Student Work
Danielle Kellar says she has “always been interested in how life works.” After dabbling in fine arts before deciding to major in biology, Kellar spent a term at the OIMB, where she became interested in studying introduced species. The following summer, she participated in the Neotropical Ecology program in Ecuador. “It was a truly amazing experience and it reestablished how much I really love biology,” she says. Kellar then started working in Associate Professor Barbara Roy’s lab. With Roy’s guidance, Kellar decided to take on her own project, comparing parasitic resistance between native and nonnative plant species, which is also the subject of her honors thesis. As for her future, Kellar isn’t sure exactly what field of biology she wants to pursue, but she knows she wants to continue research and eventually get her masters or Ph.D. “I really can’t wait to see what’s next,” she says.
Dylan Farnsworth started his undergraduate research as a sophomore and has been working on RNA splicing, which involves recognizing and removing introns—“junk” or noncoding DNA—for sequencing. Farnsworth cites Professor Alice Barkan as key in keeping his interest in biology because Barkan’s classes was discussion-based and “immediately pertinent to what we look at in the lab.” The class was also writing-intensive, which he stresses is an important skill many science majors avoid. “If you can’t communicate something, you might as well not do it,” he says.
Selected Faculty Work
Professor Patrick Phillips focuses his research on the genetics of complex traits and the evolution of genetic networks and gene interaction systems. Phillips is one of three UO researchers to receive a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2006, and will use the award to write a book on the evolution of genetic architecture. Some of his other research projects include testing theories of the evolution of sex, estimating the distribution of mutational effects, and the evolution of virulence in retroviruses.
Assistant Professor Joe Thornton was lead author of “Evolution of Hormone-Receptor Complexity by Molecular Exploitation,” which appeared in the April 7, 2006 issue of Science. The article published his lab’s findings, which traced the evolution of two hormone receptors back 450 million years to a single gene. The findings also drew national attention from other publications such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Christian Science Monitor.
Professor John Postlethwait researches the genetic regulation of animal development, including development of the nervous system, the mechanisms of sex determination, the origin of novel morphologies in evolution, and the evolution of the vertebrate genome. Postlethwait is also principal investigator for the Zebrafish Project.
Assistant Professor Karen Guillemin studies Helicobacter pylori, which colonizes the stomachs of more than half the world’s population. By using molecular, genetic, and genomic approaches, her lab has discovered that H. pylori uses numerous signaling strategies to communicate with its hosts, which either promotes normal development or inflicts disease. Guillemin teaches courses in genomic approaches and analysis, bacterial-host interactions, molecular genetics, and microbiology.
Career Prospects
Biology majors have a multitude of career prospects, ranging from lab work and research to environmental activism. “There’s no question that we have an exceptional major for professions,” says Lombardi.