Second-generation biofuel crops like
the perennial grasses Miscanthus and switchgrass can efficiently meet emission reduction goals without significantly displacing cropland used for food production, according to a new study. The researchers call it the most comprehensive study on the subject to date.
Click here to read more:
This week’s post is from 2013 IB graduate Andrea Chez, who just completed her first year of medical school… in Australia!
Shock was usually the first reaction that I got when I told people that I was moving to Sydney.
Then excitement.
Followed by disbelief.
And the question that I always got, and am still getting asked, is “why Australia?” Up until my senior year, I had never considered medical school anywhere outside of the States. I had decided to study abroad for a couple weeks in January of 2015 (through the University). The focus of the trip was to learn more about global healthcare, and the diversity of different healthcare regiments, as well as population diversity. In the course of the fortnight that I spent in Australia, I had fallen in love. The idea that I could potentially contribute to helping Indigenous peoples, both medically and culturally, was exciting and invigorating. I also truly appreciated how largely mental health is emphasized. The view isn’t too shabby either.
I had always known that I would like to study abroad throughout the course of my medical degree. I thought that I would arrange electives here or there in different countries, or utilize my summers to travel and explore. When I returned home, I decided to try and send off applications to some medical programs around Australia, without huge expectations that I would be accepted. That changed when I was notified that I had qualified for multiple mini interviews at both the University of Sydney and the University of Melbourne.
The application process is not too different from the program in the States, but everything is much cheaper. One option is to apply to multiple schools through a main application that you send to the schools that you would like to apply to, but there is only one fee versus a fee for every school. Another way is to apply through an international representative (which I elected to do). My representative helped me throughout the whole process of dealing with student loans, applying for the correct visa, and just contacting the universities in general. The medical schools then conduct multiple mini interviews, in which a panel of interviewers will talk to different applicants and have them answer a variety of panel questions, each with a rubric of points that can be awarded. Once interviews are done, decisions are made, and places are awarded. Oddly enough, international tuition prices in Australia are pretty similar to domestic medical school tuition in the States. When I opened that acceptance e-mail, it was as if all of my hard work was validated.
It definitely takes hefty doses of bravery and moxie to pack up your life, and start over. The decision to enroll in any schooling, let alone medical school, in another country, is one that doesn’t suit everyone. I love that I am completely immersed in a different culture, and will get to experience opportunities that I never dreamed of. However, there are days that I am quite homesick. There are also days that I couldn’t be happier. No matter what happens, I know that I have never regretted my decision, and am excited to see where this journey takes me.
We are pleased to highlight some of the great research our undergraduates are doing in IB! The following IB students are presenting at this year’s Symposium:
Behavioral Freeze Avoidance Strategy in an Antarctic Fish
Mateusz Grobelny, Senior
Efficacy of Common Disinfectants Against Ophidiomyces Ophiodiicola, the Causative Agent of Snake Fungal Disease
Marta Rzadkowska, Senior
RNAi Knockdown: The Role of unc-25 in Mediating Nicotine Resistance in Caenorhabditis elegans
Andrew Tran, Sophomore
Emily Yaniz, Sophomore
Stephanie Martynenko, Sophomore
Community Inference
Zachary Cohen, Sophomore
Modeling Threat Assessment in Prey
Nicholas Sutton, Senior
Molecular Evolution for the Chemoreceptor Gene Families in the Common Eastern Bumblebee, Bombus impatiens
Yihui Zhu, Senior
DNA Fragment Length Heterozygosity PCR: Lab-on-a-Chip Method for Testing Bias in Prairie Root Metagenomics
Taylor Pederson, Senior
Electrophysiological and Mass-Spectrometric Investigation of Aplysia L1-L7 Neurons
Feng Zhu, Senior
Elucidation of Dopamine’s Influence in Peripheral Sensing in Pleurobranchaea.
Megan Flanagan, Junior
Andrew Tran, Sophomore
Genetic Analysis of Cellobiohydrolase I (cbhI) Gene Sequences and Production of Other Wood Degradation Enzymes in Tropical Aquatic Fungal Communities
Matthew Boyce, Senior
Improving the Accuracy of Photosynthetic Compensation Point Measurements
Jessica Ayers, Junior
Hox Gene Expression in Mammalian Limb Development
Paige Oboikovitz, Senior
According to IB profs Stephen Long, Amy Marshall-Colon, and Donald Ort, using high-performance computing and genetic engineering to boost the photosynthetic efficiency of plants offers the best hope of increasing crop yields enough to feed a planet expected to have 9.5 billion people on it by 2050.
Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2015-03-photosynthesis-hack-world.html#jCp
courtesy LAS News Magazine, Winter 2015 edition
In the late 1800s, with the University of Illinois facing growing enrollments and limited space, renowned University architect Nathan Ricker designed a distinctive teaching and research building at the heart of campus that he hoped would endure through the ages. He produced a gem—the Natural History Building.
This historic structure has hosted generations of students studying geology, biology, and other disciplines. Distinguished scholars have taught, established laboratories, and conducted groundbreaking research within its walls.
But designs and infrastructure that worked for the 19th and 20th centuries do not meet today’s teaching and research demands. The Natural History Building has reached a critical juncture and it must evolve dramatically to continue to serve our campus. Thus, the University has begun a $70 million renovation that preserves the building’s historic exterior while transforming the interior into a new world of state-of-the-art classrooms, laboratories, and meeting spaces.
A Vision
The renovation of the Natural History Building will create a dynamic education and research center. It will house classrooms, laboratories, and offices for current and future generations of geologists, geographers, and atmospheric scientists, and will be the center for biological and environmental education for students from across campus.
IB students will gain skills to examine challenges such as the outbreak of a new infectious disease or the causes and consequences of declining biodiversity. They will combine an understanding of basic natural history with new technologies that will bring breakthroughs in fields such as genomics. The holistic approach of the School of Integrative Biology will prepare students to tackle complex problems ranging from understanding evolutionary processes to developing biofuels.
For more on the NHB Renovation, including naming opportunities, and the story of a mysterious time capsule, please visit LAS News magazine.
Searching for a job can be one of the most stressful ventures in life! The IB Advisors are here to help with career exploration, finding internships, preparing for the job search, and more!
Be sure to also use The Career Center at Illinois for services related to job hunting like resume reviews, mock interviews, and career fair prep!
Check out these additional great resources to help make yourself the best possible candidate and minimize anxiety:
On cover letters via Conservation Careers
On using power words in your resume from Career Bliss
On staying positive from The Muse
On decreasing anxiety via The Career Center at Illinois
On tough interview questions via The Career Center at Illinois
On etiquette via The Career Center at Illinois
Our very own Professor May Berenbaum and PhD student Michelle Duennes were featured in a recent Daily Illini article regarding IB 109: Insects and People, where as part of the class, the students enjoy a “bug buffet.”
From the article…
“While many cringe at the idea of eating bugs, which is called “entomophagy,” this practice is widely accepted in many countries around the world. For students enrolled in Professor May Berenbaum’s Integrative Biology 109 course, “Insects and People,” eating insects during the course’s bug buffet lab is anything but accidental.”
Read on here.
Photo courtesy Anna Hecht via The Daily Illini
Consider registering for ENG 315: Learning in Community
Student teams working on real projects with community partners
Open to all students, all majors, all levels
LINC is an interdisciplinary, inquiry-guided service-learning course in which students provide meaningful service through the conception, development, and implementation of projects in collaboration with non-profits and community partners. Each section of the course is dedicated to a nonprofit organization that has proposed one or more projects of importance to the organization. There are both new and continuing partners each semester. Choose a section based upon your interests and/or skills or your desire to learn something new!
Early in the semester you will meet a representative from your partner organization, learn more about the organization and its mission, and begin a semester project that addresses the needs of the organization. You will engage in a variety of research, service and fieldwork activities outside of class to gain knowledge needed for the project, and that knowledge is then discussed for understanding, applied, analyzed, synthesized, and evaluated in class. Class time is also used to help students delegate tasks, make decisions, process new information, engage in reflective discussions, learn core course content, collaborate with teammates, and receive guidance and feedback on the projects. Throughout the semester you will identify and explore topics that will assist you with the execution of your project. The semester concludes with a public poster presentation in which teams present the accomplishments of the project, value added to the community organization, and lessons learned.
As a result of this course you can expect to gain knowledge and skills in conducting research, understanding social and environmental issues, analyzing community and organizational needs and assets, defining problems, generating and analyzing solutions, identifying and mobilizing resources, project scoping, planning, and execution, teamwork and leadership, communication, problem-solving, critical thinking, professional writing, and civic responsibility.
For more information and to see projects for Spring ’15, visit http://linc.illinois.edu/spring-15-projects
Article courtesy of Biomarker Magazine from the University of Illinois Institute for Genomic Biology.
“Well, in our country,” said Alice, still panting a little, “you’d generally get to
somewhere else — if you run very fast for a long time, as we’ve been doing.”
“A slow sort of country!” said the Queen. “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!”
-Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass
Inspired by the Red Queen in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, collaborators from the University of Illinois and National University of Singapore improved a 35-year-old ecology model to better understand how species evolve over decades to millions of years, as reported in Ecology Letters.
The new model, called a mean field model for competition, incorporates the “Red Queen
Effect,” an evolutionary hypothesis introduced by Lee Van Valen in the 1970s that suggests
organisms must constantly increase their fitness in order to compete with other ever-evolving organisms in an ever-changing environment. The mean field model assumes that new species have competitive advantages that allow them to multiply, but over time new species with even better competitive advantages will evolve and outcompete current species, like a conveyor belt constantly moving backwards.
The model gets its name from field theory, which describes how fields, or a value in space and time, interact with matter. A field is like a mark on a map indicating wind speeds at various locations to measure the wind’s velocity. In this ecological context, the “fields” approximate distributions of species abundances. Ecologists can use models to predict what happens next and diagnose sick ecosystems, said Assistant Professor of Plant Biology James O’Dwyer, who co-authored the study.
CREATING A MODEL ECOLOGY MODEL
The mean field model has improved a fundamental ecology model, called neutral
biodiversity theory, which was introduced by Stephen Hubbell in the 1970s. Neutral theory
does not account for competition between different species, thus considering all species to be selectively equal.
“The neutral model relies on random chance,” said O’Dwyer, who is a member of the Biocomplexity theme. “It’s like a series of coin flips and a species has to hit heads every time to become very abundant. That doesn’t happen very often.”
Neutral theory can predict static distributions and abundances of species reasonably well, but it breaks down when applied to changes in communities and species over time. For instance, the neutral model estimates that certain species of rainforest trees are older than Earth.
“At one end of the spectrum, we have this neutral model with very few parameters and very simple mechanisms and dynamics, but at the other end, we have models where we try to parameterize every detail,” O’Dwyer said. “What’s been hardest is to take one or
two steps down this spectrum from the neutral model without being sucked down to this very complicated end of the spectrum.”
By creating a more realistic model that incorporates species differences, O’Dwyer and co-author Ryan Chisholm, an assistant professor at National University of Singapore, have taken an important step down that spectrum. “Our model is not the ecological equivalent of Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity, which was a conceptual leap for physics,” O’Dwyer said. “It is an incremental step at this point. But we will need those conceptual leaps that incorporate the best parts of different models to really understand complex ecological systems better.”
The Templeton World Charity Foundation
supported O’Dwyer’s work.
You can view the complete Biomarker magazine here
Thanks to our guest blogger, Matt Grobis, who is in his second year working toward a PhD in the Ecology and Evolutionary Biology department at Princeton, researching how groups filter noise from information in their environment (particularly predators) and how group membership affects how the whole group behaves. Matt earned his B.S. in IB in 2012.
What I thought grad school would be like during college:
“Grad school is where you show up at noon, plan some experiments, run them the next day, then analyze the data. A PhD takes 5-7 years because it takes a while to plan the perfect experiment, one that hasn’t been done before and that answers a hole in the literature. During your first year, you do 5-6 experiments and publish at least one of them.”
When you’re doing lab reports during college, it’s almost guaranteed that the Discussion section will say something like “the study would benefit from more data.” We had three hours to do the lab; imagine how good the data would look if we had three weeks? Then, during your senior thesis, you continually imagine being able to do your research without juggling hours of lectures and homework at the same time. Grad school seemed like a big expanse of time to think about experiments, try them again and again until they’re perfect, and then publish. Any sub-perfect experiments were the fault of the experimenter not being motivated enough.
What I think grad school is like at the end of my 1st year:
“Grad school has cycles. Sometimes you show up at 10am, read articles all day, teach yourself R, and go home early. Sometimes you show up at 8am because you need to run three trials of experiments, and sometimes you swing by at 2pm because you were up until 4am writing revisions for a manuscript due to the journal that day. A PhD takes 5-7 years because literally everything takes longer than you think it will, and nothing works the first time you try.”
Something I didn’t quite grasp during my senior thesis and the beginning of the Fulbright was how much others had helped in making the experiment work out. It’s the difference between trying to find a store in a huge city you’ve never been in versus someone giving you a crude map and telling you roughly where the store should be. My advisor in college steered my thesis ideas towards a project that would answer a question regardless of what the results were, and my collaborator in Germany was the equivalent of a 4th-year PhD student in the U.S., meaning she’d had a lot of experience with figuring out the right way to do an experiment.
What my 1st year was like:
You frequently feel like you know nothing
An incredibly common feeling in grad school is “hm… I’m not sure how to do this.” The first reaction is to ask someone else, maybe an older grad student in the lab, or your friend who’s a lot better at R or Matlab than you are (hi, Sinead). You just don’t know the answer right now, so let’s find it and move on. For our generation especially, Wikipedia and Google make the answers to most of our questions separated by merely seconds from when we decide we want to find out. Grad school, on the other hand, is about constantly being in this zone of wanting to know an answer but not having it. That’s what research is; if we knew the answer, we’d have passed the info along to someone else (government organizations, the medical world, conservation groups, engineers, etc.) and be focusing on finding the answer to a new question.
As frustrating as it can be not knowing how to fit a quadratic curve on a scatterplot in R or who to e-mail for ordering new syringes for the lab, it is very satisfying the next time you have to do it and you know exactly how. And as you read more articles, go to more lectures, and talk with more people, you start seeing the same concepts reappearing… but this time, you understand them a little better.
You spend a long time figuring out how to find the answer to a question
Do you remember those “If you had a million dollars, how would you spend the money?” essay prompts in high school? One of the biggest hurdles I’ve had in planning experiments in grad school is getting out of this mentality of infinite money and time. You read about experiments where the authors make grandiose claims out of six data points and you vow to never publish something so ridiculous. If you’re going to do science, you’re going to do it right, even if it means fewer publications during your PhD. Your experiments will have at least 30 individuals, each assayed on multiple days to control for between-day variation in behavior, and each individual will be exposed to 5 treatment groups to see the full effect of the variable on behavior.
Those are fantastic intentions, and you can often make it work. But it’s really difficult. If you’re like me in college, “really difficult” sounds like something that applied to people who weren’t you; you’ve faced “really difficult” before and gotten an A in the class. Let me reiterate: it is really freaking hard to do this.
Here’s an example from this week: I’ve started a pilot experiment to figure out how the social environment affects how skittish a fish is in a new environment. The idea is to use 8 fish in 3 different groups of 60 fish. Due to poor planning, the videos ended up really dark, and it’s impossible to distinguish who’s who in the video. Not only can I not use the data; if it wasn’t for some quick thinking by marking all tanks where fish had seen the experimental tank, I might have had to scrap the experiment! (In animal behavior research, novelty to an environment is often extremely important.) So even though I’ve been planning these ideas for a few weeks, I nearly messed everything up within the first two days of actually doing anything. It always seems so obvious before you start, and then it never goes how you plan. (Above right is a video still from a trial I can’t use.)
But… that’s just how it goes. You can’t get to the end result without making mistakes. And you can’t make any progress if you don’t try.
You wait (a lot) for clearance to do research
Animal welfare committees are a crucial part of research by instituting ethical requirements for how research should be conducted. They ensure that the research has a bigger point and that your methods are the most humane way to get there (e.g. if mice have to be euthanized, what’s the calmest and least painful way for the animals? If the crickets suddenly start dying during the experiment, what do you do?). If you’re doing fieldwork, you need to get a license for the work; if it’s in another country, you probably need a visa as well.
Ensuring that research will be done properly takes a lot of time. Animal welfare committees have panels of both scientists and non-scientists to get a range of perspectives on the ethics of the work, which means extra time is needed to exchange and explain the reasoning for different viewpoints. For fieldwork, a lot of people want government approval for permits or visas, and there are only so many people reading the proposals. The only advice I can give on this is to start early, be patient, and be courteous with your e-mails. The waiting time (on the order of months) can really help refine your ideas for when you actually start.
You start to understand what makes for an interesting scientific question
For the first few months of grad school, I told people I was interested in how group composition affects predator evasion behavior in schools of fish. It took a lot of thinking and discussing with others to refine those ideas into a broader framework with more applicability than one species of fish under one type of predation risk.
You spend a lot of time thinking in grad school. Your ideas have to stand up to hundreds of hours of mental chewing; the best ideas are the ones that not only hold strong but also generate new ideas the more you learn about them.
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Doing research has been challenging but I’ve been really happy so far. It’s really quite amazing to be paid to think about and do experiments asking questions nobody in the world knows the answer to yet. I feel like the incredible amount of time stuck, trying to figure out an impasse, has taught me how to find the answers to things I don’t know. This mentality has given me a lot of confidence to approach things I might have shied away from before because it seemed too difficult (e.g. teaching myself linear algebra, taking a metro or bus in a country where I don’t speak the language, etc.). And most importantly, I constantly feel like I’m gaining a better understanding of how the world works, which only makes me more excited to see where grad school takes me.
-Matt