The final Honors symposium of the 2018-2019 academic year was organized by the Office of Undergraduate Research and Inquiry. Dr. Cynthia Heil, from MOTE Marine Aquarium, discussed her research on red tides, which are now referred to as Harmful Algal Blooms or HABs.
On October 30th, Dr. Abe Miller from UT’s Health Sciences and Human Performance department, took a group of Honors students to collect scorpions. Dr. Miller is an expert on scorpions. He provided a good background on scorpions, illustrated how they luminesce under a black light, and provided instruction on how and where to spot them. We were a little worried that we might not see any after our first foray netted us only a wolf spider. But the next trail we tried was bountiful. Within 45 minutes we caught 15 and let another 5 or so get away.
Dr. Jeffry Fasick, from UT’s Biology Department, presented an engaging symposium on Right Whales to Honors students on October 2nd. Dr. Fasick’s research on North Atlantic Right Whales focuses on determining their visual spectrum and has been used to help diminish the number of entangling events from lobster traps that threaten right whales.
On April 4th, Dr. Bridgette Froeschke, Assistant Professor of Biology, led a Coffee Conversation on the questions “Who does water belong to? Should water be privatized?” The conversation covered a lot of topics relating to water, from the quality of bottled water versus tap water to who should own water rights and how water consumption and regulation (or lack thereof) affect environmental quality.
Working with Dr. Abraham Miller, Honors student Laura Hearst recently combined a trip to California to attend the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology Conference with a visit to the California Academy of Sciences to examine some scorpion specimens. The pictures above show Laura and Dr. Miller examining the scorpions. The research is part of her Honors Undergraduate Research Fellowship.
BIOH124 is a non-majors Honors Biology course that is being taught as an intro to human genetics. The professor, Dr. Sarah Cuccinello, developed a karyotyping activity that is unique to the Honors version of the course. The photos above show the students engaged in this activity. There are also some pictures of them using micropipettes for the first time. The micropipette practice is preparation for some genetics experiments they will be conducting in a couple of weeks.
