Our DNA - Fall 2021

N E W S for A L U M N I

BIOLOGY NEWS | FALL 2021

B I O L O G I C A L D A T A | U B I Q U I T Y O F F U N G I | I G N O B E L P R I Z E

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Contents

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Publisher University of Utah School of Biological Sciences 257 S 1400 E, 201B Salt Lake City, UT 84112-0840

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From the Co-Directors

Moving Ahead with Biological Sciences

Multi-Disciplinary Research The Science of Biological Data

School Directors Leslie Sieburth Neil Vickers

Writer & Editor

On the Ubiquity of Fungi

Alumni: Kathleen Treseder

David G. Pace

Getting Punchy with Beards

Alumni Relations | Development Committee

Graduate Students

David Almanzar (Rog Lab) Austin Green (Şekercioğlu Lab)

Neil Vickers, Chair Lynn Bohs Dale Clayton Çağan Şekercioğlu

Undergraduate Awardees

On the Cover

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The Ig Nobel Prize

Sahar Kanishka | Rachel Jones | Karrin Tennant

Stay connected Visit, respond, subscribe, donate: www.Biology.utah.edu

Director of the Center for Quantitative Biology, Fred Adler, with joint appointments in the School of Biological Sciences and the Department of Mathematics, meets with students from his lab, socially distanced outdoors on the site of the new science building dedicated to multi-disciplinary STEM teaching and research. Students include Emerson Arehart, Muskan Walia, and Jody Reimer.

Photo by Matt Crawley

Request an e-version of OUR DNA in place of a mailed copy at development@biology.utah.edu

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FROM THE DIRECTORS

Moving Ahead

with Biological Sciences

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esearch programs carried out by Biology faculty have always been characterized by deep curiosity and scientific rigor; however, the locations where this work has taken place have been surprisingly variable. One of the first departments at the U, Biology and its faculty have traditionally occupied buildings close to Presidents Circle.

Existing structures include the James Talmage Building (1902), Life Science Building (1920), Biology (1969), Aline Wilmot Skaggs Building (1998) and the George Thomas Building (1935), refurbished in 2018 as the Crocker Science Center.

Historically, the Crocker was the home of the original University library until 1968 and then the Utah Museum of Natural History until 2011. Both the Talmage and subsequently, the Life Science Building housed the original School of Medicine before accommodating Biology.

Sadly, one of our older buildings, Life Science, is no longer considered suitable for modern bench research and is in dire need of an overhaul, and we have relocated all faculty labs over the past couple of years elsewhere. Some labs have been moved to newly renovated space in the Biology building whereas others have found homes in the newer Skaggs Biology or Crocker that now hosts the Center for Cell and Genome Science.

The Life Science Building has witnessed some amazing research and, besides current distinguished faculty Toto Olivera, Sandy Parkinson, Janet Shaw and Erik Jorgensen, was the stomping ground for several other prodigious faculty over the years, including Gordon Lark, Ray Gesteland, Joe Dickinson and John Roth. The interior of this building will also be renovated, and Biology will retain a presence there. If you have a fond memory of your time in Biology and particularly in the Life Science Building, please—share it with us at biology.utah.edu/alumni!

Big changes are also in store for the College of Science with funding for a new Multi-Disciplinary Science facility that will incorporate a renovation of the old Stewart Building (directly west of Life Science) and a completely new wing and plaza.

This new facility will house Physics & Astronomy as well as Atmospheric Sciences labs. It will abut Cottam’s Gulch, a

Cottam’s Gulch, curated with the names and histories of trees is named after the late botany professor Walter P. “Doc” Cottam. This secluded and reflective place, a favorite of students, is slated to be preserved and renewed as part of the footprint of the new multi-disciplinary science building, its plaza and complex.

secluded area with a peaceful walkway.

Whatever our physical location, one of the joys of our faculty is hosting undergraduates for research experiences in our labs, and, at least some of you will have worked directly with a Co-Directors Leslie Sieburth and Neil Vickers faculty mentor while here.

However, with about forty faculty and over 1,000 biology majors, it is not possible for us to host all students in this way. Other departments face a similar challenge. To this end, the College has launched the Science Research Initiative with the goal of giving all firstyear students in the sciences an opportunity to do research.

Faculty across the College will lead research streams that will each provide undergraduates the opportunity to delve into a scientific problem. In-depth, hands-on work will greatly enhance the education of our students and give them skills that they can carry to a lab should they get bitten by the research bug. Our year-end appeal is directed to raising funds to help support this program, and we hope you’ll consider a gift.

We hope this message finds you in good spirits and health. All the best to you as 2021 draws to a close.

Neil J. Vickers | Leslie E. Sieburth Professors and Co-Directors School of Biological Sciences 1

RESEARCH

The Science of Biological Data:

Fred Adler

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n an age when cross-disciplinary collaboration has become essential, especially in academia, Fred Adler puts his mathematical models where his mouth is.

Multi-disciplinary work—in which academic silos are breached in the search for truth—is the hallmark of what Adler, who has a joint appointment in mathematics and biology, does.

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His is the kind of work that will be supported by the new science building recently announced by the College of Science, dedicated to applied and multi-disciplinary work, and where most STEM students at the U will eventually find themselves for a time.

As Director of the Center for Quantitative Biology, Adler and his team have applied their data-driven tool kit to everything from viruses to animal behavior, and from biodiversity to infectious diseases. Who else can claim a lab’s subject models as varied as aphid-tending ants, hantavirus, and the Southern Right Whale off the coast of Argentina?

The Adler group’s approach to research is driven by basic questions about how biology works. To bring together several threads of research, the lab began a study of rhinoviruses, the most frequent cause of the common cold, and how they routinely and rapidly change. The study uses mathematical models based on known interactions in the immune system and genetic sequences. “We hope to build detailed evolutionary models of this rapidly changing set of viruses,” Adler reports.

He and his team are now looking at cancer in humans. There are, of course, hypotheses of how cancer takes over cells in the body and grows. But too many of these hypotheses are based on assumptions that cells behave as they do with complete information and clever plans for the future instead of the confusing world of a real tissue.

“However useful some of these [current] models are,” says Adler of cancer research, “they are not based on a realistic assumption.” In fact, a prime contribution of the mathematical modeler is “to make sense of things from the perspective of what you’re modeling.” What access to information does the cell or organism have, is a central, guiding question.

Part of how cancer behaviors may be better scientifically “unpacked” is through game theory, but expanded over time and space and placed in a context of incomplete information between constituent parts.

Mathematical models, or more accurately, an ensemble of models later aggregated like political polls or weather models to predict the future, may be the answer. “We usually don’t get a simple smoking gun,” says Adler referring to complicated questions in biology, whether developmental, behavioralecological, immuno- or micro-biological. “With nine or ten big mathematical models running all the time you have a [more robust] hypothesis,” he says.

“All thinking is done using modeling,” Adler reminds us, “whether it’s through language or, in my case, mathematics.”

The strength of the latter is that when mathematical modeling is added to the classical biologist’s models, it is “perfectly explicit about its assumptions. When you do the math right (and we always do), the logic leading from assumptions to conclusions is airtight ‘true.’”

This is important because a mathematical argument can’t be controverted. “If conclusions in biological research are wrong, it’s the assumptions that are wrong,” and the researcher can then pivot on those assumptions.

Modeling of this kind, of course, has proven helpful, most recently, in the study of Sars-CoV-19, the virus that has propelled the world into a pandemic. The coronavirus does not operate in isolation, but with other components through the human immune system.

This kind of work is animated not just by its predictive character using statistics—as in the case of artificial intelligence or machine learning (“We aren’t all cyborgs, yet,” Adler says)—but, it is predictive in a mechanistic sense in that it cares deeply about the more nuanced and openended “how,” the foundation of the scientific method.

Adler started out at Harvard as a pure mathematician, but by the time he arrived at Cornell University as a graduate student, he had discovered that he really enjoyed talking and collaborating with biologists. Stanford-based Deborah Gordon, a renowned expert on ants, which as he puts it, “achieve a lot of stuff fairly robustly through simple rules,” was one of them. He also found himself with David Winkler in upstate New York in a bird blind and observing the breeding and offspring-raising behaviors of tree swallows. The complicated models he built based on that research were never published, but Adler was hooked on life sciences.

“We usually don’t get a simple smoking gun.”

The terrain Fred Adler has traversed via the mechanistic aspect—the how—of basic science couldn’t be more varied.

In “bench to bedside” medical science alone it has ranged from modeling the lungs of cystic fibrosis patients looking for a transplant to determining that the changes in Covid-19 are driven not just by random mutations in the virus but by adaptations to the human immune response.

How to synthesize his research over the past thirty years is the next big question. For now he will continue with modeling biological systems, their signaling connections based on the body’s own network of “trust” between components, and determining how those systems are corrupted … and maybe how to fix them.

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ALUMNI SPOTLIGHT

Kathleen Treseder On the Ubiquity of Fungi

For Kathleen Treseder, HBS’94, the launching pad for her career in science and research was Borneo, the giant, rugged island in Southeast Asia’s Malay Archipelago.

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Salt Lake City native and a first-generation college graduate, she didn’t know that universities did research. She soon found out otherwise.

On a field trip together with plant ecologist Jim Ehleringer, he asked her if she wanted to go to graduate school. “You’ll need field experience,” he said. “Is there a field site you can go to? Borneo?” He told her to ask 4

Diane (Dinah) Davidson, who is now an SBS professor emerita.

“So I prepared a whole speech on why I wanted to go,” says Treseder, thinking she was going to need to sell herself, “and I didn’t have a chance to say it to her.” Davidson just signed her up right out of the gate.

It was the first time Treseder had traveled by herself away from the University, and it proved to be transformative for her. “It was a series of change encounters. Without Borneo

my life would have looked much different.” It was the work she did there that ended up in her honors thesis which in turn was published on the cover of the prestigious journal Nature.

Not at all bad for an undergraduate researcher.

Now a professor of Biology at University of California, Irvine, Treseder has never gotten very far from that first impetus at the School of Biological Sciences to do research. Today she and her lab address the role of fungi in mediating ecosystem responses to global change. “Our overarching goal is to improve predictions of future trajectories of global change,” she says, “by incorporating feedbacks governed by fungi.”

When most of us think of fungi, mushrooms often leap to mind. But fungi are everywhere, and whole phyla of them are still being discovered. She started studying other kinds of fungi during grad school at Stanford. (“I had to learn all that, on the fly.”) She was also quick to learn that her subject matter is largely invisible to the naked eye. Ninety percent of the biomass of fungi is micro-scale, making them unseen and invisible players in the world. “Every once in a while, fungi will make mushrooms,” she says, which is like the “apple of a tree.”

In terms of climate, and climate change, fungi are real players, and the Treseder lab focuses on their production and storage of carbon (C) to corroborate that. It turns out that fungi release ten times more carbon dioxide (CO2) than humans do. “That means if fungi change [there’s] major ecological change,” she says. But because this happens at a microscopic level it’s been very hard to study.

When you look at rich, dark, soil, you are seeing a lot of carbon—most of which is from fungi or bacteria that have died, which is a good thing. “It adds up to a lot,” she says. There’s “twice as much carbon in the soil as in the atmosphere, and much of that is in [fungi].”

For fieldwork, Treseder chooses ecosystems that are in danger from fires–for example, coastal sage scrub, only five percent of which is intact–and how fungi respond to depletion. She has also studied cloud forests in Costa Rica as well as boreal forests in Alaska that are warming faster than others. Are these big changes in carbon in various sites due to fungi? Very possibly.

The role the ubiquitous fungi plays in climate change is so paradoxical, so mind-bending and so large that it requires a massive database. While the research requires thinking on the molecular level about the individual bonds that are breaking down, it is ultimately concerned with how much CO2 is entering the atmosphere globally. We are always, “taking the

research to a new level: trying to put the research in our lab and into a broader context. Whatever we find in our lab, I want to know, is this something that occurs broadly?”

The best way to approach this problem is to construct databases with all the research around the globe and to incorporate them into computer simulations of the earth’s climate called Earth System Models. The models include everything we know about how climate behaves, Treseder says, attempting to answer questions such as, What if the fungi reduces the CO2 by this amount? How will that affect the climate?

“It all relies on hands-on work on the ecosystem by lab teams,” says Treseder. In addition to testing foundational ideas about fungal ecology, the team is also looking into whether fungi that adapt to more stressful environments in turn lose their ability to grow well under favorable conditions. Team science is not just talked about in her lab, but it’s actively engaged. It is a science unto itself.

While Treseder’s research journey since graduating from the U has been absorbing, it hasn’t been so absorbing and demanding as to exclude other ambitions. It has, however, informed her other interests which includes ecological policy and removing barriers for women in science. “Local officials can really change your life and they need access to science,” she says.

“If fungi change, there’s major ecological change.”

It was an extension of this activism that led her to declare her own candidacy earlier this year for Irvine City Council on a green platform.

This trifecta of research, activism, and politics is, of course, all informed by Kathleen Treseder’s identity as a biologist that germinated at the University of Utah and threaded through her transformative time in Borneo years ago.

And while the Treseder lab shutdown for half a year because of the pandemic, and her lab members were sent home to do field research, fortunately… fungi are everywhere.

You can read an expanded profile of Kathleen Treseder on our website at biology.utah.edu 5

RESEARCH

Getting

Punchy SBS researchers awarded an Ig Nobel Prize

By Paul Gabrielsen

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n a webcast announcement, University of Utah researchers David Carrier and Steven Naleway, along with recent SBS graduate Ethan Beseris, BS’18, were awarded the 2021 Ig Nobel Peace Prize for a study exploring whether beards may serve an evolutionary purpose to protect the jaw during a fistfight.

Ig Nobel laureates David Carrier (left), Steven Naleway (center) and Ethan Beseris

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The lighthearted awards, presented by Marc Abrahams of the science humor magazine Annals of Improbable Research, are a counterpoint to the mainstream Nobel Prizes, awarded in October. Ig Nobel Prizes, awarded since 1991, are intended to celebrate scientific discoveries that “first make people laugh, and then make them think.” The U study is among this year’s ten awardees.

This is the U’s first Ig Nobel Prize, and the story was immediately picked up by the media across the globe including in The Guardian, The South China Morning News, and across the country, including in the Washington Post.

“Usually they give the awards to out-of-the-box questions, and that’s an important part of what science is about,” says Carrier, an evolutionary biologist and professor in the School of Biological Sciences, who adds that he pondered at first whether it was an award he wanted to accept. “I’m quite happy at this point.

There was trepidation at first, but now that’s gone.”

“It’s an honor to be an Ig Nobel Laureate,” says Beseris, who conducted the study as part of his undergraduate thesis. “I’m grateful to their organization for recognizing less traditional branches of science and giving our work a larger platform to be heard. Radical questions test the boundaries of our field, and I believe it’s important that they receive attention.”

Bearded pugilists The study, published in April 2020 in Integrative Organismal Biology, continues a line of research that Carrier has been pursuing for years. Given that humans are the only primates who fight by punching, could there be other aspects of human anatomy that evolved in connection with fisticuffs?

That question is called the “pugilism hypothesis” and Carrier has explored how different features unique to us among primates (planted heels, proportions of face bones, ability to form a fist and upper arm strength in males) specialize humans, particularly males, for fighting by punching.

“And so the beard, which our study shows provides some protection to some of the most vulnerable parts of the face when people punch, is just one more piece of the series,” Carrier says.

The experimental setup included a covered fiber epoxy composite material similar to bone with sheep fleece, an analog for facial hair.

Naleway’s involvement stems from his research in biomechanics and materials science. “If you talk to the researchers who do this kind of work, some of that biomechanics component is kind of missing,” he says, “and it can help us understand what’s going on, which obviously for this application of protection is incredibly important.”

Why does this matter from an evolutionary perspective?

“The beard covers the mandible, which is one of the primary targets,” Carrier says. “And when it breaks, without an orthopedic surgeon you’re in big trouble. If you broke a jaw 5,000 years ago, that was a life-threatening injury.”

Photo credit: Ethan Beseris, Steven Naleway and David Carrier

Beseris says that studies of the pugilism hypothesis help us understand humans’ aggressive tendencies. “Evolution leaves clues in our anatomy that we can observe and document,” he says. “I believe these are the building blocks of how we address larger societal issues such as war, class disparity, and racism.”

Notorious science The work was previously awarded the 2020 Pineapple Science Prize in Physics, an analog to the Ig Nobel awards, presented in China by the Zhejiang Science Museum and science website Guokr.

This year included presentations of awards by “genuinely bemused genuine” Nobel laureates, an original mini-opera, very brief lectures on topics from drinking coffee to babywashing technology and, according to the ceremony website, lots of paper airplanes.

A version of this article originally appeared in @TheU. 7

GRADUATE STUDENTS

Sister Chromosomes D

avid Almanzar came to the University of Utah in 2016 to pursue his PhD following his undergraduate degree at the University of Massachusetts. There he conducted research as an undergrad in Rolf Karlstrom’s lab, imaging neurons in the brains of fish.

Today, working in the lab of Dr. Ofer Rog, Almanzar works on understanding how chromosomes are regulated during sexual reproduction, when egg and sperm are produced.

In order to pass along our genetic information to the next generation, our chromosomes are purposefully broken and then repaired. Studying this process is challenging, since pairs of chromosomes (also called “sisters”) have identical DNA sequence, and they are entangled together. This makes it hard to tell them apart even with an advanced microscope.

To overcome this limitation, Almanzar developed a novel method to label only one of the two identical sisters in a tiny transparent nematode called Caenorhabditis elegans.

When he placed his samples under the microscope using this innovation, each sister was in a different color and he could see, for the first time, that the identical chromosomes occasionally exchange information.

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This has allowed him to begin understanding the mechanisms that regulate these exchanges, and his current work is focused on understanding more about this process.

Why is this important? “When happening precisely,” Almanzar says, “these exchanges are mostly innocuous. However, every exchange carries a risk of an error.” These errors, while rare, could be detrimental, and will likely result in an embryo with an incomplete or degenerate genetic information.

Moreover, the same mechanisms that guard the integrity of the genome during sexual reproduction also regulate repair events when cells in our body encounter damage; for example, upon exposure to UV radiation. In those cases, errors can lead to cancer. This work has recently been published in Current Biology.

When he’s not at the bench, David Almanzar, now in his sixth year as a PhD candidate in the School of Biological Sciences, plays guitar in a bluegrass band called the Pickpockets, which he co-founded in 2018. The band plays every Thursday at the local cider brewery, and at local events and gigs across the Mountain West. They currently are in the studio recording their debut album.

GRADUATE STUDENTS

The Gift of the Scientific Process

By Austin Green

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began my research career in 2013 as an undergraduate in the Şekercioğlu Lab at the School of Biological Sciences. At the time, my research interests were very broad.

All I knew for certain was that I wanted to do lots of fieldwork, so I started a small-scale project in Red Butte Canyon using camera traps. I have definitely learned a lot along the way.

I didn’t necessarily see myself going to graduate school when I started working in the lab, nor did I have any idea that one, smallscale project would blossom into a full-blown research career, but that is the beauty of undergraduate research. The weekly lab meetings and interactions with fellow students piqued a curiosity in me I didn’t know existed. That curiosity continues to this day.

As a first-generation college student from Salt Lake City, I knew next to nothing about academic research other than that it intimidated the hell out of me. It wasn’t until I was consistently around other researchers, interacting with them on a daily basis that I started seeing myself as someone capable of pursuing it myself. That interaction was key.

Public opinion and portrayal of scientists as white-coatwearing, speedy-fast calculators with purely objective motives, always striving to remove both values and preconceptions from their work was the only previous “exposure” I ever had to this world. However, being able to work with these

professionals, and noting that they are in fact just human beings like the rest of us, was an eye-opening experience.

Everyone wants a sense of belonging in their profession, and it wasn’t until I started working in a research lab that I truly felt like I belonged in academia.

Now, as a fifth-year Ph.D. candidate on the verge of graduating, I reflect fondly on my eight years with the School of Biological Sciences and the Şekercioğlu Lab. The experiences I have had, and the knowledge I have gained, have helped shape my beliefs, values, and way of thinking. It is this gift of the scientific process that I believe can benefit all members of society.

Whether at a university lecture, a presentation at a local or government agency, or a workshop at a prison or troubled youth facility, I am ever-aware of the power that shared knowledge can have, especially if it inspires action from others.

This is why I will be forever dedicated to fostering relationships with members of the community that feel separated from academia, much as I did as an incoming college student.

You can watch a short talk titled “The Effects of Interstate Highway Eighty on Mammalian Community Composition Across the Central Wasatch Mountain Range” by Austin Green at biology.utah.edu or on SBS’s YouTube Channel.

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Undergraduate Awardees Kanishka’s journey at the U threaded through ACCESS, a signature program of the College of Science. It was a scholarship and mentorship experience that led to re-figuring what research could be.

Says Kanishka, research at the U “fosters an environment of curiosity of real research. It’s really beautiful,” she says, “to have someone [like Gagnon] believe in you like that.” This, she concedes, in spite of feeling at times like an imposter as the child of an immigrant family and as a woman. She’s had to “learn through lots of struggles.”

Sahar Kanishka Sahar Kanishka, recipient of the 2021 Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Award, remembers daily where her family came from, where they are now, and what opportunity there is for her at the School of Biological Science (SBS).

“I’ve always wanted to be a doctor ever since I was younger,” she recently explained in a video interview. “Because my family’s from Afghanistan and they actually fled from the Soviet invasion, they were telling me how the medical resources over there were very scarce when they were escaping. … [My way of giving back is] becoming a doctor and contributing what I’ve learned here.”

What Kanishka, now in her junior year as an honors student, is learning happens largely in the Gagnon lab at the SBS where she and her colleagues are studying vertebrate lineage and cell fate choice along with cell signaling and genome engineering.

Their subject model is the living zebrafish with which they are attempting to answer the question of how biology builds an animal with millions of cells. The question is complicated by the fact that those millions of cells are continually sharing information while shape-shifting at the same time.

The way Jamie Gagnon, Principal Investigator who holds the Mario Cappechi Endowed Chair at SBS, puts it, the research Kanishka is doing “may lead to a holy grail method for developmental biology—the ability to record developmental history, in living animals, with molecular and spatial resolution.”

In his nomination letter, Gagnon, who referred to Kanishka as having “transitioned quickly into an independent scientist,” also wrote that he has been “impressed with Sahar’s poise, focus and commitment to research over the last year, which has been particularly challenging for our undergraduate researchers…

Sahar is already the face of STEM research in the College.”

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Some lessons from those struggles have been hard won.

“You can’t just put science in a box and tell it what to do,” she explains. “I have to allow it the freedom to seek to understand the world rather than to just understand me.” But Sahar Kanishka is optimistic about things as well. When asked about the pandemic and the social and economic upheaval, she proffers a winning smile, while adding, “I’m excited to see how college will change and adapt.”

Rachel Jones While Rachel Jones has wanted to do medical research since third grade, it wasn’t until high school during her advanced placement class that she fell in love with the cell.

“Cells are magnificent machines crafted by evolution, which is pretty cool considering evolution is progress derived [from] random events.” In particular, she remembers being completely fascinated with vesicles budding from membranes. “I took a research seminar my freshman year of college, and that’s how I found the [Julie] Hollien lab,” she says. “I started coming in to [the] lab the fall of my freshman year to learn, and eventually I got to pursue my own mini project.” She’s been in the Hollien lab ever

since and most recently was recognized as a Beckman Scholar, one of only two this coming year from the University of Utah.

Funded by the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Foundation, the program is a fifteen-month, mentored research experience for exceptional undergraduate students in chemical and biological sciences. Each scholar receives a research stipend to facilitate nine academic calendar months and two, threemonth summers of research experience.

Jones’s love affair with the cell is leading her back to her initial impulse to do medical research. She is currently absorbed in the lab with the degradation of mutant Huntingtin protein, implicated in Huntington’s, a fatal, incurable neurodegenerative disease. “Our lab discovered that the oligomeric form of this protein is degraded by a pathway that is not well studied. I aim to understand this pathway better by studying a protein I found to be involved.”

A hallmark of Huntington’s disease is the presence of large aggregates, which are composed of the mutant Huntingtin protein. And yet the mutant Huntingtin protein can also exist in a small, oligomeric form, that is composed of more than one subunit (polypeptide chain). “Interestingly,” says Jones, “it is thought that the oligomeric form is more toxic to the cells than the large aggregates. One idea is that the small form of mutant Huntingtin protein binds other structures in the cell and impedes their functions.”

When the mutant protein is sequestered in the large aggregate, it can’t interfere with cellular functions. “This is one model for how the smaller form of the mutant Huntingtin protein is more toxic,” she says.

A native of Albuquerque, New Mexico, Rachel Jones hopes to apply to PhD programs for biology this fall. “I would like to have a career in biomedical research. I’ve always wanted to contribute towards developing a cure for a disease. That’s one of the reasons why I’m excited about my project: it has a medical application… Sometimes I think to myself: I’m so lucky I can pursue a career in something so cool and interesting.”

Karrin Tennant For Karrin Tennant, recipient of the College of Science Undergraduate Research Award, the never-ending story of environmental science has plenty of plot twists.

A member of the William “Bill” Anderegg lab which studies the intersection of ecosystems and climate change, Tennant has been busy working in the area of nighttime water loss in plants. The work tests a major hypothesis in the field and has the potential to greatly advance our understanding of plant physiology. The award is given annually to the College’s most outstanding senior undergraduate researcher.

“Karrin has blown me away with her incredible independence, creativity, dedication, initiative, and intellectual maturity,” says

Anderegg. “Her Biology Honors research is incredibly exciting, eminently publishable, and on par with advanced and successful PhD students I have mentored.”

One of those plot twists includes nighttime transpiration through tiny pores known as stomata on the underside of tree leaves. Photosynthesis, the process by which green plants and some other organisms use sunlight to synthesize foods from carbon dioxide and water, clearly happens during the day. But why and how do trees like the Black Cottonwood in the Pacific Northwest, continue to draw H2O from the ground at night?

“What’s the ecological value of this happening?” Tennant asks.

At night “can trees pull water from underground like a straw away from competitors?”

Answers to these questions have implications about how forests survive and thrive, especially during drought as the earth continues to warm globally. Tennant sees her work as multi-faceted … and multi-disciplinary–narrative threads that tell the broader story of not only life systems, as in forests, but even larger systems, and not only ecological.

Tennant graduates soon with a minor in Ecology & Legacy Humanities. The intersection between biology and the humanities fosters empathy for the natural world that can inform public discourse as well as public policy that extends beyond scientific inquiry. This “leaning into the interdisciplinary,” says Tennant, is what propels her learning at the University of Utah and what appears to be the foundation of what looks like an auspicious career later in forest ecology and related fields.

In the meantime, Tennant pivots between collecting leaf samples in the field from as many as thirty-five trees in various degrees of competition with each other for water and the lab which includes the School’s greenhouse. Utilizing growth chambers she measures the gas exchange rate and other physiological measurements under the lens of a Licor 6800 microscope. She and her team also conduct statistical tests using research software, demonstrating how the micro affects the macro of ecological systems.

In her citation for the award, College of Science Dean Peter Trapa talked about Tennant’s demonstrated “genuine wonder of the world around” her and her “thirst for knowledge.” Her response to the award? “I am honored to be a woman in STEM and to follow the footsteps of other trailblazing female researchers.”

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Briefly Noted Sarah E. Bush, BS’99, PhD’04, SBS associate professor, was awarded the Henry Baldwin Ward medal given annually to a mid-career researcher who, by self-directed investigations, has attained a position of leadership in some phase of parasitological research.

The award is presented by the American Society of Parasitology (ASP). In July she presented her acceptance speech during the ASP annual meeting wherein she shared her career story in the research of parasites and their hosts. Bush is only the 4th woman to receive the Ward Medal in its sixty-two-year history.

David Hillyard, MD, BS’73, was recognized in November 2020 with a Healthcare Hero Award from Utah Business magazine. He was quick to share the love. “It’s very flattering, but every day I just think about the critical contributions front-line laboratory workers make for this effort every day.”

The sentiment is typical of the collaborative and generous nature of the Professor of Pathology at the University of Utah School of Medicine and founding Director of Molecular Infectious Disease Testing at ARUP, the largest academic laboratory in the country.

David Smith Taylor, DDS passed away July 14, 2021 at age 93. Upon graduating in the 1950s from the U with a Bachelor’s in Zoology, Taylor attended the Washington University School of Dentistry. In 1965, under his direction, a dental clinic was established at the new University of Utah Hospital. What began as a 2-chair dental clinic is now a fully accredited dental school enrolling 50 students per year.

Nancy Parry, MD, BS’63 recalls how the late SBS anatomy professor John Legler had a formative influence on her when she attended the U. After earning her MD from UC Irvine, she was a general practitioner for thirty years in Anaheim, California.

Later, in Ketchum, Idaho she expanded her interests to hyperbarics, a type of treatment that employs a pressured HBOT chamber used to help wounded veterans with TBI and PTSD and to speed up healing of tissues starved for oxygen.

Todd Alder, BS’92; PhD’00, has been a patent lawyer since 2002 at Thorpe North and Western in Sandy, Utah where he is now a partner. He was a featured speaker last spring at SBS’s BioLuminaries lecture series which brings in alumni to highlight different career paths for biology majors. “If you really contemplate the principles you are learning and integrate them into your life,” he told students, “it will change you and the way you think.”

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You can read more news and spotlights of SBS alumni at biology.utah.edu where you can also share your own updates as an alumni/friend. We want to hear from U!

Stephen C. de St. Jeor, BS’64; Phd’69, passed away in Reno, Nevada August 6, 2021 after a short battle with COVID pneumonia, despite being fully vaccinated. He was 81. Following his time at the U which spanned two important eras of SBS, including as a Division of Zoology and later as a Department under the direction of K. Gordon Lark when cell and microbiology studies accelerated, he eventually settled in Reno where he continued his work in virology at the University of Nevada Medical School. He established the Cell and Molecular Biology Program there as its Director for twenty-six years until his retirement.

For Ed Groenhout, MD, BS’85, all that was needed to become a doctor was to be told at graduation he would never get into med school. It was a pivotal moment in his life. Groenhout began his private medical practice at a clinic in Grants Pass, Oregon.

He specialized in primary care Internal Medicine there until 2020 when he and his family relocated to Salem to work with the Indian Health Services in the Chemawa Clinic.

Nikhil K. Bhayani, MD, BS’98, assistant professor, Department of Internal Medicine for Texas Christian University & University of North Texas Health Sciences, School of Medicine was the White Coat Ceremony Keynote Speaker for his alma mater Ross University Medical School in September. He was recently selected as Top Physician of the Year for 2021 by the International Association of Top Professionals for his outstanding leadership and commitment to the healthcare industry.

Diana Montgomery, BS’87, earned her PhD at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore with a degree in Biology/Biophysics, followed by a stint as a postdoc fellow first at Northwestern University and then the University of Massachusetts. Currently, she is Principal Scientist in the department of Pharmacokinetics, Pharmacodynamics, and Drug Metabolism at Merck, in Pennsylvania. She focuses on developing therapeutic proteins as new drugs, two of which are now FDA-approved products, tildrakizumab and bezlotoxumab.

Emily Bates, BS’97, is now Associate Professor in the Department of Pediatrics, (Developmental Biology) at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. She credits the unique environment at the U, including the ACCESS program as the facilitator for her acceptance to Harvard University for graduate school where she earned her PhD.

Crimson Laureate Society School of Biological Sciences N O V E M B E R

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Legacy Giving George & Lisbeth Elliott

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Çağan Hakkı Şekercioğlu

Nikhil Bhayani

Kathleen Church

Alexandrea Jee

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Martin P. Horvath Douglas H. Howe Kelly T. Hughes Edwin C. Kingsley, MD Sabrina Kozel-Lopez Sally Kursar

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s we approach the end of a sometimes vexing but also hopeful year, U Biology is partnering with the College of Science in raising funds for our Science Research Initiative (SRI). This program propels undergraduates into state-of-the-art teaching and research labs during their first semester, and beyond, where they can immediately begin learning by doing.

Your donation to the SRI this year, in any amount, will help biology expand this exciting program to more undergrads, including first generation college students like some of those highlighted in this magazine. It will also allow us to build-out new research streams which are the interest areas guided and mentored by our esteemed faculty members across the college.

Many of these streams fold multiple STEM disciplines into one dynamic experience for students. The potential synergy of this cross-pollination of knowledge sectors can’t be over-estimated, echoing the exciting new science building recently announced that will be built next to the Crocker Science Center.

Undergraduate Muskan Walia (Adler lab) shares a moment of levity with her associates on the site of what will be the College of Sciences’ new multi-disciplinary STEM building.

When this new building--a retro-fit of the old Stewart Building / public school where many Utahns attended grade K-12, plus a new addition—opens, most STEM students from across campus will likely spend at least some time there, learning by doing.

The new building is a perfect analogue to the SRI program that is already in place.

You can help provide this on-hands research experience for biology students by donating to the Science Research Initiative today which ensures your membership in the Crimson Laureate Society. Additionally, if you would like to explore a legacy gift to the School of Biological Sciences, we hope you’ll contact us directly.

Neil J. Vickers Leslie E. Sieburth Professors and Co-Directors School of Biological Sciences

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$250 to $499

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All tokens of appreciation, University recognition

All tokens of appreciation, University recognition

Wireless Phone Charging Pad

Visor

Crimson Luggage Tag

Decal and 6-in-1 STEM Pen

Note: You will receive all tokens of appreciation at and below your chosen membership level

For more information about the Crimson Laureate Society and the Crimson Legacy Society (for planned gifts) please visit biology.utah.edu