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Archived Biology News:
2003

Harvey Mudd awarded NSF grant for confocal microscope. A National Science Foundation grant for $355,583 has been awarded to Harvey Mudd College for the acquisition of a confocal fluorescence microscope. The project is under the direction of Biology Department chair David Asai, and also involves Professors Cathy McFadden and Mary Williams (Biology), Liz Orwin (Engineering and Biology), and Richard Haskell (Physics).

High-resolution confocal fluorescence microscopy is a powerful tool for visualizing cellular dynamics. Over the past decade, this technology has matured so that today confocal microscopy is a widely applied standard tool of biology.

The shared confocal microscope facility will advance research projects aimed at the visualization of dynamic processes in a diversity of experimental systems and timescales: (i) membrane lipids in the cold signaling response in plants; (ii) control of cell shape by molecular motors in ciliated protozoa; (iii) reorganization of cellular proteins that accompanies the differentiation of corneal cells; (iv) development of new technologies to visualize tissue remodeling; and (v) measurement of population diversity and evolution of soft corals.

A key use of the facility will be in undergraduate education, including undergraduate research projects and a formal laboratory course in cell biology.

[NSF award information for this grant.]

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HMC awarded $1.2M grant from HHMI to support biology programs. The Howard Hughes Medical Institute has awarded Harvey Mudd College a grant for $1.2 million to support undergraduate research and education in biology and related fields. The project will be administered by Biology Department chair David Asai, who wrote the successful grant proposal.

The program includes the following elements:

• Undergraduate research opportunities in the life sciences during the summer and the academic year
• Small grants for interdisciplinary research
• A cross-disciplinary life sciences colloquium
• Incorporation of biology into a summer bridge program
• New courses and lab modules in computational biology
• Hiring a new tenure-track faculty member in computational biochemistry
• A new research assistant to support the life sciences faculty

The grant was part of HHMI’s Undergraduate Science Education Program. Harvey Mudd was one of 42 undergraduate colleges to receive a grant in this year’s competition.

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HMC Bio/Chem major wins NSF and Hertz graduate fellowships. Kevin Esvelt ’04, a double major in Biology and Chemistry at Harvey Mudd College, was awarded both an NSF graduate fellowship and a Hertz Foundation fellowship for graduate study in molecular and developmental bioology beginning in the 2004-2005 academic year.

Chris Raub ’04, a senior Biology major at Harvey Mudd, earned an Honorable Mention in the NSF Graduate Fellowship competition.

[List of NSF graduate fellowship winners. ]

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HMC Math-Bio major wins Watson Fellowship. Tara Martin ’04, a Mathematical Biology major at Harvey Mudd College, has won a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship for the 2004-2005 academic year.

Tara’s project, “Finding the Inner Beat: Cultural Expression Through Movement,” will take her to Argentina, Brazil and Cape Verde as she studies dance forms including tango, samba, capoeira, and their African precursors.

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HMC Math-Bio majors rock at Interdisciplinary Contest in Modeling. Tara Martin ’04 and Lori Thomas ’05, Mathematical Biology majors at Harvey Mudd College, were members of teams that won “Outstanding” awards in the recent Interdisciplinary Contest in Modeling.

Tara’s teammates were Warren Katzenstein and Michael Vrable, and Lori’s teammates were Eli Bogart and Cal Pierog (all are Harvey Mudd undergrads). Only 4 teams from 143 entries worldwide received Outstanding honors.

The contest gives each team of three undergraduates 96 consecutive hours to develop a mathematical model and write a formal paper describing their work. This year’s problem was to optimize security measures for academic information systems. Both teams will have their papers published in the Journal of Undergraduate Mathematics and its Applications.