The Discovery Projects are done and we are on break!

Hello, everyone! This one's from Cassie, class of 2012...
As the fall semester transitions into winter break, I am really glad to have found time to post to our IBH blog!

The presentations of the IB 270 Discovery Projects were given the week before finals, and they were all very impressive. First off, it was really comforting to know that people outside of our class came to see our presentations. A group of similarly interested people all gathering to see the culmination of our semester's work with the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans really made the presentations fun to give. Since this was also a pizza party/presentation hybrid, it was double the fun! From the infection rate of pseudomonas in C. elegans to the chemotaxis of C. elegans in the presence of different alcohols, our Discovery Projects explored a whole range of interesting topics regarding the effects of RNA interference in C. elegans.

For the Discovery Projects, our lab groups had to develop a novel hypothesis regarding the effects of RNA Interference on a gene within the C. elegans genome. At the beginning of the semester, we researched scientific literature in order to formulate our hypotheses, methods, and expected results.Once we had created a solid proposal for the experiment, we started to see how our regular class labs were related to this independent project. With our Mendelian genetics lab, we learned the body morphology of C. elegans, their reproductive systems, and how to classify certain mutant phenotypes. Armed with our knowledge about these soil-dwelling organisms, we then moved onto a DNA lab where we learned molecular techniques such as PCR and DNA sequencing with the Sequencher program. After the completion of the RNA Interference Lab, we had successfully learned how to make NGM (nematode growth medium) plates and then seed those plates with bacteria. We then learned the intricate details of RNA Interference, and how it would be working to knock out the genes chosen for our respective Discovery Projects. These labs were crucial building blocks that guided our projects throughout the semester. Many thanks to Nick and Miranda (our teaching assistants) for preparing those labs for us, and to Professor Whitfield for teaching us everything about C. elegans, RNA Interference, and the research process!

I've never been through a class where everything culminates so fluidly to an important group project presentation. I really felt like I had invested the entire semester in this project. Not only was class time utilized, but time outside of class was a necessity for getting these projects done on time. All of us had the same common goal--to execute this experiment as best as we could, and that meant putting in a ton of extra time. This was perfectly fine with me considering all of the fun times that were had in NHB this semester.

It's the most gratifying feeling to know that all of our fun and hard work intertwined to fabricate our scientific aspirations into a tangible design. Plus, those presentations weren't so scary once I realized that we really were all in this together. I am sure that the rest of my class is as excited for the rest of what the IBH program has to offer for the upcoming semesters. From one semester alone, my outlook regarding a career in biology has evolved from a genuine interest into a sincere passion that I will undoubtedly follow for the rest of my life. With IB 270, we delved further into biological applications, previously unknown details of molecular biology, and a wealth of laboratory techniques. All of the knowledge gained from lecture, lab, our professor, teaching assistants, and each other accumulated into a reserve of inspiration to further explore the biological world. Joining IBH was the best decision that I made at UIUC so far, and I truly look forward to my future academic adventures with the program.

After a long winter break, here we come, IB 271!
Cassie

The Semester's Almost Over! (Matt Grobis)

Hello!

With Thanksgiving over and preparations being made to return to U of I tomorrow, I'm realizing that there's a week and a half of classes left. Then finals and... it's over. Whoa, hold on a second. I remember several points during the semester when I'd look at an Allenotes in my dorm (Allen Hall) and see that it was week 8, or week 10. The semester was one enormously long stretch until about halfway through, and then the next few weeks flew by. Crazy...

This semester has changed me, I think. I feel a little burned out... I actually laughed a few days ago when I asked myself if I really want to go to graduate school. What would the other option be? Stay home and play video games? Try to make a rock band and play drums for a living? Sure, those are sources of immediate gratification, but what's down the line? Deprived of biology long enough, I'm sure I'd start itching to learn more about how the world works. This all reminds me of that concept from introductory psychology... it's like, people have "lists" of desired activities, and things that are normally low on the list can actually move up if one doesn't do them frequently. The opposite thing can happen for things that one does very frequently. People take for granted their health until it's jeopardized... then, it's the most important thing in the world to them.

Anyway, this is a tremendous deviation from the point of this post. I feel burnt out because I've tried so hard and met such resistance, especially from organic chemistry... I'll be glad when it's over. And I'll be glad when this semester is over, but not because I'll be done with my classes. I feel that I have learned so much this fall, maybe more so than the entire last year. Finishing this semester will put a cap on everything that I've done so far and let me finally get closure on the last few months. IB Honors has been intense but it's been a flood of information and experiences that I want and that have helped me understand the world.

It was nice to return home and be able to put the books aside and do whatever I wanted with no obligations for a few days. After a while, though, I started getting that familiar uncomfortable feeling like I should be doing something worthwhile. This, I feel, is the reason I want to go to graduate school. It's easy to get lost in the work, sleep deprivation, and occasional frustration. The whole point of why one is doing something can be hard to hold onto. I want to pave the way into unfamiliar territory, into concepts that are still unclear and the textbooks avoid. I want to do something that others will read about and say, "wow." When I was in high school, in my final reflective paper in English I wrote that I wanted to change the world. Coming to college, I see that changing the world is going to be a bit harder than I anticipated. But give me time.

-Matt

Late into October (Matt Grobis)

Hello all!

I've gone home for the weekend and have finally found the time to write something here. This semester's been hard, much harder than the other two here. Science and math classes can be really time-intensive, so even if the material itself isn't hard, if it takes a few hours to do it, those few hours are going to be bumping shoulders with the time it takes to finish other homework. Result: very late nights if you don't time manage.

For example, our first lab report was due in IB 270. The lab, analyzing the relationship between two phenotypes in C. elegans, seemed like it would have a straightforward and simple lab report. My group took copious notes in our lab notebooks and the lab report rubric didn't seem too bad. BUT: it took time. A lot of it. I realized this at 4am Friday morning, when I took a quick break from writing to finish (ok... start) my orgo problem set due in five hours. How'd this happen?!

At no point that week had I purposely put off doing homework. I was busy doing other work, but the work was always just what was due the next day. There's this thing called "planning ahead" that you need to learn when you come to college, and if you don't do that, sleep deprivation awaits if you want to get any sort of decent grades.

I'm not trying to scare anybody thinking about IB Honors. Read the rest of this post if you want to get excited about it, because I'm really happy here. It's just a lot of work. You need to be really driven to get through math through calc III and organic chemistry in addition to tough bio classes. Physics, biochem, and statistics are probably going to be tough too. But the thing is: everyone in IBH is going through this. That night I was up late writing the lab report, I joked around a lot with the other students there and we had Jimmy John's together, making light of the situation. We're all stressed. We're all trying our best. You really bond after something like that.

Academics aside, let's get to the dorky intellectual stuff... I'm so happy! I'm realizing that one of my favorite parts of IB 270 is reading scientific articles every week. This week's article was "Massive Horizontal Gene Transfer in Bdelloid Rotifers," by some people at Harvard and the Marine Bio Lab in Woods Hole, MA. Horizontal gene transfer (HGT) is where a change in the genome occurs during an organism's lifetime, as opposed to vertical gene transfer, where two parents produce an offspring with a different genome. HGT is very common in bacteria but very rare in animals. In this one type of animal, the rotifer, though, the team found dozens of genes from bacteria, plants, and fungi. How could this have possibly happened? The article goes into detail about where they found the genes and how they could have gotten there; they use the same BLAST procedure that my lab group did to compare genes in different species (more on that later!) and analyzed where in the genome these foreign genes were.

I absolutely love reading stuff like this because it's so new that it's not even in the textbooks yet. I've realized that a lot of textbooks can be thorough but not very deep. They can cover a lot of material at a certain level of depth but they have to compromise that depth to cover everything they need to cover. A research article, on the other hand, is the equivalent of a paragraph of the textbook gone into incredible detail; basically, that paragraph is expanded into a few pages. Very cool.

So, back to the BLAST thing I mentioned. BLAST is a button you press on a website after specifying a nucleotide/protein/etc. sequence that you want to find similarities for. Normally this sequence you have corresponds to something in an organism, and you're trying to find related genes in other organisms. My lab group did this for our Discovery Project (I think I talk about the Discovery Project in detail two posts ago; check it out). We wanted to analyze olfaction and chemotaxis in C. elegans: ideally, knocking out a gene related to olfaction would result in a loss of chemotaxis. We found a gene in mice that, when knocked out, resulted in impaired olfaction. We BLASTed that gene and lo and behold, a near identical gene is present in C. elegans! We looked into a few articles on it, and nobody's done our exact experiment yet. Our semester project has been formed!

Anyway, on to other subjects. Orgo and calculus are hard but I'm managing. In my PSYC 433 class, we watched this amazing National Geographic special on Robert Sapolsky, a neurobiologist at Stanford who works with baboons in Kenya. In the video, a comparison was made between his findings of stress levels in the baboons and the results of a correlational study conducted in England on stress levels in workers in particular businesses. Baboons make a good comparison because they spend only 3 hours a day on food; the other 9 are entirely social behavior. Baboon groups have strong hierarchies, and the study found that as you descend from the top, your stress levels keep increasing. Interestingly, the same result was found with the people working in the hierarchial businesses in England. The special then went into detail on the health effects of stress, how to manage it, why zebras don't get ulcers (that's the name, actually, of one of Sapolsky's books), and more, all intertwined with beautiful views of the savannah. Awesome.

I hope this thing hasn't dragged on too long. I'm going to eat some cereal and get started on orgo reading, which never ends... but at least it's good to be home :-)

-Matt

A Month into the Semester (Matt Grobis)

Hello!

I'm writing this slightly sleep-deprived and sick but intellectually content. This semester has been pretty hard so far... IB Honors is a part of it but it's more so due to my schedule. Dr. Cheeseman was right when advising against the IB 270, CHEM 236, CHEM 237, and MATH 231 idea. I'm not taking CHEM 237 (I'm in a psychology class instead) and I'm already feeling the crunch of bio, chem, and calc. These 12 credit hours alone outcompete schedules with more credit hours last year. I think that the difference between intro-level and upper-level classes is that in intro-level classes, investing some time and studying will most likely push you to an A. In upper-level classes, you need to really grapple with the material before you can confidently say you've mastered it.

This isn't to say that this year is very hard; if I've learned anything in college, it's that it could always be much worse, haha. I've just had to put down a lot of time to get to the level of understanding of the material I want. Orgo's going well and is interesting because we're learning the answers to a lot of "why" questions: "why does a reaction occur the way it does?" for example. I have a hard TA for calculus but at least I'm understanding what's going on (I can't say that for the first few lectures this semester, though, haha). Psychology is very interesting, too, so I'm content there.

That leaves IB 270. The lecture material is still largely review but Professor Whitfield keeps it interesting by asking us questions that make us look at the material a different way instead of just memorizing it and moving on. I really like how we read a research article every week and discuss it on Friday. We're learning about the biomolecules and DNA replication and this week our article was a theory on the transition from a lifeless world to one where molecules were self-replicating (whether this constitutes life, however, was part of our discussion).

In lab my group has been planning how we'll do our crosses to test whether two genes in C. elegans are sex-linked, linked, or on different chromosomes (or more than 50 centiMorgans apart). For the discovery research project, my group is thinking about investigating chemotaxis... but it turns out that C. elegans has literally hundreds of genes for this. Looks we'll have to either choose a different topic or filter through the C. elegans genetic literature until we find a chemotaxis-related gene that doesn't need to be knocked out with 20 other genes to see a phenotypic effect.

I've got a lot of work but I'm very satisfied. I'm not wasting time with any of my classes and I'm happy with how much I've learned so far. I've gotten to know others in IB Honors better and it's cool seeing them outside of class, going through the same work I am but still joking around and being positive about everything. Being around people like that makes me realize I don't have much to complain about.

-Matt

First Impressions (Matt Grobis)

Hello all! The conclusion of the first week of classes motivated me to write my thoughts here.

I'm working at some of the requirements for the IBH major, which include calculus II, organic chemistry, and of course the first IB Honors class: the evolution of molecules and cells. My first IB 270 class surprised me in how different the class was from any other I had taken before. Having about 18 students makes a surprising difference in that we're given options that just aren't possible for larger classes.

Take, for example, the fact that we were all given keys to the IBH rooms. I hadn't bought the textbook for the class by the time the first reading was assigned, so after dinner on Tuesday I walked to the Natural History Building, unlocked a door, and got to work using one of the textbooks present in the same room I would be lectured in the next day. As I was nearing the end of the reading, a girl called Phoebe joined me and got to work as well.

The next day, the lecture material wasn't as intimidating as I had thought it would be; it was review from previous biology classes I had taken but now there was a different approach: why is this important? I feel science majors sometimes get the label of just memorizing countless facts from their textbooks and regurgitating them for exams. Here, though, our lecture was placed in the context of the scientific thought of the time and how ideas progressed from Darwin's suggestion that "gemmules" accumulated in gametes and how phenotypes were blended to our current understanding of chromosomes and exceptions to Mendelian genetics. Ok, ok, so that wasn't all in one lecture but by the end of Friday's lecture I felt that I understood not only the material but also why it was important.

My intimidation, I suppose, was made up for with the research project we have for the semester. Producing novel, interesting, and important original genetics research seems quite scary for someone who not too long ago was one of the youngest students at the university (excluding those crazy-smart 8-year olds who go on to become doctors before they can drive). Original research always seemed so far away, like something I'd be doing during grad school or maybe even later. But maybe I feel this way only because I have nothing to base these ideas on. Maybe it's intimidating only because I've never really tried. We'll see.

Outside of the academics, though, I'm excited for the community feel that IBH has. On the first day, Dr. Cheeseman introduced us to the room we were in (and had keys to), pointing out things like the printer, the speakers that could play iPod music if someone was studying in the room, the projector that could technically play DVDs if we wanted.... I feel like IBH is much more than just classes. I'm looking forward to getting to know better the students who surround me during lecture and who I will very soon share a lab with. I know three people who are also in CHEM 236 with me, so IBH study sessions are imminent. The possibilities abound...

Looks like it'll be a good year.

-Matt

Greetings from Lake County, Illinois!

OK, so the locale isn't as exotic as some of my previous bloggers, however I promise the experience is just as interesting. My work this summer was in the pharmaceutical industry, as a Quality Intern at Abbott Laboratories. For those of you that think you have never heard of Abbott Labs, if you have ever heard of the biologic rheumatoid arthritis medicine Humira, been prescribed erythromycin, seen Similac baby formula, eaten a zone bar, needed an IV bag, known someone that needed a heart stint; well then you have probably had contact in some form with Abbott Labs.

As a part of Abbott Pharmaceuticals Division I was in Global Pharmaceutical Regulatory Affairs, a department that is a member of Abbott International and deals with regulatory agencies in the more than 120 countries Abbott markets its products. The two agencies I had the most experience with are the two major regulatory agencies in the world; the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the European Medicines Agency (EMEA).

My first and main project was a study on biosimilars, an extremely hot topic in the US and a sensitive one for innovator pharmaceutical companies. Biosimilars are an attempted generic medicine for biologics, which are any drug derived from living tissues. Because a different cell bank is used to create a biosimilar the protein is inherently different, and thus the biosimilar is a different medicine than the originator biological product. Currently in the US there is no approval pathway for biosimilars, however in Europe there is an established pathway with several guidelines and product-specific annexes. I examined four originator products and their totalled 13 approved biosimilars in Europe in terms of all the Phase I, II, and III clinical trials they needed for approval. (As a quick side note: Phase I trials involve healthy volunteers; Phase II a small group of the target population; and Phase III a large, randomized trial with the target population). I utilized EMEA approval documents, FDA approval documents, Package Inserts, and Perscribing Information to determine all of the trials conducted for each of these products and put them into tables. I then used these tables to create my six key Comparison Charts that condensed this wealth of data and allowed for the differences in the originator and biosimilar products to be observed side by side.

This document I presented to our Vice President, who presented it to Commercial and some of her superiors. I also did a twenty-five minute departmental presentation to everyone in Global Pharmaceutical Regulatory Affairs, which I was the most nervous about. These people work with these products daily, and I was presenting information that I was worried they may know more about. Interestingly enough, they did not. I finally completed an Intern Poster Presentation on this project as well, where I set up my poster with other Quality, Science, and Environmental Interns and the displays were open to everyone in Abbott to discuss our projects with us. Because of the sensitive nature of biosimilars, the Vice President of my group would not allow me to hand out any information at either the departmental presentation or the poster presentation, I had to have my poster board approved by the Vice President, and my board was destroyed after the project. I have to say that I am the only intern I know that had their board destroyed.

With half the summer gone on that project, I started my second of three assignments. This project involved monoclonal antibodies, and companies that had developed surrogate antibodies for preclinical toxicology testing. Monoclonal antibody products are very specific to human receptors, and in some cases cannot be tested in the rodent. For these products, a company may develop a surrogate antibody, i.e. an antibody that acts the same way as the product but is specific to the rodent. This process, however, is extremely expensive, and not all companies create a surrogate. For toxicology studies, however, it is important to have two species (usually a rodent and a non-human primate) for a full toxicology profile. Again turning to FDA and EMEA approval documents as well as scientific literature (studies are normally published), I examined all products that had developed a surrogate and their rationale for doing so. This topic is important because in a few cases, the FDA has asked a company to develop a surrogate before moving into clinical trials. I also examined a few experimental drugs for this study, but I cannot really talk about that ;)

Then, because my preceptor unexpectedly resigned to take a Deputy VP position at PhRMA, I was switched from the Central Nervous System and Pain group to Labeling. The 5 projects I conducted with this group involved internal label comparisons, i.e. the US, European, Canadian, South African, and Australian labels for a single drug and determining similarities and discrepancies; as well as external comparisons, where an Abbott product label was compared to the labels of its competitors. A label project like the latter I completed was presented to the CEO as part of a presentation in regards to changes requested by the FDA and in comparison to the competitors.

I feel as if this blog has become rather long, and I congratulate you for having read this far. There are some perks to being an Intern at a large company other than the chance to meet students from all over the US; we had dinner with the CEO of Abbott, social events such as Amazing Race Chicago, and the opportunity to learn a vast amount of both an industry and cutting-edge science. I could go into many of my lessons learned, but as stated this reflection is already a tad lengthy. I will leave you with this: Did you know that it is possible for one manufacturer to create a product and conduct clinical trials on that product, and then sell that product and the rights to the trials to different companies that market the same drug under several different names? And that each of the mentioned drugs has a different approval document, although the clinical trials are exactly the same? I did not.


I look forward to seeing everyone next week!


--Colleen

Greetings from Ireland!

Greetings from Dublin, Ireland! It’s getting near the end of the summer (already!), so I thought it past time to fill you all in on my experiences abroad.

I’ve spent the duration of this summer at the University College Dublin (UCD) through a program known as CoBiD-UREKA. It’s a research-based program which accepts students from around the world for a 10 week, all expense-paid research internships. They tend to pick students who are about to enter their senior year – so current juniors, I’d look to see if they’re offering it again next summer!

This year the program accepted 11 students: 3 from Ireland, 6 scattered around the USA, 1 from Brazil, and 1 from Colombia. While we all arrived at UCD not knowing a single person, we quickly forged friendships and have had an amazing time together! Of course, a lot of our time Mon-Fri is spent working on our research projects. These projects span a wide range of topics, including plant genomics, limnology, paleobotany, vertebrate palaeontology, soil ecology, ecological modelling (that’s mine!), and BioControl. We’ve all gained valuable research experience, whether it was designing your own protocol for studying the setae of earthworms, going electrofishing to survey the fish of a certain region, creating a model of ocean currents, designing primers to study plant DNA, putting nylons (yep, women’s tights!) on plants to act as dust and study the effects, or creating pterosaur wing models and using a wind tunnel to test their aerodynamics.

My own research project has focused on the study of deep-sea chitons and habitat connectivity. We’re especially interested in the dispersal of these chitons, which mainly takes place during their free-floating larval life stage. We’ve been using Argo oceanography data and a program called Matlab to map out the ocean currents of the Central Indo-Pacific near our populations of interest. With this data, we have been able to model larval transport, to determine where larvae from our source populations would disperse to. Through this project we’ve determined how far the larvae are able to travel before metamorphosing into adults, allowing us to better understand the dynamics of chiton metapopulations – something which is heavily understudied as of yet.

Of course, it wasn’t ALL about the research! We’ve had the weekends to ourselves, and we’ve made the most of it. We’ve traveled throughout the country to see many famous and beautiful places, such as the Aran Islands, the Cliffs of Moher, the Blarney Castle, the Giant’s Causeway, and Killarney National Park (amongst many others). And of course, we’ve spent endless amounts of time exploring all that Dublin has to offer. Between the beautiful botanic gardens, the Dublin Zoo, the massive Phoenix Park, the theatre, the nearby markets, the gorgeous shoreline, the nightlife, and of course the friends, it has been a trip to never forget!

Dubliners tend to be friendly people in general, which was a big help in getting around the city at first. Even on our first bus ride, someone happily told us which stop we’d need to get off at, as well as narrated all of the local sites we were passing! Today Dublin is a fairly worldly city, so while it’s not as typically “Irish” as most of the other cities are, it’s still a great place to explore. It also has some killer Indian restaurants! And of course there’s also a great nightlife!

And for anyone who has seen the movies Once or P.S. I Love You (yep sappy romances but of course we all had to watch them after being here!)… yep we’ve been to a lot of those sites! Even more lovely in person than they appear in the movies!

This whole summer has just flown by, just like it has for Josie! I’m leaving a week from today, and it seems way too soon! There’s so much more I could still do and see here, my ten weeks was not enough to encompass it all. It’ll be a bittersweet homecoming, as all trips are. I’ll be glad to see my friends and share my experiences, but it will be hard parting from my new-found friends. Still, thanks to the wonders of the internet, we’ll all still be in close contact for years to come!

And if anyone wants a look at pictures - http://irishescapades2009.shutterfly.com/.

Cheers,
Katie
IBH class of 2010

Greetings from Kibale!

[This summer, like last summer and the summer before that, IB Honors students can be found all around the world. Here, Josie Chambers, UI class of 2010, sends her greetings from Kibale, Uganda where she is spending the summer doing primate research...]

I am writing to let you know that I’m having a wonderful time in Uganda, and that the research project is going well. I am working closely with University of Illinois PhD candidate, Krista Milich, who has helped orient me to logged and unlogged forest regions of Kibale National Park and the red colobus monkey groups that inhabit them. She has been habituating [getting the monkeys used to having people around] and collecting data on six different study groups for the past 8 months. I spent my first month here becoming oriented with the red colobus groups while helping Krista prepare her field assistants for data collection geared towards female reproduction. I am working with all 14 of her Ugandan field assistants, collecting feeding tree information and group scan data to begin assessing how forest degradation impacts female red colobus feeding ecology.

I have additionally hired a field assistant to help me map out home ranges for each of the six groups using GIS technology. My knowledge of Ugandan forest trees is expanding vastly, as well as my ability to identify females based on subtle bends of the tail, and to keep track of behavior of these mid-to-high canopy dwelling monkeys. When I return, I will be analyzing feeding tree and group scan data across the six red colobus groups, as well as mapping out the size and land cover of their home ranges, and eventually submitting a report to Uganda Wildlife Authority. I have had a wonderful time in the field this summer, and I know that the experience I’ve gained will prove to be incredibly important for future research endeavors.

There are constant daily challenges in the forest, such as avoiding falling into deep swamp holes and pulling small biting ants out from underneath clothing; however, spending entire days under the forest canopy with the incredible diversity of Kibale is well worth it, and getting stuck in the swamp multiple times has proved to be quite humorous. The forest primate diversity is particularly remarkable, and I usually see many primate species besides red colobus every day, including chimpanzees, black and white colobus, red tails, blue monkeys, mangabeys, baboons, and L’ Hoests. I have even managed to see one nocturnal primate – a dying bushbaby that I spotted sitting on a trail in broad daylight. I also had the opportunity to track chimpanzees for a day in another region of Kibale forest. There are forest elephants around during certain times of the year that can be quite dangerous, but fortunately they have not been around recently, as they can be very disruptive to completing field work. However, I had the opportunity to see elephants, as well as hippos, lions, warthogs, crocodiles, buffalo, and several bird species when I visited the savanna of Queen Elizabeth National Park in south western Uganda last weekend.

Everyone here is given a ‘pet’ name, which is chosen from a list of 12 names that people are typically called instead of their official name. The name Amooti has been bestowed upon me, which means ‘king’ in the local language, Rutooro. I have picked up a number of Rutooro phrases I like to use in order to attempt to impress the field assistants I work with, but I’m still learning! The food here has been terrific, and generally consists of a wide variety of starchy items, vegetable based sauces, and fruit. My personal favorite is the samosa, a mixture of peas, carrots, and spices, wrapped up in a crispy dough outer layer. There is some interesting local music here, but the majority of songs on the radio come from abroad. In particular, Dolly Parton enjoys widespread popularity in Uganda; however, more understandable figures can be found on any number of decorated items, such as Obama’s face, which can be seen on anything from belt buckles to shoes! Football is by far the most popular leisure activity, and I have enjoyed attending some local matches to cheer on the field assistants.

The people here are wonderful, and I have spent quite a bit of time with the many Ugandan field assistants I work with, whose hard work and vast knowledge of plant species and complicated trail system continue to be essential to my ability to learn about red colobus feeding ecology at Kibale. I have also met a number of other well-established researchers carrying out interesting work at Kibale, including primatologist Dr. Richard Wrangham, director of the Chimpanzee project, and Dr. Colin Chapman, who has been involved in a broad range of conservation oriented research at Kibale for many years. I have had a great deal of companionship from other students staying at the field station for the summer as well, some gaining fieldwork experience and others working at the local clinic or school. Time really flies by here, as there always seems to be something going on, whether it’s a potluck among researchers, weekly trip to town for food and supplies, local football match, or even a Ugandan wedding! I will be sad to leave here in just a week, but I look forward to having the opportunity to share my experiences and pictures when I return!

Best wishes,
Josie

Rainy 4th of July (Matt Grobis)

Greetings from rainy Vernon Hills, Illinois!

This is the first post in a blog that'll span the rest of this year and hopefully far into the future. My name is Matt Grobis; I'm going to be a sophomore next year ('09-'10) at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. I'm entering the IB Honors program and can't wait to start!

I was an English major but decided I prefer biology early my freshman year. I saw the IB Honors posters in the Natural History Building and was interested so I contacted Dr. Cheeseman, the head of the program. We met a few days later and talked for over an hour about IB Honors and what I could do to prepare for it. Several months later, in February, I interviewed for the program and was accepted!

There's plenty to be excited about IBH. IB is "integrative" biology, which focuses to connect different areas of biology from the molecular to the ecological level, showing the very interconnectedness of nature itself. The IBH core does this in three steps, starting at the smallest aspect, molecules, and proceeding to enormous concepts like evolution. IBH classes have around 15 people, which allows for greater professor-student and even student-student interaction. I like big lectures, but I think smaller classes are better for grappling with ideas instead of just memorizing them. And I can't really comment on this, but according to the website, the IBH professors are pretty good too. Awesome.

IBH is going to be a lot of work but I'm looking forward to being surrounded by students who love biology. In a school of nearly 40,000 people, it's easy to feel lost in the crowd. Finding one's niche, though, really helps to make sense of it all. I'm not sure what I want to do with biology in the future, but being in the midst of biology professors and other passionate students, hopefully I'll get a better idea about how I can translate this excitement I have for the subject into something that can benefit the world.

-Matt Grobis

p.s: Happy 4th of July!!

p.p.s: I'm not trying to be a spokesperson for IB Honors, so if you want to get the full picture on everything the program has to offer, the classes, etc., look at these links:
Classes, specifics on major: http://sib.illinois.edu/honors.htm
FAQ: http://www.life.illinois.edu/ibhonors/FAQ/FAQ.html

IB Honors is on the move

Ok, so basically this is a test posting, but it is true. IB Honors is moving out of 408 NHB and down to the less rarified atmosphere of the third floor.