Congratulations to José Pablo Vázquez-Medina for his promotion to the rank of Associate Professor. The Vázquez-Medina lab studies mechanisms of adaptation to natural and anthropogenic stressors in marine mammals and pre-clinical models of disease at the molecular, cellular and organismal level.
Integrative Biology graduate student Robert Leija and the whole Professor George Brooks Lab make a discovery. The study was part of a larger NIH-funded study to determine how well people switch from fat to carbohydrate metabolism as they age. Read the Berkeley News Article.
Integrative Biology Professor Doris Bachtrog was elected to the American Academic of Arts & Sciences in 2024. She was elected in the Evolution and Ecology section of the Biological Sciences elected members.
This Thursday, March 14 is Big Give, the annual online giving day when the entire UC Berkeley community comes together to support their favorite departments and programs. Join us this year in our support of the Department of Integrative Biology. Every gift makes a difference. On March 14, donate to IB and show your support for our students. Special for this year's Big Give: If we receive 15 gifts during Big Give, we will unlock a $5,000 gift from Marc Carrasco, and a $5,000 gift from an anonymous donor!
Integrative Biology Professor of the Graduate School, Marvalee Wake, shares her thoughts on recent findings about amphibians that provide "milk" to their young. Read her perspective in the journal Science, and read more about the discovery in the New York Times article.
CT scans of animal skeletons are now available to anyone, including those with 3D printers. Read about the scans here...
Justice Williams and Stephen Eun Song, 2023 IBSURE interns.
The IB Summer Undergraduate Research Experience (IB SURE) Program has now opened it's application. This program is for undergraduates or recent undergraduates who are considering a graduate degree in the biological sciences. Program runs from May 31 - Aug 9, 2024. Interested students should apply by April 1, 2024. See here for more information.
Phred Benham, a postdoc in the Bowie Lab.
A new genomic analysis of Savannah sparrows (Passerculus sandwichensis) from around the state — many of them collected as far back as 1889, their specimens stored in the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at the University of California, Berkeley — shows that over the past 128 years, the Bay Area's sparrow's adaptation to salt water is being diminished by interbreeding with inland sparrows adapted to fresh water. Read More...
A new study by IB researchers (Professor Cindy Looy, PhD alum Rosemary Romero, and BA alum Tony Huynh) and collaborators shows that kelp flourished off the Northwest Coast more than 32 million years ago, long before the appearance of modern groups of marine mammals, sea urchins, birds and bivalves that today call the forests home.
Credit: Keren Mevorach; copyright UC Museum of Paleontology
As part of the "Lost Women of Science" podcast, Scientific American just shared a new episode. This episode features Annie Alexander, the founder of Museum of Vertebrate Zoology and a major contributor to many of the natural history research collections at UC Berkeley. Katie Hafner and Carol Sutton Lewis visit the UC Berkeley collections (all closely tied to the Department of Integrative Biology) to learn more...