DISTINGUISHED ALUMNI

EACH YEAR THE SCHOOL OF BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES (SBS) FIELDS NOMINATIONS FOR THE DISTINGUISHED ALUMNI AWARD. TWO ALUMNI WERE SELECTED AND WILL BE ACKNOWLEDGED DURING THE SCHOOL’S ANNUAL AWARDS CEREMONY IN 2025.

Failure Done Gracefully

It’s generally not a good idea (or even allowed) to take biochemistry as your first biology class. But that’s exactly what CLARISSA HENRY BS’95 did as a freshman at the U.

“[I]t was so great,” she says, “that I changed my major from Chinese to biology.”

The class Henry took was a section taught by Baldomero Olivera, the distinguished professor who still runs one of the largest labs in the SBS. But it was a team effort for this Pennsylvania native who now calls Orono, Maine her home as Professor and Director of the Graduate School of Biomedical Science and Engineering, University of Maine. She also cites David Gard and David Wolstenholme (currently both emeritus professors) as equally entertaining and inspiring lecturers.

After declaring her major in biology, Henry found a spot in the lab of Darryl Kropf, now also emeritus. “It was in his lab that I became fascinated with how cells interact with their local environment,” she says. “Over 20 years later, I’m still fascinated with how cellenvironment interactions modulate cellular health.”

Henry’s experience is a testament to the undergraduate research opportunities still available directly from the SBS faculty or through the Science Research Initiative in the College of Science. “Undergraduate research was so easy to do at Utah, and undergraduates were very valued.”

And Henry continues to pay that undergrad experience forward. Today, her lab, which primarily focuses on how signaling between muscle cells and their extracellular matrix mediates musculoskeletal development and homeostasis in zebrafish, has been home to over 50 undergraduates.

“Throughout my career, over twothirds of my publications have [had] undergraduate authors.”

Henry also directs the statewide graduate school of biomedical science and engineering program.

“I was lucky enough to have mentors throughout my research career who encouraged me to have a growth mindset and to embrace mistakes as learning opportunities,” she says. ”It is so important in life to be able to navigate failure gracefully.” <

LARK LEGACY

In October, PAUL KEIM , one of the longest-serving postdoctoral researchers in the lab run by the late K. Gordon Lark, was tapped to present the annual Lark Lecture at the SBS Science Retreat. Keim was a natural pick for a distinguished alumni award, not only because of his work with Lark in the 80s but because of his auspicious career in The Pathogen and Microbiome Institute (PMI), an impressive cross-disciplinary research unit at Northern Arizona University where, after graduating from NAU with a BS, he returned to and has been on the faculty for the past 36 years.

PMI is closely associated with TGen North, with whom the institute shares infrastructure to maximize Arizona’s investment in science.

At the U, Keim studied everything from soybeans to kangaroo rats. “We did everything," he says about the lab’s variety. “It’s what I call either the Lark curse or the Lark blessing… Gordon was willing to work on any interesting biological problem.”

This was before Keim found himself working in infectious diseases, in particular with the deadly bacterium anthrax and later cholera and more recently the SARS-COVID-19 coronavirus, among others. At one highly elevated juncture he would find himself on the world stage as, following the attacks on American soil September 11, 2001, letters laced with anthrax spores started showing up in people’s mail. Five individuals eventually died from it.

How the story played out during the era of the “Anthrax Letters,” the title of a recent Netflix docudrama in which Keim is prominently featured, has all of the intrigue you would expect of a compressed but harrowing era starting in October 2001. It was a time when the country was rattled to the bone and saw terrorists, it seemed, around every corner—and in every letter delivered by the postal service.

Joining the Wilkes Center Climate Solutions Hackathon offered a valuable break from the routine grind of a first-year PhD student in biology.

It was through the use of genomic technology and evolutionary principles at PMI and TGen North that Keim and his team were able to trace the specific, professionally processed spores, used in the attacks to an American microbiologist, vaccinologist, Bruce Ivins, a professional acquaintance of Keim’s and a known expert in the handling of anthrax spores.

Keim was readying to testify in court when Ivins took his own life. “Whether or not Bruce Ivins [was the culprit] the collaborative effort among students from various majors, urging us to tackle the issue from diverse perspectives and glean insights from each other.

Our team [currently] consists of PhD students from the School of Biological Sciences and an undergraduate premed student studying Biomedical Engineering. The education and interests of each team member provide a wealth of foundational is still hotly debated. But the Justice Department was convinced of his guilt and they shut the whole thing down destroying all the evidence. "So all the evidence that we were analyzing, all the anthrax strains, all the letters,” he says with some disappointment if not bitterness “... it's gone.”

Being pressed into the harsh and sometimes unforgiving media light (and hype) has been a defining feature of Keim’s career, but it has always been unapologetically rooted in the ethic of scientific inquiry that relentlessly follows the facts, honors the data and reaches conclusions that counter sacred paradigms in different scientific fields. His mentor Gordon Lark would be proud. <

Our team’s final project, establishing the Wildfire Resilience Collective, ended up winning first place. However, the true highlight was knowledge, but, most importantly, we share a common goal of utilizing our research to inform policymakers and stakeholders in shaping land use decisions.

What exactly is a hackathon? While often associated with coding challenges, its essence lies in rapidly developing solutions within a condensed time frame. Our team’s focus was far removed from coding. We aimed to grasp the impact of wildfires on community resilience and the mechanisms behind fostering such resilience. < ~Hannah Meier

Learn more about the Hackathon at wilkescenter.utah.edu