Spring 2022

This distant place is close to home.

News From Our Life Sciences Departments

Dr. Kamal Ranadive, born in 1917 in Pune, India, used her degrees to conduct biomedical research in various cancers and a leprosy vaccine. When she retired, she trained rural women to work in healthcare and organized scholarships for women in science.

With the number of natural history collections declining, Skip Skidmore and Randy Larsen recognize the importance of the bird collection at the Bean Life Science Museum.

Winners of the Semiannual Agar Art Contests for the 2021-2022 school year, sponsored by the College of Life Sciences Department of Microbiology and Molecular Biology (MMBIO).

Four-year-old Sara Sayedi sits on her mother’s bedroom floor in Iran, flipping through images of colorful monkeys and frigid arctic landscapes. The world comes alive to her through the villages pictured in National Geographic magazines and the detailed maps in atlases. Her mother helps her sound out unfamiliar words like Antarctica. Decades later, Sayedi’s fascination with the natural world continues to grow as she engages in environmental conservation work through research that impacts policymaking.

Dallin Leota, the new owner of the Lytle Preserve, opens the land to BYU students, visitors, and Paiute tribe leaders to provide hands-on experiences with history, preservation, and land restoration.

The following is an abridgment of Dr. Glenn Schiraldi’s presentation given on September 9, 2021, as part of the College of Life Sciences Faith and Science seminar series.

It’s not every day that an undergraduate student approaches you with an innovative idea that significantly impacts the field and leads to developing a patented product, a startup company, and published research,” says Jonathon Hill, an associate professor of cell biology at BYU. “[But] I actually think the mentorship aspect is the best story here.”

In 2002, the death of legendary NFL center Mike Webster introduced the world to the degenerative brain disease known as chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). The disease is marked by depression, rage, substance abuse, cognitive dysfunction, and dementia, and diagnoses are rising rapidly among retired football players.

At the University of Louisville in Kentucky, a student approached then-professor James Porter and said, “You must be a Christian.” This surprised Porter; he never talked about his religion in the public education sphere. The student continued, “I could tell by the way you act that you must be a Christian.”

I am amazed at how often the work of students from the College of Life Sciences is featured by various campus and off-campus communication outlets. For example, a paper recently published in the journal PLOS One by a group of faculty and students from our Department of Microbiology and Molecular Biology was recently the lead article on the BYU homepage and was covered by several local media outlets. These researchers found that the virus responsible for COVID-19 was very unstable when placed on paper money but was more stable when placed on a credit card. This work suggests that our shift to cashless transactions during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic to limit the spread of the virus may have been ill-advised.