Paul Armsworth has been selected as a James R. Cox Professor. The three-year award provides Armsworth with a stipend of $25,500 to support his research. Recipients are chosen by a committee for their excellence in teaching, scholarship, and service.
Eugene Wofford has co-authored a new book called Woody Plants of Kentucky and Tennessee: The Complete Winter Guide to Their Identification and Use. The guide enables people to identify trees, shrubs, and woody vines during the winter months, when the absence of leaves and fruit makes plants difficult to recognize. It also provides notes on practical uses for the plants. The book features more than 400 species and is written for amateurs as well as professional botanists. It was published in October by the University Press of Kentucky and is also available from Amazon.com.
Gary McCracken took 3 graduate students (Amanda Janicki, Riley Bernard, and Melqui Gamba Rios) to the International Bat Research Conference in Costa Rica in August. It was the largest bat meeting ever, with over 600 participants from 55 countries. Below is a photo of the group wearing leaf-noses (which tropical bats have – see the link for a news article about the conference and tropical bats).
http://www.seabcru.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/ibrc_2013_abstracts.pdf
The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded $18.6 million to the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, for the National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis (NIMBioS) to continue its interdisciplinary efforts in developing new mathematical approaches to problems across biology, from the level of the genome to individuals to entire ecosystems. EEB’s Lou Gross has been the director of NIMBioS since its inception in September 2008.
The most popular paper in the Quarterly Review of Biology over the past three years, based on downloads, is “Homosexuality as a Consequence of Epigenetically Canalized Sexual Development” by Rice, Friberg, and EEB Distinguished Professor Sergey Gavrilets. This paper has been accessed 29,788 times, over fourfold the number of accesses of the next most popular paper in the journal’s history.
Research Assistant Professor Alison Boyer was interviewed today on local NPR station WUOT about her recent PNAS paper about extinctions of birds on Pacific islands. The interview can be heard here.
EEB faculty member Charlie Kwit was recently featured in a video by the Shedd Aquarium about rock iguanas. For more information about the science, see here. The video is embedded below.
UTK Distinguished Professor Sergey Gavrilets’ work on the evolution of monogamy, published in PNAS, has been featured in an article in the online magazine Slate. In his model, low-ranked males begin providing resources to females, who begin selecting them rather than higher-ranked males. Such behavior then becomes optimal for males higher and higher up the hierarchy.
UTK Distinguished Professor Sergey Gavrilets’ work on the evolution of monogamy, published in PNAS, has been featured in an article in the online magazine Slate. In his model, low-ranked males begin providing resources to females, who begin selecting them rather than higher-ranked males. Such behavior then becomes optimal for males higher and higher up the hierarchy.