Category: "Biology"

For the past decade, Harvey Mudd College has recognized outstanding examples of leadership during its annual Leadership Awards event, coordinated by the Division of Student Affairs. For the 2022 presentations, community members gathered via Zoom webinar for the ceremony to celebrate students, faculty and staff for their contributions on campus and beyond. A selection committee […]

Promotions and tenure appointments for Harvey Mudd College faculty were approved by the board of trustees and will become effective July 1, 2022. Upon discussion and the recommendation of the Academic Affairs Committee, the board unanimously approved the following appointments. Salvador Plascencia earned tenure and promotion to associate professor. He is the author of the […]

White blood cells known as “natural killer cells”—named for their ability to attack disease without requiring activation by the immune system—could play a vital role in battling cancer, according to new research by Lisette de Pillis, Norman F. Sprague Professor of Life Sciences at Harvey Mudd College. The so-called NK cells might be effective in […]

This fall, Harvey Mudd College biology professor Danae Schulz will join a multidisciplinary group of early-career researchers to address the global threat to human health from animal-borne infectious diseases. The Mitigating Zoonotic Threats conference—sponsored by the Research Corporation for Science Advancement and the U.S. Department of Agriculture—is the first meeting of a new, three-year initiative […]

Ant behavior has been a source of inspiration since at least the time of Aesop, and 2,500 years later, it appears these insects still have a certain kind of wisdom to impart—perhaps to engineers building subways. “Each individual ant doesn’t know much about the world beyond her own antennae,” says Harvey Mudd College biology professor […]

Danae Schulz, an assistant professor of biology at Harvey Mudd College, has been awarded a Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) grant from the National Science Foundation for her research “Characterizing molecular mechanisms that drive life cycle transitions in the African trypanosome.” The nearly $630,000 award covering a five-year period enables Schulz to pursue research questions […]

The most prestigious national award for undergraduate STEM researchers, the Barry Goldwater Scholarship, has been awarded to four Harvey Mudd College students: Tonatiuh Gonzalez ’22, Jacob Kelber ’23, Hanna Porter ’22 and Anna Soper ’22. The 409 Goldwater Scholars were selected on the basis of academic merit from a field of 1,256 natural science, engineering […]

One of this year’s prestigious Thomas J. Watson Fellowships has been awarded to Harvey Mudd College senior Abel Sapirstein. The mathematical and computational biology major will study alternate perspectives in healthcare equity while traveling to Bhutan, Chile and Japan. The 2021 class of Watson Fellows represents eight countries and 22 U.S. states. From the 153 […]

Harvey Mudd College professors Vivien Hamilton (history of science) and Dan Stoebel (biology) observed a desire among their students to talk about ways that current scientific work intersects with society. These conversations would usually occur at the end of a class, when the technical or historical focus of the lesson was over, and the remaining […]

In pursuit of developing models and algorithms for reconstructing gene histories across multiple species, Harvey Mudd College researchers have completed a paper that has been accepted to the 11th Association for Computing Machinery Conference on Bioinformatics, Computational Biology, and Health Informatics (ACM-BCB 2020). Computer science professor Yi-Chieh (Jessica) Wu and seven students will present “An […]