CONGRATULATIONS TO THE CLASS 2008!, with 120 Bachelor of Science degrees in Biological Science and 34 in Zoology!

The Biology Department hosted the 6th Ecology and Evolution of Infectious Diseases Conference and Workshop from June 1 to June 7. Thanks to Mike Antolin, Jennifer Neves, Ross Madden, Dylan George, Stu Field, Liz Harp, and Colleen Webb for making this year's event such a great success! Funding was provided by the PRIMES program and the Infectious Diseases Supercluster. More information at: http://rydberg.biology.colostate.edu/EEID2008/

Graduate student Alicia Ebert of Debbie Garrity's lab took the prize for best oral presentation at the recent Biology Department Research Symposium.

Dr. Gregory Florant has been selected for the Outstanding Science Mentor Award from the SLS program of the College of Natural Science. Ms. Ashley Fenn nominated Dr. Florant and presente the award to him at the ceremony on April 28th in the Long's Peak Room of the Lory Student Center.

Ms. Ashley Fenn has won a prestigious American Physiological Society Undergraduate summer research scholarship to work in the laboratory of Dr. Gregory Florant. However, Ms. Fenn also won an NSF Undergraduate Summer Research Award to participate in research in Alaska and she intends to accept that award for this summer.

Jenny Coughenour received honors for her poster entitled "Phylogeny of Celastraceae (spindle-tree family) subfamilies Hippocrateoideae and Salacioideae inferred from chloroplast and nuclear genes" at the CSU Celebrate Undergraduate Research and Creativity Showcase 2008. Jenny will continue working on her project this summer in Mark Simmons' lab as an NSF-REU participant.

Biology professors Pat Bedinger, Don Mykles, and Joe von Fischer were nominated for the 2008 Honors Prof Award by the Honors Student Association.

Brandon Bader, Kristin Van Ort, and Lindsay Martin, undergraduate researchers with Prof. Don Mykles, completed their Honors Thesis and will graduate this spring. Congratulations!

Il-Gyu Cho, an undergraduate working in Prof. Don Mykles' lab, has been selected for the Summer Undergraduate Research Program at the University of Toledo Health Science Campus.

Ph.D. student Liz Harp was awarded a Grant-in-Aid of Research from the American Society of Mammalogists, to support her work on the parasitology and genetics of Black-tailed prairie dogs.

Professor A.S.N. Reddy received a three-year grant from the Office of Naval Research.

Professor Mike Antolin visited the the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) in Mexico City to speak in an international symposium "Darwin en Medicina". The symposium took place on April 23-25, 2008.

Professor Don Mykles traveled to Busan, Korea May 18-27 to present a paper at the World Aquaculture Society meeting and visit former Ph.D. students Hyun-Woo Kim and Sung Gu Lee.

Research Scientist Brad Johnson gave an invited talk entitled Functional Assessment of Colorado Wetlands: The Benefits and Application of Stressor-Based Approaches to Assessment at the US EPA's Western Wetlands Conference in Rapid City, SD

Professor A.S.N. Reddy traveled to Miami University, Oxford, OH to present a seminar in the Dept. of Botany

Assistant Professor Rachel Mueller presented a seminar June 4 at the University of Wyoming entitled "Incorporating Bioinformatics into Evolutionary Biology Research"

Associate Professor Mark Simmons presented a seminar on June 4th at the Denver Botanic Gardens' Cafe Botanique entitled "Celastraceae and friends from Madagascar."

Assistant Professor Debbie Garrity is co-author on a paper published in March in Developmental Biology, entitled "ndrg4 is required for normal myocyte proliferation during early cardiac development in zebrafish."

Alicia M Ebert, Catherine A McAnelly, Ashok Srinivasan, Rachel Lockridge Mueller, David B Garrity and Deborah M Garrity. The calcium channel beta2 (CACNB2) subunit repertoire in teleosts. BMC Molecular Biology 2008,9:38doi:10.1186/1471-2199-9-38

A book (Title: Nuclear pre-mRNA processing in plants) edited by Professor A.S.N. Reddy and former Special Assistant Professor Maxim Golovkin was published this month by Springer.

Former Postdoctoral Research Associate Vaka S. Reddy, Professor A.S.N. Reddy and collaborators from University of California, San Francisco published a paper (Title: Structural dynamics of the microtubule binding and regulatory elements in the kinesin-like calmodulin binding protein) in Journal of Structural Biology

Simmons, M.P., D. Richardson and A.S.N. Reddy. 2008. Incorporation of gap characters and lineage-specific regions into phylogenetic analyses of gene families from divergent clades: an example from the kinesin superfamily across eukaryotes. Cladistics 24: 372-384.

Graduate student Chrissy Alba-Lynn and Professor Jim Detling have a paper in an upcoming issue of Oecologia titled "Interactive disturbance effects of two disparate ecosystem engineers in North American shortgrass steppe." (DOI 10.1007/s00442-008-1068-0)

Assistant Professor Colleen Webb, Associate Professor Mark Simmons, Assistant Professor Lisa Angeloni and Laura Thomas, Associate Director, Writing-across-the-Curriculum, have been awarded a Provost's Course Redesign Grant to develop recitation sections for BZ220 Introduction to Evolution.