Robin Dowell

CAREER scientist thrives at the intersection of research and teaching

March 20, 2014

Most university faculty divide their time between research activities, teaching and service to their institutions, sometimes putting in hundreds of hours weekly to accomplish the job’s demands. Being able to shine in all of these areas is a rare accomplishment, especially for newer faculty. For BioFrontiers faculty member Robin Dowell,...

Joey Azofeifa

Science is Hard

Nov. 17, 2013

It must be said that I have had a very difficult time writing this blog-post. The reason, after a few too many cups of coffee, came clear to me: Science is Hard (and I worried if that’s what I should tell my readers). Certainly there are intellectual struggles in Science,...

Nora Connor

On the leading edge

Sept. 5, 2013

Studying Quantitative Genomics in Italy I returned this past weekend from a conference and workshop called Quantitative Laws of Genome Evolution in Lake Como, Italy. An Italian physicist named Marco Lagomarsino created the conference, which brought together an interdisciplinary group of statistical physicists, biophysicists, chemists and biologists to talk about...

ribozyme

Understanding RNA

July 15, 2013

The newly constructed structure in the National Botanical Gardens in Ireland, meant to symbolize the flow of information from DNA to RNA and proteins, contains a representation of the DNA double helix, a ribosome, and thehammerhead ribozyme. Sculptures of the DNA helix have been constructed all over the world ;...

Ryan Langendorf

Interdisciplinarity on Steroids

Feb. 5, 2013

At my last mentoring committee meeting, after discussing the tug-of-war that the Environmental Studies and IQ Biology programs have been playing with my schedule, Dr. Brett Melbourne paused and quietly commented that my life is “interdisciplinarity on steroids!” We all laughed, but sometimes I lose sight of how many worlds...

Laruen Shoemaker

Night at the Museum: With the Society for Vertebrate Paleontology

Nov. 7, 2012

The kickoff for the 72 nd Annual Meeting for the Society for Vertebrate Paleontology was the night of October 17 th —that’s right, the meeting began on National Fossil Day. To be honest, I didn’t know that there was such a thing as National Fossil Day before attending SVP (as...

Topher Weiss-Lehman

Science in pictures

Sept. 19, 2012

Recently I was lucky enough to present a poster at the Ecological Society of America (ESA) conference in Portland, Oregon. This is the largest conference of ecologists and evolutionary biologists in the US with over 4,000 attendees this year. With so many researchers attending a single conference, the diversity of...

Carlos Vera

When the student becomes the mentor

Aug. 14, 2012

This past May, the inaugural class of IQ Biology, including myself, finished its first year of graduate study. It was an interesting year that saw different people from very different backgrounds coexist in an interdisciplinary environment where sometimes we didn’t know what each other was saying. Not a language barrier,...

Dan Knights

IQ Biology graduate's adventure continues

May 22, 2012

Dan Knights is a humble guy, with very little reason to be humble. A short list of his titles includes high school math teacher, computer scientist and the 2003 Rubik’s Cube World Champion. He has appeared on the Today Show, The Discovery Channel and as an expert on National Public...

Czech Republic

Workshop on Genomics

April 3, 2012

This past January, I had an amazing opportunity to be an instructor at the Workshop on Genomics , and the associated advanced topic sessions, in the Czech Republic. The workshop was hosted in Cesky Krumlov, a UNESCO World Heritage site considered the best preserved medieval town in Europe. The workshop...

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