Biology

Kelsey Lewis, a Ph.D. student in Martin Cohn’s lab, won the Best Student Paper Aubrey Gorman Award at the 2019 Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology (SICB) meeting in Tampa, FL.  The award is from the SICB Division of Comparative Endocrinology.  Kelsey’s talk described her research on how “The anti-androgenic fungicide vinclozolin disrupts sexual differentiation […]

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Biology Assistant Professor Emily Sessa will be receiving a highly competitive CAREER award from the National Science Foundation for her research on African ferns.  The continent of Africa contains fewer fern species in general than regions in the Neotropics or Old World tropics. Her study will address “Resolving a paradox of global botanical biodiversity: why […]

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Kelsey Lewis is the People’s Choice winner of the UF Three Minute Thesis (3MT) competition.  3MT is a research communication competition sponsored by the Graduate School that challenges graduate students to make a compelling presentation on their thesis topic and its significance in just three minutes. Kelsey is a Ph.D. student in the Cohn lab.  […]

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 The Palmer lab is part of a global study to examine the effects of herbivores on plant biodiversity.  The study, published recently in Nature Ecology and Evolution (2:1925-1932), was written up in Futurity.  This international team of plant and animal scientists synthesized results from large-herbivore exclusion studies across a wide range of habitats around the […]

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Tao Zhang, a Post-Doc in Jeremy Lichstein’s lab, was featured in The Wire for his research on the response of forests to climate change.  For more information see: https://thewire.in/environment/climate-change-is-reducing-the-ability-of-forests-to-store-carbon  Link to the original article in the April 5, 2018 issue of Nature: https://www.nature.com/articles/nature26152  

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Biology Associate Professor Jimmy Liao explains the science behind sport fishing in his videos from Fish Code Studios.  See the latest addition at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?reload=9&v=N4aZ2UYDWKM&t=28s  Watch how fish respond to lures; why they are found behind rocks in a stream; and watch a dead trout swim!

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Biology assistant professor Hannah Vander Zanden has been named an Early-Career Research Fellow by the Gulf Research Program of the National Academies of Sciences.  The award recognizes emerging scientific leaders who share an interest in improving the well-being of coastal communities and ecosystems. Her research program will focus on gaps in our knowledge about sea […]

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 Dr. Clare Rittschof (Ph.D. 2011, supervised by Jane Brockmann) received the Outstanding New Investigator award from the Animal Behavior Society.  This award recognizes an outstanding contribution in animal behavior by a new investigator.  Clare is an assistant professor at the University of Kentucky (Department of Entomology) studying how experience and social interactions influence behavior.  Her […]

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Ryan St. Laurent (advised by Akito Kawahara) won the prestigious Harry K. Clench Award for the best student paper given at the joint meeting of the Lepidopterists’ Society and the Societas Europaea Lepidopterologica in Ottawa Canada.  Mark Sandfoss (advised by Harvey Lilywhite) won best talk in Ecology at the Ichthyologists and Herpetologists meeting in Rochester, […]

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The American Society of Plant Taxonomists (ASPT) selected recent Biology Ph.D. Rebecca Stubbs (Ph.D. 2018 co-advised by Nico Cellinese and Doug Soltis) as the 2018 recipient of the George R. Cooley Award, considered one of the most prestigious early-career honors offered in the field of plant sciences. This award is for the best contributed paper […]

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Professor and Chair Marta Wayne is the new president-elect of the Society for the Study of Molecular Biology and Evolution.  The SMBE is an international organization that promotes research and collaboration by molecular evolutionists.   Congratulations Marta!

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Assistant Professor Emily Sessa has been awarded a 3-year National Science Foundation grant to support her research on ferns, Understanding the effects of ploidal level on responses to global change in plants.  This research will examine how genome duplication (polyploidy) influences the responses of plants to changes in temperature and drought conditions. The research is […]

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Jay McEntee, a post-doctoral fellow in Gordon Burleigh’s lab, published an important new study in Nature Ecology & Evolution. The paper, “Tempo and timing of ecological trait divergence in bird speciation,” examines the relationship between the rate of evolutionary change (whether pulsed or gradual) and the formation of new species. They found that evolutionary change […]

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Biology Professor Betty Smocovitis is leading one of the four interdisciplinary groups that will conduct Research into Teaching sponsored by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and organized by the UF Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere.  The group will study how lessons from past inventions can inform current problems stemming from the accelerating […]

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We hope you enjoy the first digital issue of SYMBIOSIS, the Biology newsletter for Spring/Summer 2018. We’ve had a busy spring semester in the Department of Biology! As most of you know, UF achieved Top 10 status among public research universities this year, and President Fuchs and the Board of Trustees have committed to hiring […]

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Keon Wimberly, a graduate student in Keith Choe’s lab, has been awarded a Porter Physiology Pre-Doctoral Fellowship from the American Physiological Society.  This national fellowship program awards only eight fellowships annually for study leading to a Ph.D. in physiological sciences at a US institution.   Congratulations Keon!

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Congratulations to Aaron Sandoval, a biology major student who has been awarded a Goldwater Scholarship for the 2018-2019 academic year. Mr. Aaron Sandoval, a member of the UF Honors program has been conducting research at the Cancer and Genetics Institute under the mentorship of Dr. Malcom Maden.  His research focuses on using the African spiny […]

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“Paradise in the Natural Sciences, the Social Sciences, and the Humanities” PROFESSOR WILLIAM MARTIN Evolutionary Biologist and Professor at the Institute of Molecular Evolution, Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf Talk and Panel Discussion “Life out of Paradise: Where Did We Ultimately Come From, and Why Do We Want to Know?” Monday, April 2, 5 – 6:30 p.m. Ustler […]

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Biology Postdoc Tao Zhang and Assistant Professor Jeremy Lichstein published a major paper in Nature on the response of forests to climate change. They examine changes in forest biomass using systematic forest inventories from the 1980s and 2000s across the eastern US, a period in which some regions became drier while others became wetter. They […]

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