Congratulations to Mike Gil and Joe Pfaller on a recent front page article in the Gainesville Sun regarding their research. The University of Florida researchers discovered that diverse communities of rafting animals can inhabit even the smoothest pieces of plastic debris if barnacles step in first to create complex habitat, similar to trees in a rainforest or […]
The National Geographic Society has just issued its first press release about the opening of this new traveling museum exhibit on crocodilians, which will open later this month at the National Geographic Museum in Washington, D.C. Dr. Kent Vliet served as the principal scientific advisor for the development of this exhibit, produced by Peeling Productions […]
At the recent meeting of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology, Joe Pfaller was awarded best student presentation by The Crustacean Society for his talk entitled “High seas hitchhiker and sea turtle symbiont: global genetics and ecological interactions of oceanic crabs.” Congratulations to Joe!
Symbiosis, the Department of Biology newsletter’s Fall 2015 edition is available for PDF download here! This issue of Symbiosis provides updates about the research of some of our emeritus faculty and undergraduate students.
Pauline is the recipient of a Burroughs-Wellcome Travel Award of $1,900 to collaborate with Dr. John Gilleard at the University of Calgary, an expert in nematode parasites. They will work together to characterize the role of a stress response pathway in drug resistance. Go Pauline and the rest of the Choe Lab!
Judit Ungvari-Martin and Tong Zhang were both awarded spring semester CLAS Dissertation Fellowships. Judit’s was funded by the Robin and Jean Gibson Fellowship Endowment, and Tong’s was funded by the Maurice C. Holmes and Frances A Holmes Endowed Fellowship in the amount of $7,000. Congratulations!
A comprehensive introduction to vascular plant phylogeny, the Fourth Edition of Plant Systematics: A Phylogenetic Approach reflects changes in the circumscription and placement of several families in order to represent monophyletic groups, following the classification of the Angiosperm Phylogeny Group (and recent phylogenetic analyses). Appendices cover botanical nomenclature as well as field and herbarium methodology. […]
Read more "U.F. Faculty member, Walter Judd, coauthors Plant Systematics: A Phylogenetic Approach"
Eleven CLAS Biology majors and one Zoology major were elected to Phi Beta Kappa, the nation’s oldest honor society. These students have exceptional GPAs (3.75 for graduation candidates; 3.90 for “rising seniors”) as well as significant breadth of study in the liberal arts and sciences outside of their major discipline (a minimum of 36 hours). They have […]
Eleven UF Biology and Florida Museum of Natural History graduate students will be participating in an art installation at the Hippodrome Theater titled “Art of Biology”. The formal gallery opening is on Friday, November 13th from 6-8pm and the photos will be available to view until November 21. The installation will contain artistic images of the subjects each student studies, along with scientific descriptions. The goal is […]
Mike Gil, recent Ph.D. graduate in Biology, along with American and Mexican collaborators, just published a new study in this month’s issue of the journal Marine Biology. The team’s work centered on measuring the structure of coral reef communities over space and time within Akumal Bay, Mexico, a booming tourism hot spot, largely due to […]
Zoology Ph.D. alumna Dr. Catalina Pimiento has published an article in the journal Evolution: Education and Outreach about her pedagogical innovations to promote international science literacy in a blended learning class taught in Panama. Catalina’s work included focusing on regional resources to make content relevant and authentic. Learn more about her work, which was just published in […]
UF scientists Doug Soltis, Brian Drew, Ruchi Chaudhary, and Gordon Burleigh contributed to a multi-institutional effort to construct a tree of life describing the relationships among ~2.3 million species. The study appears this week online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. This research is part of the “Open Tree of Life”, a […]
Getting In was written for undergraduates in STEM who are considering undergraduate research as part of their curriculum. Getting In was written to help students start their search by first examining what they want from a research position, what is realistic to achieve with the commitment they are willing to make, gain a solid understanding […]
UF alligator biologist and lab coordinator for the Department of Biology Dr. Kent Vliet discusses the drawbacks of hunting large gators. Read the article in the Washington Post here.
Read more "Alabama hunters are killing huge gators off the Gulf Coast. Is that a good thing?"
UF Biology faculty Stuart McDaniel and José Miguel Ponciano (with scientists from Northern Arizona University and University of Colorado) were awarded an NSF Dimensions of Biodiversity grant to study the effect of moss diversity on nitrogen-fixing microbes in the Alaskan arctic. McDaniel, Ponciano and their colleagues plan to use the moss-microbe interactions to understand of […]
Read more "UF Biology faculty receive NSF grant to study moss-microbial symbiosis"
Congratulations to David Julian, Associate Professor of Biology who has landed an NSF IUSE “Development of a Simulation-Based Application for Teaching Human Physiology through Guided Discovery, Pure Discovery, and Authentic Research.” This is a two-year, $250k grant. Co-PI’s include Pavlo “Pasha” Antonenko in the College of Education here at UF, along with Matt Lineberry, an education […]
Does shark predation change sea turtle movements? Surprisingly, no! This paper is co-authored by Mike Frick, Teaching Lab Specialist, Department of Biology, UF.
Assistant Professors in the Department of Biology, Stuart McDaniel and co-PI José Miguel Ponciano have been awarded an NSF EAGER grant! The title is EAGER: The evolutionary consequences of subtle biases in the outcome of meiosis; amount is $150,000. Congratulations, Stuart and José Miguel!
Paris Grey’s article, Empty Bench Syndrome, beautifully captures the bittersweet nature of academia in that our goal as educators is to make our students leave us. Her article made the front page of ASBMBToday (or, the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology for the non-cognoscenti), which has a readership of approximately 32,000. Paris also […]
UF Biologist Todd Palmer says yes, but it’s not too late to reverse the trend… yet. The paper “Accelerated modern human–induced species losses: Entering the sixth mass extinction” appears in Science Magazine. Read the abstract here and the Washington Post article here.