Research in the News
Wide Media Coverage for Recent Thornton Lab Nature Publication
Jamie Bridgham and Joe Thornton recently published a paper on the irreversibility of glucocorticoid reception evolution, along with their collaborator Eric Ortlund at Emory University. The research is so compelling that it has generated considerable commentary, in Science, The New York Times, The New York Times (again), and Nature. Those who missed Joe's seminar on October 5th should read the paper to see what everyone is talking about.
CEEB Graduate Student Wins NSERC Doctoral Prize
David Anderson, a second-year PhD student in the Thornton Lab, recently won a postgraduate scholarship from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC). This prestigious award is highly competitive; students must maintain an excellent academic record and show exceptional promise as a developing scientist to win.
Michelle Wood to Join ASLO Board
Outgoing CEEB Director Michelle Wood has recently joined the board of the American Society for Limnology and Oceanography (ASLO) and is helping plan the 2010 Ocean Sciences meeting. The meeting will draw several thousand oceanographers and marine biologists to Portland this winter. You can find more information on this large (and relatively local) meeting here. Information about ASLO, the largest international organization devoted to aquatic sciences, can be found here. For more information about Michelle's new appointment, click here.
CEEB Publication on Cover of Trends in Genetics
Kevin Emerson, a newly-minted post-doc in the Bradshaw/Holzapfel lab, recently published a paper that made the cover of Trends in Genetics. You can find the article online, here.
CEEB Student Leads Wildflower Walks
Second-year PhD student and accomplished botanist Tobias Policha lead an evolving series of nature walks every Wednesday, from early spring until midsummer. The Eugene Register-Guard featured a story about Tobias, leading a group of nearly 40 plant enthusiasts in Hendrick's Park. Tobias is entertaining, informative and extremely knowledgeable. He is likely to provide a similar program in the future; check back here for updates.
Bohannan Selected as 2009 Leopold Leadership Fellow
Brendan Bohannan will receive a Leopold Leadership Fellowship for 2009. This fellowship is awarded to up to 20 North American scientists annually, to help academic scientists contribute to public policy. You can read a longer press release here, and a description of the fellowship here.
Thornton to Deliver Next Lecture in Series Celebrating Charles Darwin
CEEB faculty member Joe Thornton will deliver the next lecture in a series celebrating the life and works of Charles Darwin. The University community has already heard Patrick Phillips discuss sex and aging, and Warren Holmes address altruism. On Tuesday night, March 10th, Thornton will demonstrate what molecular biology can reveal about the evolution of complexity by "Opening Up Darwin's Black Box."
7:30 PM, Tuesday, March 10th
150 Columbia Hall
1215 E. 13th Ave.
Thornton's lab was recently the subject of an extensive profile in Findings, the magazine of the National Institutes of Health. It also was part of a special series celebrating Charles Darwin's contribution to science, and can be found here.
Patrick Phillips Delivers Lecture Celbrating Darwin's Life, Works
On Tuesday, January 13th, Patrick Phillips delivered the first in what will be a series of lectures celebrating the life of Charles Darwin, and the publication of his book On the Origin of Species. This year marks the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth, and the 150th anniversary of the publication of "Origin." Patrick is a Professor in CEEB, and was recently awarded a Senior Scholar Award in Aging from the Ellison Medical Foundation to study the evolution of aging. His lecture - "Darwin's Puzzles: The Evolution of Sex and Death" - was packed; you can watch a video here. Warren Holmes delivered his lecture on February 10th, covering the evolution of cooperation (check back soon for a video link). More information on the lecture series is available here.
Professor Emeritus Richard Castenholz Honored with 2009 Porter Award
On Sunday, November 9th, Professor Emeritus Richard Castenholz was notified that he won the U.S. Federation for Culture Collections/J. Roger Porter Award for 2009 (Sponsored by the American Society for Microbiology). This award recognizes outstanding efforts by a scientist who has demonstrated the importance of microbial biodiversity through sustained curatorial or stewardship activities for a major resource used by the scientific community. Professor Castenholz will present the Roger Porter Award Lecture at the American Society for Microbiology meetings in Philadelphia, May 13-16, take part in an honorary dinner, and will receive travel and residency expenses for the meeting and a cash prize of $2000.
More information
CEEB Holds Annual Retreat
The CEEB Annual Retreat was September 18th and 19th at the McKenzie River Conference Center and United States Basketball Academy, in scenic Blue River, Oregon. Patrick Phillips organized the event. There were posters, poems, hikes, exothermic nocturnal organic reactions and a successful town-hall meeting. Next year's Retreat Coordinator has yet to be determined.
More photos (courtesy of Dave Clements)
CEEB Faculty, Graduate Student, Receive Biology Department Teaching Awards.
Alan Dickman, a Senior Instructor and Research Associate Professor in CEEB, and the Director of the Environmental Studies Department, and Paul Cziko, who just completed his first year as a doctoral student, each earned a Deparment of Biology Teaching Award. These awards, given annually, recognize outstanding teaching by one faculty member, one graduate teaching fellow, and one undergraduate teaching assistant. Students submit nominations for teachers who have made significant impacts in their education during their studies in the Department of Biology.
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Paul Cziko wins NSF Graduate Research Fellowship.
Paul Cziko, a first-year doctoral student in CEEB, has been awarded a prestigious National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. This highly competitive award -- the NSF offered only about one thousand this year in all fields of science and engineering, and just 22 to evolutionary biologists --
provides three years of support for outstanding graduate students whom the NSF expects to contribute significantly to research, teaching, and innovation in science and engineering. More information
IGERT Symposium Highlights Future Directions for Evo-Devo.
The University of Oregon recently hosted the fifth annual IGERT Symposium on Evolution, Development and Genomics, "From Pattern to Process:
Bridging Micro- and Macroevolutionary Concepts through Evo-Devo." The symposium drew more than 100 participants from around the world for more than a dozen scientific presentations, fostered extensive interactions between students and leading scientists, and highlighted future directions for Evo-Devo.
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CEEB's Joe Thornton honored at White House.
Associate Professor Joe Thornton was recently awarded the U.S. Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, the nation's highest honor for young scientists, in a White House Ceremony. More information
CEEB's Jessica Green receives Moore Foundation grant for metagenomics.
If you were part of an organization that was generating huge amounts of genomic data, what would you do about recovering the most important biological information from it? The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, which has funded ambitious research in marine microbiology and environmental genomics, is faced with exactly that problem. "Metagenomic" techniques involve simultaneously characterizing the genomes of whole communities of organisms in an environment. This approach promises great progress in our understanding of the abundance and distribution of microorganisms in the environment, but methods are not well-developed for analyzing the huge quantities of mixed data it generates. To meet this challenge, the Moore foundation recently awarded CEEB's Jessica Green and her collaborators Jonathan Eisen and Katherine Pollard (both at University of California, Davis) a three-year, $1.8 million research grant, "Integrating Evolutionary, Ecological, and Statistical Approaches to Metagenomics". The team will develop computational and theoretical strategies to efficiently extract information about microbial diversity, evolution, and function from environmental metagenomic data.
Dick Castenholz and Liz Perry receive awards for microbiology research.
Richard W. Castenholz, CEEB Professor Emeritus, was recently recognized for "seminal contributions to research in the geothermal systems of Yellowstone National Park" by the NSF-funded Research Coordination Network for Geothermal Biology and Geochemistry in Yellowstone National Park. At the RCN's January 2008 conference at Montana State University, Liz Perry, a CEEB first-year graduate student, received the runner-up prize for best oral presentation by a graduate student. Liz's talk, "The Diversity of the thermo-acidophilic Cyanidiales in Yellowstone, Japan, New Zealand, Iceland, and the Philippines," was based on her fall rotation project in the Castenholz lab.
June Keay receives award from the Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution.
June Keay, a graduate student in Joe Thornton's lab, received the award for best student poster at the Society's June 2007 meeting in Halifax, Canada. The conference -- the premier international meeting in molecular evolution each year -- featured some 700 participants from more than 25 countries. June's poster, "Estrogen receptor evolution by loss of function mutations," was one of six winners, out of more than 350 poster presentations. The Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution
Crystal Structure of an Ancient Protein: Evolution by Conformational Epistasis
Eric A. Ortlund, Jamie T. Bridgham, Matthew R. Redinbo, Joseph W. Thornton
Science, 14 September 2007: 1544-1548
See related articles at the Science Magazine, The New York Times, and UO University News
Evolutionary Responses to Rapid Climate Change
Bill Bradshaw and Chris Holzapfel
Science 9 June 2006: 1477-1478
See related articles in Inside Oregon and in the Portland Oregonian
2007 Guggenheim Fellows
Patrick Phillips is one of three University of Oregon researchers receiving Guggenheim Fellowships, one of higher education’s top honors.
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