Dr. Greg Florant has received this year's College of Natural Science Faculty Excellence in Undergraduate Research Mentoring Award. He will be honored at the College of Natural Sciences Professor Laureates Lecture and Reception on April 29th, 2009 in the Long's Peak Lounge in the Lory Student Center.

Congratulations to Undergraduate Jenni Sneden of the Garrity Lab for winning High Honors at the recent Celebrate Undergraduate Research and Creativity Poster Session!

Graduate student Sharon Poessel (Angeloni Lab) successfully defended her Masters thesis entitled "Behavior and conservation of black-footed ferrets: Stress in captivity and predation risk in the wild." Congratulations, Sharon!

Honors student Ashley Fenn successfully defended her thesis entitled" The role of AMPK in the regulation of food intake in winter hibernators" on May 5th, 2009. Her honors thesis advisor was Dr. Gregory Florant.

Dr. Greg Florant presented a poster at the Experimental Biology conference in New Orleans, April 17th to 22nd.

Professor Daniel Bush gave an invited talk on genomic and biotech approaches for increasing yields in energy crops at the UC Denver Health Sciences Molecular Biology Symposium on Biofuels and Bioremediation.

Special Asst. Prof. Lorrie Anderson was in Washington D.C. April 14-18 serving on the Eukaryotic Genetics panel for NSF.

Assistant Professor Amy Angert traveled to Alberta in early April to present a seminar to the Department of Biology at the University of Calgary.

Dhruba Naug gave a talk on his research at the Enrichment Program of the University of Denver's school of professional and continuing studies.

Graduate student Christopher Mayack presented a talk entitled "Energetic stress as a potential cause of colony collapse disorder" at the Northern Colorado Beekeepers Association on March 25th. In addition, a collaborative project proposal was presented to investigate the prevention of energetic stress caused by Nosema ceranae as a potential management strategy for Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD).

Pat Bedinger, Paul Covey, Steve Stack and other members of their Plant Genome grant are in Peru now having wild tomato adventures! See their blog at www.irbtomato.blogspot.com.

Assistant Professor Debbie Garrity and colleagues at Virginia Commonwealth University authored a recent paper in Developmental Biology, entitled "Tbx5-mediated expression of Ca(2+)/calmodulin-dependent protein kinase II is necessary for zebrafish cardiac and pectoral fin morphogenesis."

"Pronghorn (Antilocapra americana) locked in fight becomes prey of coyotes (Canis latrans)" by Detling advisee Jennifer G. Glazer (soon-to-be Jennifer G. Chipault) was accepted for publication in The Southwestern Naturalist.

Naug D, 2009. Structure and resilience of the social network as a function of colony size in social insects. Behav. Ecol. Sociobiol. 63:1023-1028.

Daniel Bush and former Ph.D. student Ekrem Dundar published a paper in Planta describing a new class of amino acid transporter in plants. BAT1, a bidirectional amino acid transporter in Arabidopsis. Planta (2009) 229:1047-1056

Honors student Ashley Fenn, is the lead author on the publication" Energetic relationships between field and laboratory woodchucks (Marmota monax) along a latitudinal gradient" published in the journal Ethology Ecology and Evolution, Firenze Press, with Dr. Stam Zervanos and Gregory Florant.