to recognize nutrients. Gilbertson's lab is also studying how the detection of nutrients by both pre- and post-ingestive chemosensory cells contributes to ingestive behavior and how, in turn, the nnutritional status of an organism modulates its ability to sense these nutrients.
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