Joanna Kelley, a new assistant professor in biological sciences, is one of 20 scientists worldwide named as promising young investigators in the annual list compiled by GenomeWeb publisher.
The early-career honorees were recommended by established principal investigators. Kelley was recommended by Carlos Bustamante, Stanford University School of Medicine.
In the weeks before hibernating, bears pack away enough apples, berries and salmon to put on 100 pounds or more under their brown fur. Their bad cholesterol jumps and blood pressure spikes. But unlike humans, their health doesn’t suffer. Bears’ arteries don’t clog from the gorging, nor do the animals battle heart attacks or turn into diabetics. To figure out why, WSU researchers draw the bears’ blood, biopsy their fat deposits and listen to their hearts—carefully.
Few places are available for this kind of bear study. Washington State University says it has the only facility in the world housing adult grizzlies for research. Behind chain-link fences, the 12 bears wander along grassy hills and among Douglas firs and Ponderosa pines, or they relax inside concrete dens and runs. When winter nears, they hibernate.
Bears at the center, set up 27 years ago, are either born at the facility or rescued from places such as Yellowstone National Park because they got too close to humans.
Vanessa Serratore (zoology ’08, DVM ’11) began researching the body temperature molting Monarch butterfly larvae for her undergraduate honors thesis while studying abroad in Australia. Working in collaboration with Patrick Carter, WSU associate professor in biological sciences, and Myron Zalucki of the University of Queensland, Serratore successfully completed a four-site research study while also completing her doctorate in veterinary medicine at WSU. The resulting paper was published in the February 2013 print issue of Australian Journal of Entomology and online in September.
In December, Pat Carter, associate professor in the School of Biological Sciences (SBS), received the Outstanding Advising Award from the WSU chapter of the National Academic Advising Association. He is associate director of the SBS undergraduate program and the school’s dedicated advisor for pre-veterinary studies.
Of his 17 years as a student advisor, Carter believes “advising is one of the most rewarding aspects of my job.”
“We thought we understood how things happened, but maybe they happened for another reason,” says Emily Jones, a Rice University researcher in evolutionary ecology who started pondering Darwin’s conundrum while a post-doctoral researcher in the Washington State University lab of Richard Gomulkiewicz. Writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Jones and colleagues Gomulkiewicz and Scott Nuismer of the University of Idaho say the relatedness of new and established species is not as important as the details of how they go about doing their business..
“Darwin put out a lot of interesting ideas back in the day but he didn’t have the means to check them with rigor,” says Gomulkiewicz, a professor in the WSU School of Biological Sciences. “That’s what we did with our mathematical model, and we found that Darwin’s logic on this issue doesn’t quite pan out.”