News
The 2009-2010 Biology Major Reps are:
Sasha DeWitt and Rica Dela Cruz
Congratulations to the Class of 2009 Biology Graduates!
Some of our 2009 Biology Majors...
Student News Summer 2009
Bryn Mawr Biology majors are having an exciting summer, working at variety of jobs on campus, off campus, and out of the country! Here is a sampling of how some of our students are spending their summers...
Emily Bergbower (BMC '11) ... is once again spending the summer working in the Hardwick Lab at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. She is continuing her research on the ketogenic diet using a mouse model. In August, she will travel to the south of France.
Lisa Betz (BMC '10) ... was busy this summer! She spent part of her time preparing for the MCAT and volunteering for Habitat for Humanity. In addition, Lisa spent her third summer working for Dr. Clifford Jones, an orthopedic trauma surgeon. She is very excited about her recently published case report, "Peronea arteria magna," in Pediatric Radiology and her current study, “Functional Outcomes of Operatively Treated Displaced Acetabular Fractures.” After a productive summer, Lisa is looking forward to her senior year at Bryn Mawr College.
Leah Bonnell (BMC '11) ... is enjoying New York City as she participates in the Summer Medical and Dental Education Program (SMDEP) at Columbia University, where she is learning about dentistry and science.
Anisha Chirmule (BMC '10) ... spent a month of her summer working in a microbiology, immunology and molecular genetics laboratory at UCLA. While she was there, she investigated transgenic mice expressing chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) as well as transductions of CD34 stem cells and human PBMC using lentiviral vectors expressing CAR.
In the lab of Dr. Greg Davis at Bryn Mawr College ... 
Hillary Cleveland (BMC '10), Eileen Downs (BMC '10)
and Emma Hedman (BMC '11) ... are having an excellent time working with aphids. Emma and Eileen are injecting asexual aphid mothers with hopes of affecting their offspring, while Hillary is trying to clone several genes with the eventual hope of in situ hybridizations. In their free time, they enjoy bonding experiences like exploding aphids and late night protocols.
Sasha DeWitt (BMC '10) ... started her summer by volunteering on a Navy Hospital Ship the USS Comfort. Sasha said: "It was really amazing and I felt like I really was helpful to them and I learned a lot about medicine. I worked as a translator for Navy doctors at different temporary clinics in Colon, Panama. I was in Panama for a week." After this experience, Sasha flew back to NY to start her summer internship in the Emergency Department at Bellevue Hospital. She enjoyed this experience, and said that she felt like she was helping and learning a lot by working in various parts of the emergency department (ER to the emergency psych unit) and by volunteering in the OR and observing operations. Mahvish Qureshi (BMC '10) was also in the program with Sasha, and they did a health fair project together on heart disease.
Sandra Gandarez (BMC '11) ... is taking General Chemistry at Rutgers Newark, which she says gives her "a whole new appreciation for the professors at Bryn Mawr." She is also getting ready to study abroad, and is planning to take a class on Mediterranean ecosystems.
Yang Gao (BMC '10) ...
is spending her summer doing a research internship at the American Museum of Natural History. She is working in the Sackler Institute of Comparative Genomics, and her research project is part of the DNA Barcoding Initiatives. Yang is barcoding African Bushmeat samples... she tell us: "mostly crocodiles, but some other animals as well." In addition to barcoding fresh African bushmeat tissue samples, she is also extracting and barcoding DNA from some leather products confiscated by the USFWS (US Fish & Wildlife Service) to see whether they are made from skins of endangered croc species (see the photo, which illustrates some of the confiscated products she's working with!).
Regina Kukola (BMC '10) ... is working in Peru this summer, analyzing human skeletal remains from archaeological contexts. She is assisting Dr. Melissa Murphy with inventory and analysis of materials, along with collecting data for her anthropology thesis project, which involves creating population specific value ranges of post crainal measurements which can be used for assigning sex to archaeological Peruvian human remains.
Lisa Lamprou (BMC '10) ... is spending her summer working at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania with an attending psychiatrist. She is shadowing Dr. Deborah Kim in two clinics, one specializing in mental health issues, and the other in pregnant women with mental health issues. Lisa is also currently working with Dr. Kim on two research projects. The first project is a pilot safety study that they hope to turn into an efficacy study, attempting to treat depression in pregnant women using TMS or transcranial magnetic stimulation. The second study involves drawing blood from patients before and after they receive transcranial magetic stimulation and assessing their brain derived neurotrophic factor levels (BDNF), an important factor in depression. Lisa tell us: "I will continue working with Dr. Kim throughout the duration of the school year and will also be publishing a review paper focusing on BDNF in a medical journal!"
Crystal Leonard (BMC '11) ... is currently working in an microbiology/immunology lab at the Pennsylvania Biotechnology Center of Bucks County in Doylestown, PA. She is optimizing a new ELISA assay for AFP, which is the only currently approved biomarker for liver cancer. Crystal tell us that "the lab hopes to make this new assay commercially available, although that will take a while to happen and I'll be back in school by then."
Kristen Magnuson (BMC '11) ... is spending her summer researching how leaf litter decomposition affects magnesium and calcium dynamics in forests with varying levels of nitrogen deposition in order to gain greater knowledge of the effects of acidic deposition on forest sustainability and potential methods of mitigating harmful effects. She tell us: "I'm learning a lot about the research process, and I'm enjoying my work in the lab." At the end of the summer, Kristen will travel in Europe, and says "I'm really looking forward to the upcoming year at BMC!"
Sarah Maley (BMC '11) ... is spending her second summer working with Dr. Vazquez at the Yale School of Medicine and Yale-New Haven Hospital, trying to determine the correlation between maternal antibody levels and the presence and severity of a human metapneumovirus infection in infants. She tells us: "I'm having a great time learning about the inner workings of clinical trials."
Jane Morris (BMC '10) ... is keeping herself busy this summer with two different internships. For the first part of the summer, Jane is studying public health in Gaborone, Botswana, a job which includes "weekly volunteer work at a hospice, study trips to the diamond mine that made Botswana rich, and a week-long internship at a primary health care clinic in Mochudi." When Jane returns to Philly, she'll be participating in the Clinical Translational Research program at the University of Pennsylvania, and will be working with Dr. Hildegund Ertl.
Valeria Pizzini (BMC '10) ... took the DAT and is in the process of applying to dental school this summer. She is also working in the OR of a hospital near Milan, where she is doing volunteer work. She tells us: "It's really fun!"
Fatima Quadri (BMC '11) ... is participating in a Summer Medical and Dental Program at the University of Louisville in Louisville, Kentucky. Along with 79 other students from various parts of the country, Fatima took a class called Introduction to the Fundamentals of Biomedical Science which combined Organic Chem, Biochem, and Physiology. Through this program, she has had the opportunity to shadow both the medical and dental world.
Evan Raskin (HC '10) ... is working in the Mitchell-Olds lab at Duke. He has primarily been conducting experiments on drought tolerance with Brachypodium distachyon, which is being developed as a model system for grasses. He is currently determining water use efficiency for the 1500 test plants (collected across a moisture gradient and grown out in high- and low-moisture treatments) with a rather unique whole-plant gas exchange system.
Amelie Raz (BMC '11) ... spent the first five weeks of her summer taking the first semester of Organic Chemistry at Bryn Mawr with the wonderful Dr. Nerz. She then continued internship work from last year with the Center for Bioethics at UPenn, studying the ethics of establishing a market system for kidney transplantation. During August, Amelie will be doing an internship with the Clinical and Translational Sciences program (also at UPenn), working for Dr. Katherine Nathanson on projects identifying the genetic changes associated with an increased risk of breast cancer and testicular germ cell tumors.
Madison Schaeffer (BMC '11) ... 
is keeping herself busy surveying spotted gar populations in Michigan lakes and tagging fish. She has been doing a lot of electrofishing and seining, and is sampling many different species of native fish. Madison is also working in the lab - setting up a common garden experiment with Louisiana and Michigan gar, artificially spawning fish, and dissecting.
Caroline Wright (BMC '10) ... participated in an REU in Kruger National Park, South Africa, where she conducted biodiversity surveys to assess the effects of elephants on biodiversity through loss of big trees in the riparian forests along the Sabi River. Her project investigated differences in terrestrial arthropod assemblages in sites of various canopy coverage. Caroline collected, sorted, and IDed almost 5,000 individuals, not including ants, and in general found that communities in dense sites are distinct from open, sparse, and intermediate sites when categorized both by major orders and functional guilds, though the specific structural vegetation features that serves as the best predictors of these differences have yet to be determined.
Students conducting research in the Bryn Mawr Biology Department include:
Hilary Cleveland (BMC '10) - G. Davis lab
Rica Dela Cruz (BMC '10) - Chander lab
Kathy Dilliplane (BMC '10) - Sears lab
Eileen Downs (BMC '10) - G. Davis lab
Sahitya Penumetcha (BMC '10) - Chander lab
Bailey Baumann (BMC '11) - Greif lab
Dakota Fisher-Vance (BMC '11) - Brodfuehrer lab
Emma Hedman (BMC '11) - G. Davis lab
Nelly Khaselev (BMC '11) - T. Davis lab
Emily Lovejoy (BMC '10) - Grobstein
Sadie Marlow (BMC '11) - T. Davis lab
Brie Stark (BMC '12) - Grobstein lab
Other Student News...
Fourth Annual Undergraduate Research Symposium
Ursinus College
November 10, 2007
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Nana Asabere (BMC '09), RaElle Jackson ('08), Astra Bryant (BMC '08), Rachel Brady (BMC '09), Kamila Nowak (BMC '08), and Cecily Moyer (Haverford '09) at their posters.