Accomplishments: School of Life Sciences

Andrea Darby (Life Sciences) recently won first prize in the Science Slam competition at the 59th Annual Drosophila Research Conference in Philadelphia. The title of her spoken word piece was "Pet Project." She is an undergraduate student in her senior year.
Boo Shan Tseng and Sophia Araujo Hernandez (both Life Sciences), as well as collaborators at the University of Washington and the University of Calgary, published a research article, "A Biofilm Matrix-Associated Protease Inhibitor Protects Pseudomonas Aeruginosa from Proteolytic Attack", in the high-impact journal mBio. The work shows…
Kelly Ai-Sun Tseng (Life Sciences) was awarded a $224,250 grant from the Nevada INBRE: IDeA Network of Biomedical Research Excellence funded by the National Institutes of Health. Her research project "Building a Molecular Blueprint for Productive Eye Repair" aims to identify genes and signals that induce eye regeneration. Research…
Helen Wing (Life Sciences) and a group that included 16 members of her research team (seven undergraduate students, six graduate students, two technicians and one post-doctoral fellow) published a paper, "Insights into Transcriptional Silencing and Anti‐Silencing in Shigella flexneri: a Detailed Molecular Analysis of the icsP…
Mira Han (Life Sciences) was awarded a National Science Foundation Career Award for her research project, “Using Indel Rate Variation to Understand Evolutionary Constraints on Distances Between Functional Elements in the Genome.” Han will use the five-year, $574,068 award to study how insertion and deletion mutations impact the evolution…
Jenifer Utz (Life Sciences) gave a research presentation entitled, "Voluntary Self-Assessment Quiz Use Improves Exam Performance, Especially for Learners with Low Prior Knowledge" at the Intermountain Teaching for Learning Conference. This research was a collaborative project with Matt Bernacki (Educational Psychology and Higher Education).
Scott Abella (Life Sciences) has partnered with University Libraries to showcase his research on conservation in America's national parks system in the digital exhibit space in the Leisure Reading Zone on the second floor of Lied Library. "Conserving America's National Parks" pulls images and information from Abella's 2015 book of the same name,…
Lawrence Walker and Fred Landau (both School of Life Sciences) recently published a book,  A Natural History of the Mojave Desert. In it, the authors explore how a combination of complex geology, varied geography, and changing climate has given rise to intriguing flora and fauna — including almost 3,000 plant species and about 380…
Matthew Le Claire (Liberal Arts), Erdogan Kaya (Education), and Michael Isaacs (Life Sciences) are this year's recipients of the Graduate College's Outstanding Graduate Student Teaching Awards. 1st Place - Matthew Le Claire (College of Liberal Arts) 2nd Place - Erdogan Kaya (College of Education) 3rd Place - Michael Isaacs (School of Life…
The National Science Foundation will fund Kurt Regner and Eduardo Robleto's (Life Sciences) proposal, REU SITE: Mechanisms of Evolution (DBI 1757316 - $333,830).  REU Sites offer paid summer undergraduate research internships supplemented with workshops on careers in science.  The overarching goal of this proposal is…
Erin Cassin (Life Sciences) attended and presented her work at the Emerging Researchers National Conference in STEM in Washington D.C., earlier this month. Her work is based on a collaborative project between the lab of professor Philippos Tsourkas and the lab of professor emeritus Penny Amy in the School of Life Sciences. Cassin, an undergraduate…
Jacklyn Newsome (Life Sciences) successfully defended her master's thesis in the Schiller Laboratory of Applied Bioinformatics in December. She worked on personalized diets and a new single-cell technology called the GigaAssay. Both have been licensed commercially.