UPbeat

News for and about University of Portland faculty and staff.

Biology Department

Can (COVID-era) Science Be Fun? Yes It Can!

As faculty prepare for online Fall 2020 classes, tales of ingenuity and perseverance abound. Biology professor Jacquie Van Hoomissen shares the following from her colleague, Ryan Kenton, biology:
“I hope you are all staying sane (and healthy) prepping like mad for the semester that no one has ever had before.
I am currently assembling take home kits for Micro Lab – something that I thought I would never do – but here we are. So, what is the best, most fun, ingenious, item in the kit?
  • Some may say the glitter/water mixture that can be streaked to obtain “isolated colonies” onto a homemade gelatin petri dish
  • Others will say the shipping box itself, which once punctured a few times will act as a “tube rack”
  • Most will agree it is the foldscopes (https://www.foldscope.com/), a paper microscope that once hooked to your phone can achieve 1000x magnification (I have attached my pictures of bakers yeast and sweater fuzz)
  • But no, the crown jewel was created last night by my genius wife. By using our kitchen microplane we shaved 40 different colors of crayons into a container. We then tixed in water and aliquoted into 1.5ml tubes. A circular piece of paper is then cut and placed inside of a petri dish. This mixture can then be poured over the plate by the student to create a diverse set of “colonies.” Students can then pick and patch these using the provided “sterile” toothpicks onto a 32 grid on another petri dish–something that is done in the lab to begin to find antibiotic producing bacteria.
For more information or to marvel over his genius wife, contact Kenton at 503.943.7694 or kenton@up.edu.

UP Science Takes Home The Prize!

First Place TrophyA group of 26 science faculty and students from the College of Arts and Sciences attended the annual M.J. Murdock Charitable Trust Undergraduate Research conference on November 8-9 in Vancouver, WA. The annual conference drew hundreds of college students and science educators from across the Pacific Northwest. A number of UP students gave oral and poster presentations to colleagues from around the Pacific Northwest.  Students mentored by Laura Dyer (biology) and Eugene Urnezius (chemistry) took home poster prizes for outstanding posters in their sections: Pia Fornell won for “Identifying How Sonic Hedgehog Signaling Affects Cardiac Neural Crest Migration Following Fetal Alcohol Exposure” and Kailin Mooney won for “Physicochemical properties of 2,5-dihydroxy-1,4-quinones appended with phosphonato groups.”

Additional information about the conference is available on the Trust’s website.

Your 2019 ACUBE Excellence in Teaching Award Winner: Tara Prestholdt

Tara Prestholdt, biology, won the 2019 Excellence in Teaching Award at the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association of College and University Biology Educators (ACUBE). The award is offered annually to honor faculty who both practice and promote effective, innovative teaching in the biology classroom.

While the entire campus is no doubt aware of Prestholdt’s polymathic proficiency, mathematics professor Stephanie Salomone explains it best: “Tara is a true mentor to her undergraduates. Tara’s expectations for her co-researchers are high. They will not just do good science, but they will be able to explain their work to people who are as far as possible from experts. They will not just enjoy science, or like science; they will find science exciting,the process of discovery exhilarating, and the difficult cognitive task of explaining science to laymen motivating. Every student that I’ve known who has worked in Tara’s lab has come out skilled in scientific research, and eager to get back into the lab or the field to do more.

“Further, Tara Prestholdt is dedicated to improving undergraduate education on campus and beyond. Tara’s work on the NSF-funded REFLECT project has helped transform the culture of undergraduate STEM education at UP into one that responds to the evidence of what makes for great teaching – active, hands-on, engaged approaches to instruction. She is a supportive mentor for other faculty who are new to evidence-based practices, she is innovative in her own approaches to teaching, and she is a leader who deeply deserves this recognition.”

 

 

 

Presentation By 2018 Teaching Award Winner, Nov. 2

Tara Prestholdt, the 2018 recipient of the Faculty Award for Outstanding Teaching, will share her thoughts on teaching in a talk titled “Gifts, Presence, and Present’ on Friday, November 2, at 4 p.m., in the Clark Library classroom (Room 211). All staff and faculty are invited to attend and light refreshments will be provided.

For more information, contact the Teaching and Scholarship Committee at tas@up.edu.

Outstanding Educator Award for Jacquie Van Hoomissen

Biology professor Jacquie Van Hoomissen has been selected as the Oregon Academy of Sciences (OAS) Outstanding Educator in Higher Education for 2018. She was cited for her “considerable contributions to life science education at the University of Portland.” She will be presented with the award on Saturday, March 3, at a ceremony at George Fox University.

For more information contact Ami Ahern-Rindell, biology, at ahernrin@up.edu.

Student Research Stresses Real Discovery, Knowledge

staff & faculty portraits

Students in all sections of Ami Ahern-Rindell’s Genetics Lab course presented a Research Poster Symposium on Tuesday, December 8. Posters were presented to fellow students guests including University president Rev. Mark L. Poorman, C.S.C.; Tom Greene, provost; CAS dean Michael Andrews, acting assistant provost Lauretta Frederking, and Dan McGinty, director of the Dundon-Berchtold Institute.

The lab course was designed for students to conduct hypothesis-driven research that serves as part of Ahern-Rindell’s scholarly work on an animal model of GM1-Gangliosidosis, a fatal genetic disorder. Students are engaged in creating new knowledge and learning science by doing science, rather than conducting experiments for which the outcome is already known. The benefits of undergraduate research are made available to more students by incorporating it into the classroom curriculum.

Ahern-Rindell received funding for this approach in 1998 from the National Science Foundation and recently contributed a chapter on the design of her Genetics Lab course in a book titled Inquiry-Based Learning for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) Programs: A Conceptual and Practical Resource for Educators.

For more information contact Ahern-Rindell at 7137 or ahernrin@up.edu.

Come See The Crab Lab, Oct. 3

1aCrabLab150All students, staff, faculty, and friends are invited to visit the Crab Lab during its open house on Friday, October 3, from noon to 5 p.m., in Swindells 139 and 128, according to Tara Maginnis, biology. With over 500 gallons of saltwater and six species of crabs, there is plenty to explore. Maginnis and her biology research students will be there explaining how the lab works and what kind of research goes on there (and no, they don’t eat the crabs and neither can you).

For more information contact Maginnis at maginnis@up.edu.