Laurel Hartley defended her Ph.D. dissertation "Plague and the Black-tailed Prairie Dog: An Introduced Disease Mediates the Effects of an Herbivore on Ecosystem Structure and Function", September 26. Congratualtion to Dr. Hartley and to her advisor Professor Jim Detling. This research was supported by the Short Grass Steppe Long Term Ecological project, funded by the National Science Foundation.

Christina Alba-Lynn defended her M.S. thesis "Prairie Dogs and Harvester Ants as Disturbance Agents on the Shortgrass Steppe: Implications for Habitat Heterogeneity", September 25. Congratualtion to Ms. Alba and her advisor Professor Jim Detling. This research was supported by the Short Grass Steppe Long Term Ecological project, funded by the National Science Foundation.

Assistant Professor Mark Simmons and Robert Archer (National Botanical Institute, South Africa) received funding from the National Geographic Society for fieldwork in Madagascar.

Prof Don Mykles, with Co-PI and Assistant Prof. Annette Gabaldon at CSU-Pueblo, was awarded a 3-year $595K grant from NIH to increase the number of underrepresented minorities in biomedical graduate programs. The grant will support the transition of MS students at the Pueblo campus to PhD programs in Biochemistry and Biology at the Fort Collins campus.

Assistant Professor Colleen Webb will be an invited participant at an NSF sponsored workshop on Creating a National Mathematical Biology Center, Sept. 18-20 in Washington, D.C.

Associate Prof Lianne Pilon-Smits will travel to Irvine CA to chair a session at the Ninth Annual Kavli Chinese-American Frontiers of Science Symposium, October 26-28.

Associate Professor LeRoy Poff is in Madrid, Spain,this week to present a Plenary Talk on September 19 at an International Symposium on Restoration of Spanish Rivers. The syposium is sponsored by the Spanish Ministry of Environment and hosted by the Polytechnical University of Madrid.

Assistant Professor Cameron Ghalambor presented a seminar on September 14th, at New Mexico State University.

Associate Professor Lianne Pilon-Smits is giving a presentation at the UMass Amherst Plant Biology Graduate Program Symposium- "Phytoextraction of Nutrients and Pollutants", October 14, 2006.

Professor Greg Florant and undergraduate student, Melanie Richter will be attending the American Physiological Society's Comparative Physiology Conference: Integrating diversity, from October 8-11th in Virginia Beach, Virginia. Prof. Florant is an invited speaker and will also present a poster. Ms. Richter is presenting a poster on her work in the Florant lab.

Islam, M.B., M.P. Simmons and R.H. Archer. 2006. Phylogeny of the Elaeodendron group (Celastraceae) inferred from morphological characters and nuclear and plastid genes. Systematic Botany 31: 512-524.