Biological Sciences
Facts
- 75 faculty members
- 745 undergraduate majors
- 143 graduate students
Research Award Dollars
- Ecology, Evolution & Organismal
Biology - $13,711,629
- Genetics Development & Cell Biology
- $11,445,466
- Biochemistry, Biophysics & Molecular
Biology - $20,040,019
July '99 to March 02
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Leaders have been announced for two new departments in biological sciences
at Iowa State University.
Jonathan
Wendel, an ISU faculty member since 1986, was named the chair of the
Department
of Ecology, Evolution and Organismal Biology. Martin
Spalding, an ISU faculty member since 1984, was named the chair of
the Department of Genetics, Development and Cell Biology.
The new departments, approved earlier this year by the Board of Regents,
State of Iowa, are part of a reorganization to strengthen research and
education in basic life sciences. The reorganization is providing new
academic homes for faculty members addressing similar types of biological
questions, whether they be at the molecular, cellular or organism and
population levels.
The reorganization also has included the establishment last year of the
Department of Natural Resources, Ecology and Management, which was created
from a merger of the animal ecology and forestry departments; the elimination
of the microbiology, botany and zoology and genetics departments; and
the continuation of the existing Biochemistry,
Biophysics and Molecular Biology.
Three of the four departments resulting from the reorganization are co-administered
by the College of Liberal Arts and
Sciences and the College of Agriculture. The fourth, the Department
of Natural Resources, Ecology and Management, is administered by the College
of Agriculture.
Spalding holds a Ph.D. in plant physiology from the University of Wisconsin.
His research interests focus on the metabolic regulation of gene expression
and responses of photosynthetic cells to changes in carbon status. He
is a member of the American Society of Plant Physiologists and served
as the chair of the plant physiology graduate program at Iowa State from
1992-2000. In 2001 he was a visiting fellow at the Bioscience Center at
Nagoya University in Nagoya, Japan.
Wendel studies plant systematics and molecular evolution, particularly
in cotton. He was the Jacob Meyerhoff Visiting Professor at the Weizman
Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel in 1997-98. He is a member of
the American Society of Plant Taxonomists and earned his Ph.D. from the
University of North Carolina.
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