Briefly Noted

Ole Jensen BS’72 recently edited the 3rd edition of The Sinus Bone Graft. Mark Durham, DMD at the U’s School of Dentistry says of it, “This is the source book on the topic. The international network of clinical scientists, required to assemble the essential knowledge on this critical but highly esoteric topic, cannot be overstated. Dr. Ole Jensen, with his international renown as one of the world’s leading experts in oral reconstruction, is considered one of the few people who could assemble such a diverse, broad, and profound team of authors on such an important topic. The profession is fortunate to have a volume of work on this scale, and an international leader who made it happen.”

Craig Thulin BA’89 worked in the labs of Dr. Baldomero “Toto” Olivera among others before moving to Seattle to secure his PhD in Biochemistry. At what is now Utah Valley University he joined the Dept. of Chemistry and from 2004 to 2008 was an adjunct in Obstetrics and Gynecology at the U School of Medicine. This stemmed from Thulin’s research looking for serum proteomic biomarkers of complications of pregnancy and led to the formation of a startup company called Sera Prognostics. Today he continues to lead students in mentored undergraduate research, collaborating with faculty members at BYU and Utah State University, and working on investigations on the bioanalytical chemistry of honey.

Russell Marion Nelson Sr. BS’45, former surgeon and long-time leader in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints became its president in January 2018 at age 93. He was a member of the LDS Church’s Quorum of the Twelve Apostles for nearly 34 years. A native of Salt Lake, he earned a PhD at the University of Minnesota, where he worked on the research team developing the heart-lung machine that in 1951 supported the first ever human open-heart surgery using mechanical takeover of heart and lungs (cardiopulmonary bypass). A medic for the U.S. Army during the Korean War, he returned to Salt Lake as professor at the U’s School of Medicine in 1955.

Heng Xie PhD’04 taught middle-school science before joining the team as senior scientist at IDbyDNA, a start-up that has developed transformative metagenomics technology to simultaneously profile tens of thousands of microorganisms and pathogens in any sample. At the U Xie worked with Kent Golic in his lab studying genetics and cell biology. Xie hasn’t left public education entirely. When she isn’t working in R&D in Salt Lake City where the lab and offices of IDbyDNA are located, she tutors students in biology, chemistry and math, including calculus.

Taryn Wicijowski BS’14 took her Pac-12 Scholar-Athlete of the Year talents overseas, in 2015 joining the top basketball league in Italy. “I found professional basketball to be much more about individual statistics and achievements than collegiate [ball],” she says. Eventually, she was accepted to the medical school at the University of Alberta, close to Saskatchewan where she’s originally from. “I have had great patient interactions,” she reports. “Each experience makes you feel like you’re really making a difference in peoples’ lives and further motivates you to one day be a physician.”

Michael T. Ghiselin BS’60 is a biologist, and philosopher as well as historian of biology. Currently scientist-in-residence emeritus at the California Academy of Sciences, he is known for his early work on sea slugs, and has had both a species (Hypsedlodoris ghisenlini) and the defensive chemical that it contains (ghiselinin) named after him. Widely quoted on the relationship between science and society, he is perhaps most known for the dictum, “Scratch an altruist and watch a hypocrite bleed,” first recorded in 1974 in his book The Economy of Nature and the Evolution of Sex. Photo by Alan E. Leviton, with permission

James F. Berry PhD ’78 joined the faculty at Elmhurst College in Illinois, and taught biology courses there until he retired in 2017. He received a JD degree from IIT Chicago-Kent College of Law and spent his law career teaching both biology and environmental law. The author of many articles (and two books) about the biology of freshwater turtles and environmental law, including The Environmental Law & Compliance Handbook, he is now retired near Charleston, SC, where he continues to teach an online biology course.

Daina Graybosch, BS’01 completed a PhD in Chemistry and Chemical Biology from Harvard. Today she is Senior Research Analyst covering Immuno-Oncology at SVB Leerink, a leading investment bank in New York City, specializing in healthcare. Prior to joining the firm in 2018, she worked at McKinsey & Company as a Senior Expert and Head of McKinsey’s Center for Asset Optimization, as well as the U.S. Head of the McKinsey Cancer Center. In these roles, she developed several McKinsey solutions that bring data and advanced analytics to pharmaceutical development decisions. In her 11 years at McKinsey, she developed a rich understanding of oncology through her work with companies across the value chain, including Pharmaceutical, Diagnostic, Academic Medical Center, and Genomic/Data.

Austin Green, PhD candidate, was awarded an Alta Sustainability Leadership Award for his citizen science project Wasatch Wildlife Watch. With two sites, one in Salt Lake and one in Logan, hunters, public lands advocates, public school teachers and university students work with 305 trail cameras to photograph wildlife through motion-sensors. This data will help developers and city planners institute sustainable practices as the Wasatch Front grows. A detailed story about the project appeared on the front page of the Salt Lake Tribune earlier this year.

Taylor Thompson BS’14 is a bantamweight mixed martial arts (MMA) athlete based in Boston. She first discovered MMA through a course she enrolled in while an undergraduate student at the U. “I had no idea what it was,” she says. “I thought it was going to be … kind-of dabbling in all of the very traditional martial arts. I thought that would be a fun way to get some athletic credit done.” After graduation she attended veterinary school in central Massachusetts where she continued the sport, eventually going full-time. A fullcontact combat sport that allows striking and grappling, both standing and on the ground, using techniques from various combat sports and martial arts, MMA first signed women on to the sport in 2012. You can follow her career on Facebook @

Michael Shapiro, faculty member known more for his work with pigeons (see cover of Our DNA) than cinema, reviewed science-related films at the 34th annual Sundance Film Festival. He along with a team of others donned Science@Sundance hats and reviewed ten films, including The Great

Hack, I Am Mother, and Ask Dr. Ruth, a documentary of the diminutive celebrity sex therapist. The Festival’s theme “Risk Independence” emphasized Sundance’s provocative themes and experimental storytelling. In Science Magazine where the reviews appeared in March, Sundance Institute’s Keri Putnam said, “Art can’t spark conversation if it’s playing it safe.” The same could be said of science.

Sarah Bush, faculty member, also works with pigeons… but focuses on their relationship to lice. She, Michael Shapiro and others reported in Evolution Letters on experimentally triggered adaptive radiation. By placing feather-eating lice on white, black, and gray pigeons, they showed how the parasites change color to better blend in. The researchers showed that descendants of a single population of feather lice adapted rapidly in response to preening, the pigeons’ main defense. “People have been trying to bridge micro- and macro-evolution for a long time,” said U biology faculty member Dale Clayton and another co-author of the paper. “This study actually does it.” The research was also featured prominently in The Atlantic.

Dale Forrister, PhD candidate, was the lead author of an article recently published on diversity in tropical rain forests. The paper appeared in Science, and was co-authored by Phyllis Coley and others. While 650 different tree species can exist in an area the size of two football fields, similar species never grow next to each other. Add herbivore pests and you have warfare for survival. For the first time these biologists compared the two combatting factions in a single study. The study reveals the significant role of herbivores in driving diversity in tropical ecosystems, with stark implications—the loss of those populations could have catastrophic consequence on these important habitats.