In Plain English
In Plain English: Julie Noor
March 23, 2015
As Lab Coordinator for the Gateway to Genetics and Evolution course Julie Noor is responsible for designing and implementing experiments...
In Plain English: Diana Nemergut
March 18, 2015
In 1995 Diana Nemergut was one of the first Americorps volunteers, and helped to build community gardens in New Orleans. It changed her...
In Plain English: Alyssa Perz-Edwards
November 05, 2014
Alyssa Perz-Edwards works far away on East Campus as Assistant Dean for pre-health majors. She works with many students but her special...
In Plain English: Dave McClay
November 05, 2014
How does the embryo build itself? asks Dave McClay. It starts with a single cell containing the complete DNA instructions, but some cells...
In Plain English: John Mercer
August 11, 2015
Before going to college John Mercer joined the Navy. See the world! Experience life! After much training John became a reactor operator...
In Plain English: Paul Magwene
August 11, 2015
Deep in the darkest recesses of a cell something determines its fate: How will it react to food or famine? Should it grow and divide? ...
In Plain English: Chantal Reid
June 29, 2015
Chantal Reid is excited about teaching “How Plants Feed and Fuel the World.” She and Jim Siedow have taught it before, but this time is...
In Plain English: Zhen-Ming Pei
June 29, 2015
Zhen-Ming Pei wants to understand how plants sense basic aspects of their environment: salt, temperature and most of all, water. They do...
In Plain English: John Willis
August 11, 2015
John Willis loves figuring things out--specifically, how the wildflower Mimulus adapts to different environments. Colonies adapt to...
In Plain English: Alec Motten
August 11, 2015
Alec Motten is excited about bioluminescence—live creatures that glow in the dark. The lab for Organismal Diversity gives him an excuse to...
In Plain English: Sam Johnson
August 11, 2015
The great scientist Sir Isaac Newton formulated his theory of light, indispensable to using microscopes and telescopes, at Cambridge...
In Plain English: Vikas Bhandawat
August 07, 2015
Vikas Bhandawat chose to study the sense of smell in fruit flies because it is so much simpler than sight. Less than 10,000 neurons! But...
In Plain English: Nina Tang Sherwood
August 11, 2015
Fruit flies live long enough to have degenerative diseases? Yes, and Nina Sherwood studies one that impairs the ability to walk. A...
In Plain English: Terry Corliss
August 11, 2015
Terry Corliss started collecting insects at age 5 and progressed to fish, reptiles and eventually microbes. Now she leads a hard-working...
In Plain English: Meng Chen
August 11, 2015
Meng Chen got his job by accident; that is, he accidentally discovered a mutant while he was a post-doc, and now his lab is defining a new...
In Plain English: Michael Barnes
August 11, 2015
Down behind the French building, far from the mailroom and offices, the labs on upper floors and the subterranean teaching space, there is...
In Plain English: Rytas Vilgalys
June 23, 2015
“It’s a good time to be a mycologist,” says Rytas Vilgalys. Rytas began by learning the edible and inedible mushrooms at his Muka’s (...
In Plain English: Fred Nijhout
August 11, 2015
Animals come in all sizes, but how does an animal know when it’s grown to the right size? That’s been puzzling Fred Nijhout for a long...
In Plain English: Katia Koelle
August 07, 2015
Like many people today, Katia Koelle is fascinated by ancestry. But she's not tracing her family tree; instead, she uses sophisticated...
In Plain English: Eric Spana
June 29, 2015
Eric Spana just finished running “Nerd Camp”—that is, pSearch, a pre-orientation program introducing freshmen to research. All day for 2...