N E W S for A L U M N I
PLANT DEFENSE & GROWTH
BIOLOGY NEWS
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ANATOMY AS RELIGION
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SPRING 2022
WINNINGEST COACH IN THE NFL
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Contents
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Publisher University of Utah School of Biological Sciences 257 S 1400 E, 201B Salt Lake City, UT 84112-0840
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From the Co-Directors Breathing Easier
New Faculty: Heejin Yoo
Feeding the World Through Plant Fitness and Defense
Alumni: George Seifert
School Co-Directors Leslie Sieburth Neil Vickers
Writer & Editor
The winningest coach in the NFL
David G. Pace
Retirement: Mark Nielsen
Alumni Relations | Development Committee
Anatomy’s Eureka! Moments
Outreach
Neil Vickers, Chair
Letters from the Galápagos Islands
Lynn Bohs
Kudos
Çağan Şekercioğlu
Dale Clayton
New Fellows at The National Academy of Sciences and American Association for the Advancement of Science
On the Cover
Stay connected Visit, respond, subscribe, donate: www.biology.utah.edu
Retiring human anatomy professor Mark Nielsen has left an indelible impression on SBS and beyond. Illustration from De humani corporis fabrica libri septem (On the fabric of the human body in seven books) by Andreas Vesalius (1514–1564). Public Domain Mark.
Request an e-version of OUR DNA in place of a mailed copy at development@biology.utah.edu
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FROM THE CO-DIRECTORS
Breathing
Easier T
he pleasure of interacting with people during recent events (e.g. annual Awards Ceremony and Social, research and doctoral thesis defense seminars) has been palpable! We eased our distancing requirements as we entered the spring’s lull in the pandemic and the fine outdoor weather returned.
This issue of OUR DNA references some of these changes as we sincerely hope that the improved conditions continue, allowing us to adopt a “new normal.” The School successfully hosted our Distinguished Alumni, one of whom, Nina Buchmann, made an appearance virtually from Switzerland. The School has had no shortage of awards in the past six months, including from the American Association for the Advancement of Science which announced that three of four inductees at the U were biology faculty. In May, biology’s Erik Jorgensen, Distinguished Professor and HHMI Investigator, was one of two U professors elected into the National Academy of Sciences, and Thure Cerling was awarded The Rosenblatt Prize during commencement, the most prestigious faculty award given at the U. Speaking of graduation week, during convocation on May 5, Biology graduated 207 undergraduates and fourteen graduate students. One of the barometers of our outstanding graduates is the number completing their degrees with honors this year: twenty-five. Carrying out honors research is difficult at any time, and pandemic-related challenges certainly did not make it any easier. We are proud of these intrepid souls. In addition to stories about alumni and a youth scientist’s report on her time in the Galápagos Islands, in this issue we feature a new faculty member, plant biologist Heejin Yoo whose research interest is the distinct regulatory mechanisms plants have to attract friends as well as to defend against foes. This molecular biological work has huge implications for agriculture and for feeding a hungry world. While we welcome Dr. Yoo, we also bid a fond farewell to anatomy professor Mark Nielsen, who over the course of thirtyseven years has taught more than 32,000 students. His unique approach used teaching assistants and mentors, and provided
exceptional training to thousands of pre-med students who are now health professionals throughout the Mountain West and beyond. You will all be happy to know that their hands-on learning experience in a full cadaver lab provided a solid foundation for Co-Directors Leslie Sieburth and Neil Vickers these individuals to provide premium care. We will miss this beloved teacher of anatomy and are honoring him by establishing the Mark T. Nielsen Endowed Scholarship for Anatomy. As our time as Co-Directors draws to a conclusion, we want to thank you for your interest in and support of the School. We also want to introduce to you our new Director, Fred Adler (inset), who will be taking the reins beginning July 1. Fred enjoys a joint appointment between SBS and the Department of Mathematics, and his research featured in the Fall 2021 edition of OUR DNA employs mathematical modeling to inform a wide spectrum of biological research, including the coronavirus. We know he’ll do a great job!
Fred Adler
Thank you for supporting our students and research through your generous donations, including legacy gifts which you can read about on the back cover. We wish you a safe and enjoyable summer.
Neil J. Vickers | Leslie E. Sieburth Professors and Co-Directors School of Biological Sciences 1
FACULT Y SPOTLIGHT
Feeding the
World
Through Plant Fitness and Defense
By Heejin Yoo
In January, the School of Biological Sciences added two new plant biologists to its stable of tenure-track faculty. A couple, Heejin Yoo and Chan Yul Yoo, come to SBS via Oklahoma State University where they were in faculty positions. At the University of Utah, each has their own separate research lab, and their work differs from each other in both scope and focus. In this issue of OUR DNA, we have invited Heejin to share with us her research story. You can read more about her work at her lab website: hyoo-pbio.com/
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grew up in a house filled with various plant species because my mother loves gardening. Today, my parents have a huge garden on Yeonsan mountain about forty-five minutes away from our home in Daejeon, South Korea. There they grow lots of flowers, vegetables, trees, etc. My mother’s loving care for plants and my father’s research in biology influenced me a lot, and inspired me to major in plant biology in college. While an undergraduate, the study of genetically modified organisms (GMO) was a hot topic, and I became fascinated with plant molecular biology. I dreamt about studying how plants grow in continuously changing environments and how to make healthy plants with genetic engineering. 2
In graduate school at Purdue University, my interest in plants became more serious when I learned that plants seem to have very distinct regulatory mechanisms to attract friends as well as to defend against foes. As stationary organisms, plants must have various strategies to handle friends and foes very differently than that of animals which are mobile and have specialized immune cells to defend against pathogens. Plants cannot run away from their enemies or approach their friends. So how do plants then defend themselves from harm while continuing to flourish?
Volatiles to attract and repel One of plants’ key approaches to this is through volatiles, the metabolites they release into the air. The quantities released are not trivial; almost
one-fifth of the atmospheric CO2 fixed by land plants is released back into the air each day as volatiles. Some flowers emit volatiles to attract pollinators, thus solving the problem of not being able to travel themselves. In contrast to the effort to attract, some plants repel insect herbivores by emitting volatiles such as menthol, having unpleasant odors. During my PhD program, I studied plant volatiles in Petunia hybrida which attracts moths at night. Since Petunia hybrida emits phenylalanine-derived volatiles, my main research was focused on identification and characterization of unknown genes in phenylalanine biosynthesis to ultimately understand the regulatory mechanism of phenylalanine biosynthesis and phenylalanine-derived volatile compounds.
Heejin Yoo’s mother’s garden in South Korea. With her parents, husband Chan Yul, and their son Aiden.
Later, during my postdoc research at Duke University, I began to dig into plants’ strategy to defend against their foes. One of these strategies is to regulate a phytohormone called salicylic acid, a well-known plant defense hormone against biotrophic pathogens and also a natural substance of pharmacological compounds. The famous pain killer aspirin is a synthetic compound derived from salicylic acid through acetylation with acetic anhydride. Methyl salicylate is the methyl ester of salicylic acid. It is a volatile, which gives inter- and intra-species airborne signals to give warning against pathogen attack. Methyl salicylate, a major component of wintergreen oil, smells minty and has been used in oils, food production, sports medicine and cosmetics. From my post-doc study on regulation of salicylic acid biosynthesis in the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana, our research team discovered that the transcription factor CHE controls circadian rhythm and systemic induction of salicylic acid. This controlled rhythm is critical for plant immunity because the level of salicylic acid peaks at dawn to adapt to the environmental challenge of biotrophic pathogens which are elevated in the morning.
Unpredictable pathogen infection Additionally, systemic induction of salicylic acid is a key immune mechanism to establish systemic acquired resistance (SAR) in distal uninfected leaves. When local plant tissue is infected by a pathogen carrying effectors, the infected tissue dies by activating what we call programmed cell death (PCD) to trap the effectors in the infected site. During PCD in local tissue, uninfected neighboring tissue receives signals from local infected tissue and establishes SAR, which confers a broad spectrum of resistance in uninfected tissue to prepare for potential attacks. Especially in field-grown crop plants, timing of these attacks varies in different parts of plants. In this way, SAR establishment is critical for plants to prepare and protect from unpredictable pathogen infection at the whole plant level. Other research during my post-doc was focused on translational regulation in plant immunity, which controls the levels of protein synthesis from its mRNA. Translational regulation is another important layer of regulatory mechanisms beyond
transcriptional regulation. From this study, we discovered distinct translational regulatory mechanisms for local immune activation. Stemming from my diverse educational background as well as my past research, the Heejin Yoo lab (HYoo Lab) is interested in studying the dynamic regulation of plant metabolism and immunity for balancing plant growth and defense. The HYoo lab is particularly interested in following metabolites for plant immunity: salicylic acid, amino acids and plant volatiles.
Super Plants A first direction in this research is to study the regulatory mechanism of salicylic acid in crop species especially focused on Brassica napus (Canola) and Camelina sativa (Camelina), which are both important oilseed plant species. A second direction is to study the role of selected amino acids for plant immunity. A third direction is to study plant volatiles for defense activation and communication with other plants. Through this progression, the HYoo Lab is attempting to understand the action molecular mechanisms of systemic immunity. We also want to approach this research with a focus on translational regulation in systemic tissue. We expect to find novel regulatory mechanisms during systemic immunity through translational control. By elucidating multiple layers of unknown mechanisms for plant immunity, we try to find the ideal genetic engineering strategy to improve immunity of crop species. Our research team first mainly focuses on basic science research rather than working from an agricultural (or applied) platform. Ultimately, I believe that the knowledge gained from basic science research will provide a better strategy for agricultural application. My dream is to develop “super-plants” with strong disease resistance and a high yield, which, again, can solve the increasing food demand due to increasing world population. I feel like I’ve traveled quite a distance from my mother’s gardens in South Korea where I first fell in love with plants, an affinity underscored by my father’s biological training. In fact, I have traveled quite a way from my undergraduate studies at Seoul National University in Korea, to graduate school at Purdue and then to complete a postdoctoral position at Duke in the United States. But my subject model of plants has remained the same even if my research has taken many twists and turns. 3
ALUMNI SPOTLIGHT
George Seifert, BS’64 The Art (and Sport) of Teaching
G
eorge Seifert began his professional coaching career in 1977 as a defensive assistant to San Francisco 49ers’ head coach Bill Walsh. After nine years and three Super Bowl championships with Walsh, Seifert was appointed Head Coach of the San Francisco 49ers in 1989.
They were big shoes to fill for the unassuming defensive specialist and defensive backfield coach standing on the sidelines wearing his signature windbreaker and poker face, and not everyone thought he was up to it. “My wife told me, ‘George don’t screw it up,’” Seifert has reported, “so I did everything I could not to screw it up.” Little did he know then that someday he would be first an assistant coach and then the head coach of his hometown team, accompanying the 49ers to two more Super Bowl wins for a career total of five.
Crossroads of the West None of this was to happen until after college, however. The Friday before he enrolled in Cal Poly Tech, the University of Utah offered him a football scholarship. He took it. The 4
freshman guard and linebacker found himself on a bus headed for Salt Lake City, the “crossroads of the west.” When asked why biology, Seifert at first did not know what he wanted to major in, but due to the enthusiasm and expertise of his professors during his first year of general ed, he gravitated to zoology. He recalls stepping outside the old (and now raised) Ballif residence hall in his shorts with binoculars on a Saturday, kiting off to do field research while his “kibitzing” buddies, ready to party, chided him. He didn’t care. He loved the fact that he could step outside his dorm, just below Ft. Douglas, and almost instantly be in the mountains and among wildlife. Even in his shorts and with the friendly ridicule of his dorm mates, he was willing to follow his passion. Seifert says he wasn’t much of a football player, but that he made a better coach, and it had to do with his time at the U. Following graduation in 1964, he entered a master’s program in physical education and was a graduate assistant for the football program. The very next year the Utah Utes beat West Virginia 32-6 in the Liberty Bowl, the first bowl game to be held indoors. “I was always into football,” he says, but “I loved the teaching aspect of it.” At age 25, he was hired by Westminster College to reboot its football program, and he clearly had found his bliss. From there he followed U Coach Ray Nagel to the University of Iowa.
It helps to have his trusty companions along with him, Cavalier King Charles spaniels Rusty and Dusty who, he says with affection, are just a couple of awesome “ragamuffins.” It bears repeating, though, that the circuitous route from college football player and biology major at the U and then to the art (and sport) of teaching and coaching, was one that Seifert chose to embrace fully. There are many people, many former players and many fans—especially among the San Francisco “Faithful”—who are glad he did.
The Coach After working as an assistant at the University of Iowa, the University of Oregon and Stanford University, Seifert was hired as head coach at Cornell University. Following Cornell, in 1977, Seifert returned to Stanford where he first met Bill Walsh, destined to become the legendary coach of the San Francisco 49ers. In 1979 he was offered the position as the coach of the defensive backs for the 49ers. On Seifert’s 49th birthday, the 49ers won Super Bowl XXIII (January 22, 1989), and the following season he was promoted to head coach. Three superstars later—Joe Montana, Jerry Rice and Steve Young—and the team had won two more Super Bowls, one in 1989 and another in 1994. Seifert is one of only thirteen NFL head coaches with more than one Super Bowl victory and he still holds the record (98) for franchise wins and also the record for winning percentage (76.6%).
The Retiree Today, Seifert lives with his wife Linda in Nevada where he has returned to nature through fishing and hunting. He loves getting into the outback where he has made friends with ranchers and gets to return to his zoological background, studying life all around him.
“I was always into football,” he says, but “I loved the teaching aspect of it.”
The Philosopher From his home base, split between Nevada and the North Bay, near where his two children and four grandchildren live, Seifert has watched with gratification as the University of Utah Football Program has expanded and grown into a “new environment.” He’s watched with interest as head coach Kyle Whittingham, despite heavy recruiting from other teams, decided to coach at the U, Seifert’s alma mater. The U’s first time ever at the Rose Bowl this past January, is strong evidence that, in the Pac-12 and nationally, the Utah Utes are a force to be reckoned with. You can read an expanded version of this article at biology.utah.edu
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RETIREMENT
W
hat constitutes a legacy? Is it having taught as many as 32,000 students? Publishing forty-eight teaching publications and twenty videos along with software and abstracts? Is it having scores of presentations and lectures under one’s belt? Six professional affiliations? No less than thirty-five teaching awards?
What about securing $1.5 million for your department (now a School) from outside certificate-granting schools of massage? For the John Legler Endowed Anatomy Lecturer Mark Nielsen, the true measure of his legacy is in the loyalty of his students who on the first day of their lecture/lab were greeted by a tall, smiling, one-time basketball player who announced dogmatically, “Anatomy is your new religion!” The statement was both serious and tongue-in-cheek, but it got the attention of pre-nursing, pre-pharma, pre-dental, pre-medical students and others from not just biology but from across the university. It also registered famously with the teaching assistants and mentors that Nielsen enlisted early in his career to help run such a vast program in anatomy–more than 1,600 over the years. Students teaching students was Nielsen’s calling card, with as many as five TAs per section of lecture/cadaver lab work.
Anatomy Professor
Mark Nielsen
Giving Students a “Eureka!” Moment
Nielsen was a student in the late John Legler’s anatomy lab in the early 80s (the Salt Lake City native graduated with a BA in 1983 and an MA in ’87, both in biology from the U), and quickly became his heir apparent. Legler and other faculty members like Dennis Bramble (now emeritus) were anatomists with a comparative and evolutionary perspective. It was the combination of that with Nielsen’s tenacity, strategy and uniquely developed pedagogical platform that converged into the program SBS and the University of Utah see today. Dave Carrier, a faculty colleague who at the 2022 Awards Ceremony in April extolled Nielsen’s signature approach to teaching, explained: “His teaching changes the way people’s brains work. His teaching gives people a new understanding of who they are and who humans are as a species. He gives students a ‘Eureka!’ moment.” The religion-of-anatomy boot camp went like this: four lectures each week with an accompanying lab, each lab section with five teaching assistants, each stationed with an intricately prepared cadaver dissection. As the class rotated through the stations, it was the TA who taught the small groups on the cadaver dissection what they had learned from Nielsen the previous week in lecture. Students were encouraged to ask questions, explore the specimen and experience first-hand what constitutes the human body. This learn-in-lecture/see-in-lab approach taught by a fleet of well-trained TAs was reinforced weekly when Nielsen met each Friday with his team of TAs and mentors, all of whom were undergraduates. The first rule of teaching is that if you can teach the subject yourself, or even some part of it, then you can be sure that you know the material. Empowering TAs not only allowed Nielsen to teach so many students, but it instilled in the TAs a real
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loyalty to him…as much as any apprentice’s affinity for their master teacher. To watch Nielsen in the classroom setting with about a hundred students in the Talmage Building is to experience poetry in motion. His tone is conversational, his method Socratic and he uses mnemonic devices and developmental patterns to aid in memorization, referring to repeating anatomical components as “Tom, Dick and Harry” while generously adding from time to time during the lecture, “That would be good advice for a test.” Additionally, Nielsen uses dozens of digital illustrations which speak to another aspect of his career: his textbooks (one of which is currently in its 15th edition), CD-ROMs, and most recently, Real Anatomy, an interactive software program (which debuted in 2009 and is now in a 2.0 version), with colleague Shawn Miller. Rather than using modeled images, the software features thousands of detailed photographs of actual dissections in an interactive and searchable platform. All of this, including one-on-one consultations and study groups, converges to elevate the experience students have during their unique semester of learning anatomy. Whether he’s talking about muscle innervation or the popliteal artery that pushes blood through the leg to the foot, or the fact that the sciatic nerve is actually two, the students are rapt, and it’s hard not to think of them in the lab shortly afterwards actually probing that artery and that nerve in three-dimensional space. What’s also striking is that this is not just taxonomy. Nielsen regularly talks and even illustrates the kinesthetic nature as if he’s choreographing and then performing a multi-dimensional dance. The dance of the human body writ large. “A teacher is not simply a knowledge source,” Nielsen writes when asked “Why teach?” “One might profess knowledge,
wisdom, and expertise, yet never truly be a teacher. Anyone can share knowledge. A teacher is someone who uses their knowledge, wisdom, and expertise to show others how to learn, how to think, and how to use knowledge as a problemsolving tool.” Professionally, Mark has been a member of the Human Anatomy and Physiology Society (HAPS) for many years and was elected its president in 2018. When HAPS arrived in Salt Lake City for their annual conference, it became clear to Carrier and others that the SBS Anatomy Program with its full cadaver lab, highly trained TAs and uniquely prepared director is the gold standard for programs in the United States. “It’s not that we have a good program here,” says Carrier, “it’s that we have the worlds’ best.” Needless to say, whoever steps in to replace Mark Nielsen will have some big loafers to fill. He is one of those legendary professors that college graduates remember wistfully. It’s as if he’s been their one-time spirit guide through a brave new world that is utterly relevant, deeply rooted in their experience, and overlayed with nothing less than awe. For some it sort of feels like the zeal expressed by some religionists… evolutionarily speaking, of course. Are you an alum of Mark Nielsen’s anatomy program? Visit our anatomy web pages at biology.utah.edu/ anatomy to share your memories and update us on your career. You can also join us in funding the newlycreated Mark T. Nielsen Endowed Scholarship Fund at https://giving.utah.edu/ mark-nielsen/ 7
OUTREACH
The Clayton-Bush family, including Sonora and her brother Austin. Dale Clayton and Sarah Bush are faculty members at the School of Biological Sciences.
Footnotes from a Young Scientist
Letters from the
Galápagos
Islands
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O
ur South American correspondent Sonora “Nora” Clayton happily embarked on an excursion of a lifetime in January of this year: the Galápagos Islands off the coast of mainland Ecuador. The middle-schooler was embedded in Clayton/Bush lab fieldwork (Dale Clayton and Sarah Bush also happen to be her parents.)
It was a first-hand view of research into parasites of birds, and her weekly, illustrated letters each began with the familiar ‘To whom it may concern.’ The project was followed by Utah school teachers and has now been archived. “This expedition’s purpose is to study avian vampire flies (Philornis downsi),” wrote Nora in the first letter before leaving Salt Lake City, “and how these flies affect finches and mockingbirds in the Galápagos Islands. So, we’ll pack spotting scopes for watching birds, a field microscope for identifying flies, nets, and banding equipment so that we can give each bird a unique colored bracelet for identification. Most of these supplies are [currently] in a pile on our basement floor.” It wasn’t an easy venture, not only because of the distance, but because of Covid-19. The entire team had to be tested
Iguana
repeatedly before, during and after their stay following international travel protocol. The team spent most of their ten weeks on the Isla Santa Cruz at the Playa El Garrapatero field site. On Santa Cruz, wildlife was, well, everywhere: Sally Lightfoot crabs, cownose rays, geckos (which show up everywhere), iguanas, seals and the signature tortoises, that based on the submitted photos, looked like the size of the original Smart car. An excellent (and a little spooky) photo of sharks through filtered light graced letter #5. In other letters were pen-and-ink and water-colored drawings of longhorn beetles, curious-looking botanicals… even two skulls, one of a dolphin and another of a whale! The letters were far more than the scribblings of a tourist. Nora helped explain the research in detail, including their main subject, Philornis downsi: “Originally, it was suggested that the fly be named ‘Vampire Fly.’ That name was rejected, because evidently it could be mistaken for a fly living on vampires. As surprising as it may be, Philornis lives on a slightly less chiropteran host: birds. So, the name was changed to ‘Avian Vampire Fly.’” The fly is a parasite on the mockingbird, so the team was kept busy tagging birds and peering into their nests through a “plumber’s camera” perched on the top of a pole. But it wasn’t all about work for Nora and the rest of the team. “Puerto Ayora isn’t a very big town,” explained Nora about the closest settlement to their research site, “so people walk almost everywhere. …In the evenings our group usually walks to one of the outdoor kiosks for dinner. …On Friday nights, the main street called ‘Avenida Charles Darwin’ is blocked off so that people can walk in the street and go to the shops.” The University of Utah team also visited giant sinkholes called “Los Gemelos” aka “The Twins.” This was up in the highlands which are greener than the lowlands, with trees called Scalesia that are actually more closely related to a daisy than to other trees. Back down in the lowlands, Nora reported, “cactus spines in our shoes aren’t ideally tropical, and the dry plants and sharp lava rocks aren’t quite what Darwin expected….” A photo of her pulling those spines out of her shoes gives the reader an up-close-and-personal perspective.
Frigate bird
Following their research in the Islands, the Clayton/Bush team set off for a side trip to the Amazon region of Ecuador. But per usual, school work—even in faraway South America—didn’t wait. “We finished packing for [the city of ] Quito this morning. I took a final exam for science, so I’m almost done with schoolwork until we get home. We’ve been talking with our teachers in Utah this week to have our tests unlocked early so that we can take them before we leave for the mainland.” On their way to Tiputini, a field station in the Amazon, they stopped to look at wildlife and birds along the way, including colored tanagers, thrushes and oropendolas, as well as hummingbirds fighting for a feeder. “We even heard a Macaw.”
“The dry plants and sharp lava rocks aren’t quite what Darwin expected.” Perhaps it was fitting that the only family photo we received was at the Tiputini Research Station in front of a giant fig tree which, according to Nora’s father, “may have as much biomass as all the trees at our Galápagos field site combined!” Even so it was a reminder to both the research team and the eager readers of Nora’s “Letters from Galápagos Islands” of just how big and impenetrable our natural world is, even for scientists. As for Nora Clayton that natural world will continue to pique her curiosity as both a researcher and an artist. Youth is definitely on her side. For now, it’s back to a more traditional classroom in Salt Lake City. You can read all of Nora’s letters at biology.utah.edu as well as at science.utah.edu
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KUDOS
Erik Jorgensen, 2022 NAS Fellow
New Fellow at the
National Academy of Sciences W hen explaining his work, Erik Jorgensen, a geneticist who studies the synapse, can transport you to an almost galactic place—the observable universe of the brain.
“Synapses are contacts between nerve cells in your brain,” says the School of Biological Sciences’ distinguished professor and Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator who May 3, 2022 was elected to the National Academy of Sciences (NAS). “You have trillions of them. Think of all the stars you can see on a moonless night on Bald Mountain,” he continues, referring to the 11,949-foot peak in the nearby Uinta Mountains. “Multiply that by 100 billion. I will give you a few minutes to do the calculation. …That’s how many synapses you have—the brain can hold and process a lot of information with all of those synapses. The memory of your grandmother lives here, along with cello lessons, the smell of your mother after visiting the hairdresser’s, and eating a raw olive given to you by your brother. It’s a crowded place.” 10
Scientists want to know how synapses work, says Jorgensen, “understand how they change to store a memory, and how they become corrupted when we forget, or why they die as we pass into dementia.” As of 2020, Jorgensen has been a collaborator in the National Science Foundation-funded Neuronex 2 Project, and he knows what it takes to understand these elusive, minute gaps between nerve cells. His election to the NAS, arguably the most prestigious award of its kind, speaks to the kind of mind-blowing inquiry into neurology for which he’s known. It also validates Jorgensen’s inner galactic allusion to locating where your grandmother suffering from severe dementia lives along with “your childhood friends, embarrassment, fear, love, and hate.” Fifty U researchers have been elected to the NAS since its inception. In addition to Jorgensen, this year Valeria Molinera, distinguished professor of chemistry, was also elected. More at science.utah.edu
KUDOS
Denise M. Dearing, Distinguished Professor
Kelly Hughes, Professor
Dale Clayton, Professor
New Fellows at the
American Association for the Advancement of Science
A
mong the four University of Utah scientists selected as 2021 fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), three were from the School of Biological Sciences.
The researchers joined other newly named fellows to be inducted during the organization’s annual meeting on Feb. 19 in Philadelphia. The AAAS has members in more than ninety countries and is also the publisher of the Science family of
research journals. The AAAS Council elects members whose “efforts on behalf of the advancement of science, or its applications, are scientifically or socially distinguished.” One of the more prestigious of its kind, the AAAS Fellowship dates back to 1874 and often precedes other accolades in long and impactful careers, including the Nobel Prize. The awardees this year were acknowledged at the annual SBS awards ceremony and social, April 27, 2022.
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2022 Distinguished Alumni Awards Four alumni were recognized for their achievements at the Awards Ceremony & Social April 27, 2022.
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Nina Buchmann, PhD
Jennifer Sorensen Forbey, PhD
Professor of Grassland Sciences in the Institute of Agricultural Sciences at ETH Zurich, Switzerland. (Postdoctoral alumna, Ehleringer lab)
BS’03, Professor of Biological Sciences at Boise State
Carol Blair Brennan, PhD
Jed P. Sparks, PhD
HBA’64, Professor Emerita in the Department of Microbiology, Immunology and Pathology at Colorado State University
BS’95, Professor of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology at Cornell University
Briefly Noted
You can read more news and spotlights of SBS alumni at biology.utah.edu where you can also share your own updates as an alumni/friend. We want to hear from U!
SBS Professor Emerita Naomi Franklin passed away on December 24, 2021 in Salt Lake City. She was 92. Colleague Larry Okun, also emeritus, described Franklin as a “complex character, stubborn and sometimes irascible on the one hand and extraordinarily caring and generous on the other. … She was also a meticulous scientist, for example, uncovering, essentially single-handedly, significant insights about anti-termination in lambda phage that turned out to be of value in studies of HIV.” One of very few women STEM researchers at the University of Utah at the time of her arrival, she regularly extolled the essential nature of science to ameliorate or at least manage some of the world’s most intractable problems, including, among many others, bad air quality in the valley where she lived. Read the full appreciation of Dr. Franklin at biology.utah.edu
“I came to the U of U to be a doctor and was content with that decision and path until I took a plant physiology class from Leslie Sieburth,” says Patrick Newman, BA’03, of the SBS plant biologist who studies pathologies in Arabadopsis. “That course changed my perspective of biology, refocused my interests, and altered my career path—all of which I am extremely grateful for.” Following a stint with the Peace Corps, he returned to the U where he earned an MPA in 2010 and worked at Red Butte Garden for a decade. This was followed by his appointment as Executive Director of the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center in Austin, TX. Then in 2020, he was recruited to lead the merger of the Botanical Research Institute of Texas (BRIT) and the Fort Worth Botanical Garden where his currently CEO and president.
At a time when women were discouraged from pursuing advanced degrees, Estelle Dina Shuster Marlor, MA’57, who died in June 2021 at age 86, chose to attend graduate school in zoology and comparative anatomy at the U. She was the only woman graduate student in her department. Her master’s degree thesis was on “The Bats of Utah.” While taking a class in human anatomy, her assigned dissection partner was Russell Larry Marlor. Despite the decidedly non-romantic setting of working on a shared corpse (whom they named Blanche), Estelle and Russell married in 1959. After Russell’s graduation and US Navy commission, they shipped out together for adventures that took them all around the world. In addition to being a Navy wife she worked as a volunteer for community organizations, including local schools, the Red Cross, the Navy Relief Society and voter registration all while raising three daughters.
Loren D. Jensen, BS’60, MS’62, PhD ’65, a scientist who studied the Chesapeake Bay, died January 20. He was awarded the Distinguished Alumnus Award in 2012 by the Department of Biology, now SBS. He was 84. The Salt Lake native joined the faculty of the department of geography and environmental engineering and the department of environmental health in the School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University in 1965. He worked on developing methodologies for aquatic ecological assessments of large volume surface water discharged by power plants and evaluated the measures used for protecting aquatic organisms potentially affected by toxic industrial discharges into surface waters. He also worked on the development of aquaculture as a mitigation response to large-scale regional water quality problems. In 1973, he founded Ecological Analysts, later EA.
“I was so excited to have been peed on by a titi monkey while walking to lab,” Julie Jung remembers of her time in the jungles of Panama doing field work as a graduate student. During the course of getting her doctorate at Boston University, she slowly grew into her role as a behavioral biologist. As winner of this year’s College of Science’s “Outstanding Post-Doc Award,” she has found a scientific home in the Michael Werner Lab studying the phenomenon of “phenotypic plasticity”—or how the same genotype produces distinct phenotypes depending on environmental conditions. The lab’s subject model is primarily nematodes. Jung’s NSF-funded research hopes to establish a general model of plasticity across diverse systems. The pivot from field work to bench work has been jarring, but only partially—as she and her lab members still get out to the Great Salt Lake to collect soil specimens.
“My best trait is the ability to hang out with people who are far more capable than I am,” says Charles Sorenson, MD, FACS, in a 2020 interview. “I am not intimidated by working with people who are smarter than I am.” The former president and CEO of Intermountain Healthcare, the Salt Lake City-based nonprofit regional healthcare system, and by some measurements the largest employer in Utah, must have been “hanging” with some pretty capable and smart people over the years . . . and vice versa. Now Emeritus CEO, the U Biology alumnus, HBA’74, has a long history at Intermountain as a urologic surgeon and physician leader. Today he serves as Founding Director of Intermountain Healthcare Leadership Institute. In 2009 President Barack Obama publicly acknowledged IHC, more than once, as a model of quality, low-cost, integrated patient care.
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A deep commitment to U Biology… Through a Legacy Gift
M
y wife Tanya Williams and I are happy to be able to provide a planned gift to the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Utah. We moved to Utah in 2010 to establish my Biodiversity and Conservation Ecology laboratory. I am thankful for the research, teaching and service opportunities provided to me by the University of Utah’s School of Biological Sciences, and Tanya is grateful to be able to serve her patients at the U’s School of Medicine.
Our work has benefited greatly from the generosity, resources and collegiality provided by the U, its faculty, alumni and other benefactors. This support has enabled me to study, conserve and teach about the world’s endangered biodiversity and helped Tanya provide healthcare to some of the underserved populations in this beautiful state. We hope to “pay it forward” by providing a modest legacy gift for SBS. Planned gifts of this kind will help SBS continue to attract and support the best PhD students in biodiversity research, conservation biology, environmental science,
ornithology and wildlife ecology during this time of rapid and devastating global change that requires all hands on deck. We hope you will join us in making a legacy gift to the School of Biological Sciences. —Çağan H. Şekercioğlu, PhD and Tanya M. Williams, MD
To donate, visit biology.utah.edu/giving | Gifts in any amount are gratefully received. Detail of illustration featured in De Humani Corporis Fabrica by Belgian anatomist, physician, and author Andreas Vesalius (1514–1564).
Learn more about legacy (planned) giving and the Crimson Laureate | Legacy Societies at biology.utah.edu or 801.587.9020