URAP

Michael Shapira - Professor, Integrative Biology

Status: Full- no new appr needed     Weekly Hours: 12 or more hours     Location: On Campus

Toxins play important roles in inter-species interactions, and the ability to overcome them can open new niches. The potential of animal genomes to facilitate such adaptations is limited; instead, toxin resistance in animals is often provided by gut bacteria. Human activity and industry has dramatically increased the prevalence of...

Michael Shapira - Professor, Integrative Biology

Status: Full- no new appr needed     Weekly Hours: 12 or more hours     Location: On Campus

Animal microbiotas are increasingly recognized as essential for host health. The gut microbiota is the richest, and was shown to contribute to diverse host functions. Perturbations in microbiota composition are associated with human disease, raising interest in manipulating the microbiota to promote healthier living or treat pathology. However, current understanding...

Michael Shapira - Professor, Integrative Biology

Status: Full- no new appr needed     Weekly Hours: 12 or more hours     Location: On Campus

Aging involves a multi-system physiological deterioration. In addition to affected tissues, and likely as a consequence, aging also affects the gut microbiota, an extensive microbial community which contributes to diverse host functions. Imbalances in microbiota composition, or dysbiosis, are often associated with pathology, and recent reports indicate that aging...

Michal Shuldman - Assistant Teaching Professor, Integrative Biology

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: 6-8 hrs     Location: On Campus

This project looks at how undergraduate biology students perceive their instructors' practices in introductory courses at a large research university. While most education reform efforts in biology focus on “inclusive teaching” have been defined by instructors and researchers, there hasn’t been much focus on how students themselves view inclusion. We’re...

Ellen Simms - Professor, Integrative Biology

Status: Check back for status     Weekly Hours: to be negotiated     Location: On Campus

Introduced plants can become invasive when they escape the insect and microbial enemies that control native plant populations. Legumes benefit from symbiotic relationships with nitrogen-fixing bacteria called rhizobia, which colonize nodules in legume roots. We have found that three invasive leguminous plant species (French broom, Spanish broom, and Scotch...

Ellen Simms - Professor, Integrative Biology

Status: Full- no new appr needed     Weekly Hours: to be negotiated     Location: Off Campus

Until recently there was still the idea that when it comes to the microbial world, since it is so small, everything must be everywhere. Much current research is showing this claim does not hold water. Few things are truly everywhere and most things, even on the micro scale, have very...

Ellen Simms - Professor, Integrative Biology

Status: Full- no new appr needed     Weekly Hours: to be negotiated     Location: On Campus

Bacteriophages (phages, for short) are viruses that attack and kill bacteria. Phages tend to be host specific (specialize on particular bacteria), which allows them to influence bacterial community composition. Legumes are plants that benefit from symbiotic relationships with nitrogen-fixing bacteria called rhizobia, which colonize nodules in legume roots. Rhizobia...

Ellen Simms - Professor, Integrative Biology

Status: Full- no new appr needed     Weekly Hours: 9-11 hrs     Location: On Campus

High temperature is an abiotic stress that impedes the growth and productivity of all crops irrespective of their heat tolerance. High temperature affects the development of both vegetative and reproductive structures. It arrests cell proliferation arrest, increases vacuolization, causes over-development of chloroplasts, certain abnormalities in other organelles, and comprehensively...

Rebecca Tarvin - Professor , Integrative Biology, Museum of Vertebrate Zoology

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: 6-8 hrs     Location: On Campus

Evolutionary transitions underlying phenotypic change are difficult to study because they often occur over millions of years. However, the fruit fly has a short generation time and a small genome that is well annotated and cheap to sequence. We used a large-scale experimental evolution approach to evolve toxin-sequestering...

Rebecca Tarvin - Professor , Integrative Biology, Museum of Vertebrate Zoology

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: 6-8 hrs     Location: On Campus

The Tarvin Lab studies how and why poison frogs don’t poison themselves. We aim to measure the effect of toxin consumption on frog health and chemical defenses through toxin feeding experiments paired with phenotypic assays (health monitoring, jumping challenges) and genomic assessment (RNA and DNA sequencing...

Rebecca Tarvin - Professor , Integrative Biology, Museum of Vertebrate Zoology

Status: Full- no new appr needed     Weekly Hours: 9-11 hrs     Location: On Campus

Amphibians -- frogs, salamanders, and caecilians -- exhibit a stunning variety of chemical defenses, ranging from antimicrobial peptides to antipredator neurotoxins and biological glues. Amphibian glues are the least-studied of these defenses. Additionally, the methods used to measure amphibian stickiness are not standardized, with some researchers gluing together beer cans to...

Rebecca Tarvin - Professor , Integrative Biology, Museum of Vertebrate Zoology

Status: Full- no new appr needed     Weekly Hours: 6-8 hrs     Location: On Campus

Amphibians -- frogs, salamanders, and caecilians -- exhibit a stunning variety of chemical defenses, ranging from antimicrobial peptides to antipredator neurotoxins and biological glues! These defenses generally co-occur with physiological, morphological, and behavioral adaptations that sometimes exhibit convergence with distantly related taxa. However, research into amphibian chemical defense has been far...

Jack Tseng - Professor, Integrative Biology

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: to be negotiated     Location: On Campus

Bone crushing dogs were a diverse and successful subfamily of canids that thrived throughout North America for nearly 30 million years. As bone crushing dogs evolved they show convergent features with hyaenas in their cranial anatomy (i.e. a large sagittal crest and domed forehead to dissipate stress). While the skull...

Jack Tseng - Professor, Integrative Biology

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: 3-5 hrs     Location: On Campus

With over 260 recognized extant species, the order Carnivora is one of the most diverse mammalian groups today, with a history tracing back approximately 60 million years. Crown carnivorans are divided into two suborders: Feliformia (cats, genets, hyenas, mongooses, etc.) and Caniformia (dogs, bears, raccoons, weasels, skunks, seals, etc.). Despite...

Jack Tseng - Professor, Integrative Biology

Status: Full- no new appr needed     Weekly Hours: 6-8 hrs     Location: On Campus

Studying vertebral measurements and trabeculae's shape and orientation can provide a more comprehensive understanding of how rodent groups adapted to their specific environments and lifestyles. Quantifying the gross morphological variation of each rodent group through vertebral measurements can provide information about weight-bearing capacity, stability, strength, mobility, and flexibility. Additionally...

Jack Tseng - Professor, Integrative Biology

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: 6-8 hrs     Location: On Campus

Human actions and infrastructure are impacting biodiversity in real time, rapidly changing environments, modifying ecological interactions, and introducing new selection pressures that living organisms have never before encountered. To develop effective, targeted conservation strategies, we need to understand how anthropogenic actions, infrastructure, and management decisions influence evolution. One of the...

Jose Pablo Vazquez-Medina - Professor, Integrative Biology

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: to be negotiated     Location: On Campus

Oxidative damage to mitochondria has been implicated in the pathogenesis of diabetes, stroke, nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD), and many other metabolic syndrome disorders. Recent work shows that deletion of the antioxidant protein peroxiredoxin 6 (PRDX6) dysregulates mitochondrial function. PRDX6 is a multi-functional enzyme that expresses at least 2...

Jose Pablo Vazquez-Medina - Professor, Integrative Biology

Status: Full- no new appr needed     Weekly Hours: 9-11 hrs     Location: On Campus

This project seeks to characterize cells isolated from the blubber of northern elephant seal pups during the post-weaning fasting period. Elephant seal pups nurse from their mothers for ~1 month, after which they are abruptly weaned and carry out a terrestrial post-weaning fast for several months prior to...

Jose Pablo Vazquez-Medina - Professor, Integrative Biology

Status: Full- no new appr needed     Weekly Hours: to be negotiated     Location: On Campus

The focus of this project is to develop tissue culture models to answer mechanistic questions that are relevant to physiological responses during diving and under stress conditions in sea turtles. This project will examine sea turtles’ adaptations to hypoxia by characterizing gene expression and reactive oxygen species generation under differential...

Jose Pablo Vazquez-Medina - Professor, Integrative Biology

Status: Full- no new appr needed     Weekly Hours: to be negotiated     Location: On Campus

The aim of this project is to examine the impact of acute and chronic glucocorticoids (GC) on marine mammal muscle cells. Environmental and ecological stressors increase the concentration of circulating GC potentially affecting an individual’s behavior, physiology, and fitness. However, the consequences of chronic GC exposure remain elusive in many...

Noah Whiteman - Professor, Integrative Biology

Status: Full- no new appr needed     Weekly Hours: 3-5 hrs     Location: On Campus

Approximately fifty percent of all insect species are herbivorous and together with plants, comprise over half of all named species of life. To feed on a plant, an herbivore must evolve strategies to overcome the chemical defenses (toxins) that plants produce to protect themselves from herbivory. These toxins may inhibit...

Noah Whiteman - Professor, Integrative Biology

Status: Full- no new appr needed     Weekly Hours: 3-5 hrs     Location: On Campus

During the evolutionary transition from one feeding guild to another, such as microbe- to plant-feeding, it is hypothesized that behavioral adaptations are among the first to evolve. In insects, changes to the chemosensory systems that determine host preference are necessary, not only for finding an appropriate host, but in...

Noah Whiteman - Professor, Integrative Biology

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: 6-8 hrs     Location: On Campus

NOTE TO APPLICANTS: This project is only open to onboard a previous Whiteman Lab undergraduate researcher who had not been enrolled through URAP. We will not be evaluating new applications for this project at this time.] While much of genetic inheritance occurs via vertical transmission (i.e., from parents to offspring...

Caroline Williams - Professor, Integrative Biology

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: 9-11 hrs     Location: On Campus

The Williams Lab in the Department of Integrative Biology studies the life history and physiology of the California variable field cricket. Crickets are a model system to study how animals can adjust energetic investments to activity, reproduction, and maintenance throughout their lifetime because there are winged and wingless types within...

Caroline Williams - Professor, Integrative Biology

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: 9-11 hrs     Location: On Campus

We are using grasshoppers from the Rocky Mountains in Colorado to study the biological impacts of recent anthropogenic climate change, from the level of genes and molecules to whole organisms and communities...