Accomplishments: School of Life Sciences

Mira Han (Nevada Institute of Personalized Medicine and Life Sciences) won the National IDeA Symposium of Biomedical Research Excellence (NISBRE) Young Investigator/Student Travel Award for her poster, "Transcriptome Analysis Reveals Negative Correlation between Mitochondrial Genes and Transcripts of L1HS, and Positive Correlation between…
Cindy X. Kha (Life Sciences) was a recipient of two Awards of Excellence at the American Association for the Advancement of Science 99th annual meeting of the Pacific Division. A graduate student in the laboratory of Kelly Ai-Sun Tseng (Life Sciences), Kha presented her research, “Apoptosis is Required for Developmental Eye Regrowth in…
Kai-Yu Ho (Physical Therapy) and David Lee (Life Sciences) received a Faculty Opportunity Award in the collaborative interdisciplinary research category for their study “Knee Pain, Tendon Degeneration, and Limb-Socket Dynamics in Trans-Tibial Amputees.” Their work seeks to understand how below-the-knee prosthetic sockets influence the transmission…
Nora Caberoy (Life Sciences) and Francisco Sy (Community Health Sciences) gave their research presentations at the 38th Philippine American Academy of Science and Engineering Annual Meeting and Symposium public health session at the University of Arizona earlier this month. Caberoy presented her research "Lessons from the Eye: Can We Redirect the…
Andrea Darby (Life Sciences) recently won first prize in the Science Slam competition at the 59th Annual Drosophila Research Conference in Philadelphia. The title of her spoken word piece was "Pet Project." She is an undergraduate student in her senior year.
Boo Shan Tseng and Sophia Araujo Hernandez (both Life Sciences), as well as collaborators at the University of Washington and the University of Calgary, published a research article, "A Biofilm Matrix-Associated Protease Inhibitor Protects Pseudomonas Aeruginosa from Proteolytic Attack", in the high-impact journal mBio. The work shows…
Kelly Ai-Sun Tseng (Life Sciences) was awarded a $224,250 grant from the Nevada INBRE: IDeA Network of Biomedical Research Excellence funded by the National Institutes of Health. Her research project "Building a Molecular Blueprint for Productive Eye Repair" aims to identify genes and signals that induce eye regeneration. Research…
Helen Wing (Life Sciences) and a group that included 16 members of her research team (seven undergraduate students, six graduate students, two technicians and one post-doctoral fellow) published a paper, "Insights into Transcriptional Silencing and Anti‐Silencing in Shigella flexneri: a Detailed Molecular Analysis of the icsP…
Mira Han (Life Sciences) was awarded a National Science Foundation Career Award for her research project, “Using Indel Rate Variation to Understand Evolutionary Constraints on Distances Between Functional Elements in the Genome.” Han will use the five-year, $574,068 award to study how insertion and deletion mutations impact the evolution…
Jenifer Utz (Life Sciences) gave a research presentation entitled, "Voluntary Self-Assessment Quiz Use Improves Exam Performance, Especially for Learners with Low Prior Knowledge" at the Intermountain Teaching for Learning Conference. This research was a collaborative project with Matt Bernacki (Educational Psychology and Higher Education).
Scott Abella (Life Sciences) has partnered with University Libraries to showcase his research on conservation in America's national parks system in the digital exhibit space in the Leisure Reading Zone on the second floor of Lied Library. "Conserving America's National Parks" pulls images and information from Abella's 2015 book of the same name,…
Lawrence Walker and Fred Landau (both School of Life Sciences) recently published a book,  A Natural History of the Mojave Desert. In it, the authors explore how a combination of complex geology, varied geography, and changing climate has given rise to intriguing flora and fauna — including almost 3,000 plant species and about 380…