Biology Department Student Prizes: 

The William K. Purves Biology Prize is awarded to a junior biology major who combines scholarship with some kind of breadth (intellectual, cultural, athletic or service).  The co-winners for the 2007-8 academic year are Hallie Kuhn and Oksana Sergeeva.

The W. A. Brandenburger Biology Prize is awarded annually to a senior biology major for outstanding performance and promise in the field of biology.  The Brandenburger Prize winner for the 2007-8 academic year is Clarence Chan.

Older announcements: 

Professor McFadden Part of Team Awarded $2.85-Million Tree of Life Grant
Merck/AAAS Awards HMC $60,000 for Biology and Chemistry Research
HMC Biology Sponsors Talk by Noted AIDS Researcher Jay Levy

Professor McFadden Part of Team Awarded $2.85-Million Tree of Life Grant
Professor of Biology Catherine McFadden is part of a 10-person team of research scientists from seven colleges and universities and the Smithsonian Institution who will share a $2.85-million grant from the National Science Foundation’s Assembling the Tree of Life Program.

The team’s project will investigate the origins of the phylum Cnidaria, one the two most primitive groups of animals on earth, which includes such diverse forms as jellyfish, hydra, sea anemones, and corals. The five-year grant will investigate the phylogeny of Cnidaria by developing new molecular markers and gathering large amounts of DNA sequence data from an extensive sampling of Cnidarian taxa. There are more than 10,000 described species of Cnidarians.

For the past 10 years McFadden has been using molecular data to try to understand the evolutionary relationships and species boundaries among groups of soft corals from the North Atlantic and Mediterranean and, most recently, the tropical Indo-West Pacific. A number of current and former HMC undergraduates have worked on these projects and are co-authors on a variety of publications that have resulted.

The NSF award provides new opportunities for collaborative research among members of the Cnidarian community and training for graduate students and postdoctoral researchers. Selected HMC students will participate during the summer in molecular biology lab work and the input of historical literature into the database that is housed at the University of Kansas.

“In both cases,” McFadden noted, “we need students who are meticulous and able to pay close attention to detail. We have no margin for error in extracting DNA from museum specimens in the lab, or entering data into the database.” Many of the historical texts are in foreign languages.

Other goals of the project are to: characterize and classify nematocysts (the specialized stinging cells of Cnidarians) in a comparative context; develop culture conditions for select Cnidarian species to identify new model organisms for the study of gene expression; build Cnidarian museum collections through field work; assemble a Cnidarian Tree of Life database modeled after the existing Hexacoral database; contribute to museum exhibits on Cnidarian evolution; and hold a symposium on Cnidarian phylogeny.

The National Science Foundation describes the Assembling the Tree of Life project thus:

A flood of new information, from whole-genome sequences to detailed structural information to inventories of earth’s biota, is transforming 21st-century biology. Along with comparative data on morphology, fossils, development, behavior, and interactions of all forms of life on earth, these new data streams make even more critical the need for an organizing framework for information retrieval, analysis, and prediction. Phylogeny, the genealogical map for all lineages of life on earth, provides an overall framework to facilitate information retrieval and biological prediction. Assembly of a framework phylogeny, or Tree of Life, for all 1.7 million described species requires a greatly magnified effort by large teams working across institutions and disciplines. This is the overall goal of the Assembling the Tree of Life activity.

In addition to McFadden, whose area of expertise is octocoral phylogeny, the following investigators will take part in the project:

• Neil Blackstone, Northern Illinois University (culturing new model organisms)
• Paulyn Cartwright, University of Kansas (hydrozoan phylogeny)
• Allen Collins, Smithsonian Institution (medusozoan phylogeny)
• Cliff Cunningham, Duke University (molecular marker development)
• Meg Daly, Ohio State University (anthozoan phylogeny and nematocyst morphology)
• Daphne Fautin, University of Kansas (database development)
• Daniel Janies, Ohio State University (data analyses)
• Daniel Martínez, Pomona College (hydra phylogeny)
• Sandra Romano, University of the Virgin Islands (coral phylogeny)

Merck/AAAS awards HMC $60,000 for biology and chemistry research
Merck Company Foundation and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) selected Harvey Mudd College as one of the award winners in the 2005 Merck/AAAS Undergraduate Science Research Program. The award includes $17,000 a year for three years for student research in biology and chemistry, plus $3,000 a year for programs and activities. Four to six students will participate each of the three years in an intensive, ten-week summer research experience.

The grant will allow HMC to continue efforts to enhance interdisciplinary scholarship and teaching. Proposed interdisciplinary research projects include “Interactions of antimicrobial peptides with membrane mimetic systems,” Kerry Karukstis, professor of chemistry; “Development of self-assembled DNA nanoarrays as biosensors,” Shenda Baker, professor of chemistry; “Structure and function studies on the plant-specific phosphoinositide phosphatase SAC9,” Mary Williams, professor of biology; “Function of dynein accessory chains in Tetrahymena thermophila,” David Asai, professor and chair, Department of Biology; and “Covalent trapping studies of the repair of 8-Oxoguanine lesions in nucleosomal DNA,” Karl Haushalter, assistant professor of chemistry and biology.

Additionally, the award will allow distinguished scientists to spend several days at HMC and present joint seminars to the chemistry and biology departments and to meet with individual classes. Also included in the grant will be a weekend workshop on chemical biology undergraduate education at which attendees will share success stories for integrating the teaching of chemistry and biology at the undergraduate level.

“The Merck-AAAS Award recognizes the continuing efforts of the departments of Chemistry and Biology to illustrate to our students that contemporary research questions span disciplinary boundaries,” said Karukstis, now in her twenty-first year as a member of the chemistry faculty. “Our two departments have collaborated on a number of educational ventures in recent years-the Interdisciplinary Laboratory, the new Joint Major in Chemistry and Biology, and the Beckman Scholars Program in Chemistry and Biological Sciences. We see the Merck/AAAS award as an expansion of this collaboration and a further demonstration of our faculty’s commitment to the HMC mission to broadly educate our students.”

HMC Biology sponsors talk by noted AIDS researcher Jay Levy
Sixty-eight million people in the world are infected with HIV (five million in the last year alone), posing a significant threat to the health and economies of the world.

In the 2005 Mindlin Lecture, University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) Professor of Medicine Jay Levy will discuss how scientists are dealing with this worldwide crisis when he delivers the Mindlin Lecture, “The Social and Economic Threat of HIV/AIDS: How Does Science Face the Challenge?” in McAlister Auditorium of Galileo Hall at Harvey Mudd College on Wednesday, April 27, at 7 p.m.

Over the past 20 years, human immuno-deficiency virus (HIV) has spread to every continent in the world and threatens the economic growth and well-being of the entire human population. Levy will discuss ways knowledge of the virus has grown and the new steps that have been developed to curb its transmission and human mortality.

In addition to his duties at professor of medicine at UCSF, where he has been since 1972, Levy is research associate in the Cancer Research Institute and director of the Laboratory for Tumor and AIDS Virus Research. He obtained his M.D. degree from Columbia University, New York.

During the last 22 years, Levy and his researchers have dedicated their efforts to the biology, immunology and molecular biology of acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS). His group was the first to isolate HIV and originally called it the AIDS-associated retrovirus (ARV). Levy has published over 400 articles in virology and infectious diseases, particularly on HIV/AIDS.

His current studies involve host immune responses to HIV and the development of an HIV vaccine. His research focuses especially on individuals who have survived more than 10 years with no symptoms and have a normal CD4+ cell count. He is pursuing the study of such individuals in China, India, Mexico, the Dominican Republic and other parts of the world.

The lecture is made possible by a generous gift of the Mindlin Foundation and is co-sponsored by the Harvey Mudd College Department of Biology.

News Archive 2004  |  News Archive 2003