BIOLOGY DEPARTMENT

Prof. Steve Swoap (center) with Honors students Lisa Chu, Ben Iliff, Erik Tillman
and Elizabeth McClure at the Experimental Biology meetings in Anaheim, California.

Working closely with the many interdisciplinary programs on campus: The BIMO Program, the Neuroscience Program, the Environmental Studies Program and the BiGP Program, the Biology Department’s goal is to provide students with the opportunity to do hands-on, one-on-one research with a professor in addition to offering state of the art academic courses. To that end the department had 31 honors students working in faculty labs this past year. Of these, 17 were inducted into the Sigma Xi Honors Society. For the academic year 2010-2011 the department has 22 students who will be doing honors work. Despite being understaffed, the department is committed to providing a positive research and learning experience for all biology students. As a result of this commitment, several of our students were awarded grants or fellowships to pursue their studies after graduation. Among these students are Eric Beam, Ben Cohen, Jessica LeClair and John Salcedo who each received Fulbright awards to further their studies. Nathan Benaich received the prestigious Gates Cambridge Scholarship to study at Cambridge University in England; and Cory Watts, received a Watson Fellowship to pursue studies on the impact of emergency services in rural areas abroad. The department also has approximately 40 students doing summer research, either here at Williams or off campus. Jack Berry, Francesca Barrett and Geoff McCrossan will be working at the Whitehead Institute. Funding for summer research comes from various sources including individual research grants and Division funding. At least half of the biology faculty has outside research funding from either NSF or NIH. This funding allows many students to travel to professional meetings throughout the year giving poster presentations on their research at Williams. At the Experimental Biology meetings in California in April of this year two of Prof. Swoap’s students, Lisa Chu ’10 and Ben Iliff ’10 won the prestigious David Bruce Award for the best undergraduate physiology research project. The David S. Bruce Awards are given to recognize excellence in undergraduate research. These awards honor Dr. Bruce’s commitment to promoting undergraduate involvement in research, in the American Physiological Society annual meeting, and, ultimately, in research careers. The American Physiological Society's annual meeting is called Experimental Biology, and consists of physiologists, young and old, totaling about 12,000+ scientists, including MDs, PhDs, graduate students and undergraduates. A number of alumni returned to campus this year to share their post-graduate experiences with students in the form of a poster presentation. This is an opportunity for students to learn first hand about life as a graduate student.

Each year at graduation, the Biology Department awards prizes to several outstanding majors. Ben Iliff and Tahsin Khan each received the Benedict Prize in Biology. Nora Mitchell received the Dwight Botanical Prize. Jamie Lahvic received the Conant-Harrington Prize for exemplary performance in the biology major, and Taylor Goller received the William C. Grant, Jr. Prize for demonstrating excellence in a broad range of areas in biology.

The Biology Department would like to congratulate Prof. Claire Ting on her promotion to tenure. The Department would also like to welcome two new faculty members – Assistant Professor Luana Maroja and Visiting Assistant Professor Jonathan Snow. Luana comes to us from the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute and received her Ph.D. in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Cornell University. Jon Snow, a Williams College Alum Class of ’96, is currently at Children’s Hospital Harvard University and received his Ph.D. in Biomedical Sciences at UCSF. Prof. Lara Hutson will be leaving the department to pursue her research in Buffalo, NY. We wish her well in this endeavor.

The Biology Department continued to participate in the Class of 1960 Scholars program. In addition to the returning alumni who were sponsored by the Class of 1960 Scholars Program, the department invited Prof. Cliff Tabin from Harvard University to be a Biology Class of 1960 Scholar speaker.

Finally, after almost 41 years in the Biology Department, Judy Uryniak, Academic Assistant, will retire at the end of June. Her service and dedication to the department are truly appreciated and we wish her well on her retirement journey.

In fall 2009, Professor Art returned from a year-long sabbatical to teach the interdisciplinary technology- and writing-intensive course Natural History of the Berkshires (BIOL 225) (cross-listed with INTR and Environmental Studies). In the spring semester, he taught Field Botany and Plant Natural History (BIOL/ENVI 220).

During the summers of 2008 and 2009, Professor Art supervised the research of Abby Martin ’11, Jeffery Stenzel ’11, Annelise Snyder ’12, and Thalia Lowen ’13 involving the Hopkins Forest permanent plot system, as well as the research of Ashley Turner ’12 on Hopkins Forest vernal pools. In addition, he has served as a surveyor of rare plants through the New England Wild Flower Society Plant Conservation Volunteer program and as a member of the team that is designing an interpretive program for the Mt. Greylock State Reservation.

During the academic year, he supervised Jeff Stenzel on his senior thesis project, “The Hopkins Memorial Forest Landscape 1830-1936.”

During January 2010, Professor Art led trips for the Williams Society of Alumni to Tanzania and to the Everglades in Florida.

Professor Art gave a lecture for the Conway School of Landscape Design as well as a lecture on Forest Land-use History Legacies, “Williamstown Land-use Changes, 1935-2001” for the CES-Log Lunch and the annual meeting of the Williamstown Rural Lands Foundation.

Professor Art serves as the director of the “Project to Use Participatory and Empirical Teaching in a Curricular Initiative for Renewable Energy and Resource Sustainability at Williams College,” sponsored by the Henry Luce Foundation. The program has been working toward both increasing the inclusion of sustainability issues in the courses taught and visioning sustainable futures at Williams.

Associate Professor Lois Banta continued her research on the soil bacterium Agrobacterium tumefactions. This plant pathogen is best known for its unique ability to deliver DNA and proteins to host plant cells, thus stably altering the genetic makeup of the plant and causing crown gall tumors (“plant cancer”) to form at the infection site. One major goal of the lab’s current research is to characterize the host defense responses elicited by the bacterium. Honors student Annie Park ’10 and technician Annie Knox pursued this line of investigation, which is funded by a $415,000 grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) awarded to Professor Banta, in collaboration with Rosalia Deeken, in Wuerzburg, Germany. Honors student Emily Porter (’10) used scanning electron microscopy and established a new genetic screen to study the role of several groups of proteins in mediating attachment of Agrobacterium to host plant tissue. Honors student Amulya Iyer ’10 concluded the lab’s exploration of a novel mechanism for transcriptional regulation of a subset of the virB genes, which encode a multi-protein complex responsible for the delivery of the DNA and several virulence factor proteins to host cells. Honors student Lauren Sinnenberg ’10 continued to pursue the lab’s recent discovery by David Rogawski ’08 that a newly identified Type VI Secretion System (T6SS) in A. tumefaciens influences the formation of biofilms, large aggregates of bacterial cells that are resistant to antibiotics, antibody attack, and even Clorox bleach. Independent study student Jeff Meng ’11 explored the possibility of studying morphological features of these biofilms using the College’s new atomic force microscope, purchased by an NSF instrumentation grant on which Professor Banta was a co-principal investigator. Finally, independent study student Corey Watts (’10) used both wet-lab and biostatistical tools to compare microbial populations in complex ecosystems in a collaborative project with the Broad Institute Microbial Metagenomics group at MIT/Harvard.

Professor Banta is the Project Director on a collaborative grant from the Teagle Foundation’s “Fresh Thinking” program to support “development and application of new knowledge about student engagement and learning” within the liberal arts. The 30-month, $136,000 Teagle project, in which Williams was joined by Carleton and Vassar Colleges, has led to the development and dissemination of several novel genomics instructional modules at Williams and six other liberal arts colleges, and provides a new model for integrative teaching that leverages the resources of a large research institution to provide opportunities for small colleges to teach inquiry-based science in resource-intensive fields such as genomics. The Teagle group held their third and final curriculum development workshop at Williams in July 2009 for faculty members from across the country who have received stipends for new genomics and bioinformatics projects. Information about the project is available at <http://serc.carleton.edu/genomics/index.html>. A link to a white paper describing the project outcomes can be found at <http://www.teaglefoundation.org/grantmaking/grantees/wg3.aspx#williams>. See <http://serc.carleton.edu/genomics/activities.html?&results_start=1> for the curricular modules.

During the fall semester, Professor Banta taught the lab-intensive capstone course for the Genomics, Proteomics, and Bioinformatics program. The course focuses on one model system, the Ras/MAPK signal transduction pathway, and its role in the development of colon cancer. New innovations in the course this year included using quantitative real-time PCR to probe the contributions of microRNA’s to human colon cancer and programmed cell death. In the spring term, Professor Banta taught an upper-level elective in Microbiology. The students in this course are among the first undergraduates in the nation to carry out a metagenomics project, surveying the full spectrum of bacteria found in a given ecological niche; the class focused on pond sludge from three local ponds.

During this academic year, Professor Banta served as a reviewer for the National Science Foundation, Journal of Bacteriology, Molecular Plant Physiology, Plant Cell, and FEMS Microbiology Letters. She presented a poster on the lab’s research on the contributions of the T6SS to host plant interactions at the Gordon Conference “Bacterial Adhesion” in Newport, RI and a poster on the regulation of vir gene induction and host cell association by the Lon protease at the Thirtieth Annual Crown Gall Conference hosted by the Nobel Foundation in Ardmore, OK. Within Williams, she served on the Biochemistry/Molecular Biology advisory committee, the Bioinformatics, Genomics and Proteomics advisory committee, and the International Educational Initiatives committee; she also served as coordinator for the Global Health track of the International Studies Area of Concentration and for a new college-wide program in Public Health.

Professor Joan Edwards taught Ecology, BIOL 203 in the fall term and the Biology of the Tropics, BIOL 134 in the spring term. This past summer Jessy LeClair ’10 and Nora Mitchell ‘10 went to Isle Royale National Park to do thesis work with Prof. Edwards. Jessy studied pollinator networks in the boreal forest and Nora studied ultra-fast movements in plants. In July, Allie Gardner joined the thesis team in Williamstown. Allie studied species boundaries in the local goldenrod and aster populations.

Prof. Edwards continues with research both on Isle Royale and in the Williamstown area. Currently she is on her 11th year of monitoring arctic plant populations at Isle Royale National Park and monitoring garlic mustard populations in three different aged forest stands in Hopkins Memorial Forest. She is also continuing her work on ultra-high speed plants. She has added exploding alfalfa flowers, exploding fruits of touch-me-not (Impatiens) and exploding fruits of wood sorrel (Oxalis) as research plants. A paper on Sphagnum moss that she co-authored with Dwight Whitaker (Pomona College) was just accepted for publication in Science. In January, she presented her work on high-speed plants at an invited symposium “Mechanics without Muscle: Evolutionary Design of Macrophytes” at the 2010 meeting of the Society for Integrative & Comparative Biology in Seattle, Washington. Her talk, co-presented with Nora Mitchell ’10 and Dwight Whitaker, was titled, “Floral Trebuchets, Airguns and Elaters Effect Rapid Spore Dispersal in Low Growing Plants.”

In June, Professor Edwards was an invited participant on the Committee of Visitors to evaluate the National Science Foundation's MRI Program (major research instrumentation program). It is reviewed every five years.

During this past year, Professor Dan Lynch taught BIOL 101 The Cell in the fall semester, and he taught Biochemistry II Metabolism in the spring semester.

Lynch continued his research on plant sphingolipid biochemistry. Students working in the lab included Jonathan Levinsohn (’10), who completed a senior thesis project for honors, Michael Choi ’10, who completed an independent research project, and two work-study students, Heather Valenzuela ’12 and Chalita Washington ’13. Lynch was co-author on a paper published in Trends in Plant Science titled “Lipid Signaling in Arabidopsis: No Sphigosine? No Problem!” Lynch also served as a reviewer for manuscripts submitted to several scientific journals.

Martha Marvin, a Postdoctoral Essel Fellow in Neuroscience, taught the lab sections of Neuroscience (NSCI 201/BIOL 212/PSYC 212.) Her research focuses on the heart development in zebrafish. In collaboration with Lara Hutson, Martha studied the role of small heat shock proteins, which protect animals against environmental stresses, as well as additional cellular roles. Of the thirteen zebrafish sHSPs, three are expressed in heart from early stages, and become particularly concentrated in the regions that will give rise to cardiac valves. However, when we reduced expression of two of these genes, we found that each gene also played a role in determining to which side of the body the heart would migrate during development. The heart, gut and brain are all organs with asymmetric gene expression and development, and most asymmetric genes are expressed on the left side of the embryo. Reducing the expression of Hspb7 resulted in concordant asymmetry of heart, gut and brain, in which a reversed heart correlated with reversed liver and reversed brain asymmetry. Consistent with this concordant asymmetry, we found that the first gene normally expressed on the left side of the embryo, southpaw, was duplicated on the right in a portion of these embryos. In contrast, reduction of Hspb12 did not affect southpaw, but did cause heterotaxy, in which heart and gut asymmetry are randomized relative to each other. In embryos in which expression of hspb12 is reduced, left-sided genes expressed later in the asymmetry cascade were abolished, suggesting that hspb12 acts later than hspb7. We concluded that Hspb7 is required for the repression of southpaw on the right side of the embryo, while hspb12 is required to relay laterality information encoded by southpaw to downstream genes in the heart, gut and brain. This work was primarily the thesis of Jamie Lahvic ’10, with contributions from Leigh Davis ’11 and Christina Liu ’10.

In January 2010, a collaborative project brought zebrafish to the 4th grade and high school classrooms in Williamstown. The efforts of Williamstown Elementary 4th grade teachers, Lisa Shannon, Kate Seid and Frani Miceli; Mt Greylock High School Biology teacher Larry Bell; Kaatje White of the Williams Center at Mt. Greylock; Jennifer Swoap, Williams Science Liaison; Michael Choi ’10, community volunteers Laura Bentz, Arthur Fuleihan and Diane Fuleihan, the Biology Department at Williams, and a generous anonymous donor allowed us to bring the Project BioEyes program to Williamstown. The funds given by our anonymous donor allowed us to buy equipment and invite Jamie Shuda of Project BioEyes in Philadelphia to train the teachers and volunteers and share her teaching materials with us. The primary and secondary students learned to set up matings between fish, make predictions and observations about the pigmentation of the babies, and collect fish embryos and watch them develop during the course of the week. Fish embryos are transparent for the first five days, so students can watch the blood cells pumping through the heart in the microscope. The week-long project was an unforgettable experience for the students and the classroom volunteers. Art Fuleihan further honored us by composing a song for the elementary school students. Many thanks to our energetic and creative volunteers!

Professor David Smith taught BIOL 305 Evolution in the fall term and developed and taught a new advanced tutorial BIOL 428T Evolutionary Ecology in the spring term. In the summer of 2009 Emily McClary ’10 and Alec Crowell ’10 went to Isle Royale National Park to do thesis work with Prof. Smith. Emily studied the breeding patterns of the boreal chorus frogs and used molecular genetics to determine how females distribute their egg clutches among pools. Alec modeled population dynamics. In the fall, Melissa Kemp ’10 joined Prof. Smith's lab as a third thesis student. Using microsatellite markers she studied gene flow and the genetic structure of the boreal chorus frog population.

Professor Smith continues with his long-term studies of the boreal chorus frog on Isle Royale Wilderness national park. With over thirty years of records, Prof. Smith's study is one of the longest studies of any single amphibian population. His studies, to date, show regular fluctuations in the populations on close to 10-year cycle. His use of genetic markers is providing a clear picture of the genetic structure and behavior of the frogs. The results from Emily McClary's thesis show that females do not put all their eggs in one pond, but rather distributed them among several pools. By spreading eggs among several pools, females may hedge their bets and avoid loosing all offspring in a pool that may dry up or be over-crowded.

Heather Williams presented results from her ongoing Savannah sparrow project at the 14th Annual Bird Song Workshop, a conference that she helped to found. With other Williams College faculty, Prof. Williams published an account of a laboratory exercise developed for the introductory neuroscience course. She led a tutorial BIOL 209T Animal Communication in the fall, and taught BIOL 102 The Organism in the spring.

Two honors students completed thesis in Professor Williams’ lab. Dani Levine ’10 examined the relationship between song complexity and the brain space devoted to song learning in control in two different songbird species, and Hannah Rosenthal ’10 used lesioning techniques to study the relative contributions of two neural circuits in song production and its variability in adults.

Steve Zottoli continued as Chair of the Biology Department. During the fall semester, Prof. Zottoli team-taught BIOL 212, Introduction to Neuroscience, with Betty Zimmerberg of the Psychology Department. In the spring, he taught BIOL 205, Animal Physiology. He mentored three Honors students, Taylor Goller ’10, Jun Liu, ’10 and Lahari Koganti, ’10. A long-term goal of the Zottoli laboratory is to understand the neuronal basis of behavior and the recovery of behavior after spinal cord injury. All three Honors students studied the invasion of reactive cells after injury to a single axon (the Mauthner axon) in the brain of the goldfish. Taylor Goller focused on the invasion to a minimal wound of the Mauthner axon, Jun Liu studied the relation of the reactive cells to regeneration of the Mauthner axon and Lahari Koganti used the transmission electron microscope to identify the reactive cells that invade the wound site. Prof. Zottoli continues to spend summers at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, MA where he conducts research and is a faculty member in the SPINES (Summer Program in Neuroscience, Ethics and Survival) course. Lahari Koganti, ’10 worked with Prof. Zottoli continuing studies on the function of supramedullary neurons in fishes. In work performed with Anna Green and Catherine Peichel at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, Prof. Zottoli published a paper on “Distinct Startle Responses are Associated with Neuroanatomical Differences in Pufferfishes.” Prof. Zottoli continues as a Life Trustee of The Grass Foundation.

Professor Marsha Altschuler was on sabbatical this past year, and spent the time working in her research lab exploring chromosome function and maintenance in Tetrahymena thermophila with the help of Sa-kiera Hudson ’11, Ang Li ’11, and Brian Shepherd ’11. She attended the FASEB conference on ciliate molecular biology in Saxtons River, VT in July 2009 and served on a grant review panel for the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. In June 2010 she and Ang Li ’11 presented a poster on their research at the Genetics Society meeting (Genetics 2010: Model Organisms to Humans) in Boston. She also gave a series of five lectures on the human genome to a group of Berkshire County residents as part of the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute’s spring course offerings and assisted Mt. Greylock Regional High School biology students in designing and carrying out independent research projects.

Carthene Bazemore-Walker, Brown University
Co-sponsored with Department of Chemistry

“Proteomic Analysis of Membrane Proteins”
Robert Burgess, Jackson Laboratory

“Mouse Models of Heritable Peripheral Neuropathy (Charcot-Marie-Tooth Disease)”
Anthony Fiumera, Binghamton University

“Variation in Reproductive Success and the Genetic Basis to Sexually Selected Traits”
Charles Mann, Author of 1491
Co-Sponsored by the Departments of History, Anthropology/Sociology, Center for Environmental Studies, Lecture Committee and Phi Beta Kappa Chapter.

“The ‘Pristine Myth’: The American Landscape before Columbus”
Michael Starnbach, Harvard Medical School
BIMO Class of 1960 Scholar Speaker

“Monitoring T Cell Responses to Bacterial Pathogens”
Matthew Stremlau, UCSF

“Why Monkeys are Resistant to HIV/AIDS”
Cliff Tabin, Harvard
Biology Class of 1960 Scholar Speaker

“Morphogenesis of the Vertebrate Gut”
David Weaver, UMass Medical School

“Circadian Rhythms in Mammals and Research Opportunities at UMass Medical School”

Hank Art

“Williamstown Land-Use Changes, 1935-2001”
Williamstown Rural Lands Foundation
Joan Edwards
Nora Mitchell ’10
Dwight Whittaker

“Floral Trebuchets, Airguns and Elaters Effect Rapid Spore Dispersal in Low Growing Plants”
Symposium “Mechanics without Muscle: Evolutionary Design of Macrophytes”
2010 Meeting Society for Integrative & Comparative Biology in Seattle, WA.
Martha Marvin

Poster Presentation, 9^th International Conference on Zebrafish Development and Genetics, Madison, WI, June 2010.