BioScience 113

Charlotte Chang’s research focuses on social-ecological systems to improve conservation science and practice. Research in the Chang lab examines how different stakeholders interact with the environment, ranging from digital conservation constituencies in different countries to illicit wildlife hunting to managing agroforests to better support habitat specialist taxa. Projects in the lab focus on work with local community leaders, environmental practitioners, and academic colleagues to advance conservation research and application.

Monarch butterflies are well-known for their spectacular migration from North America to Mexico, and for their reliance on milkweeds as their larval host plants. I will present on our research to show how parasitism affects monarch migration, and how monarchs may use medicinal milkweeds to fight their infections.

Dr. Christine Sprunger is an Associate Professor of Soil Health at Michigan State University and is currently serving as Interim Associate Director at the W.K. Kellogg Biological Station (KBS). Dr. Sprunger is a faculty member in the Department of Plant, Soil, and Microbial Sciences and is based at KBS. Dr. Sprunger is also a member of MSU’s Plant Resilience Institute. Her research focuses on the intersection of agriculture and the environment, where she investigates how climate change impacts crop production, nutrient cycling, soil food webs, and rhizosphere dynamics.

Dr. Noorsher (Noor) Ahmed’s research focuses on harnessing high-content optofluidic robotics and computer vision to investigate the flow of genetic information within cells at genome scale. By utilizing spatial transcriptomics and developing custom computer vision software, Noor aims to reveal insights into how the localization of RNA and protein molecules influence cellular decision making. During his PhD, Noor contributed to Bento and the scverse software ecosystem for single-cell genomics, and trained one of the fastest cell segmentation AI models in the field.

In humans, the relationship between epilepsy and aggression has a long and controversial history, from relatively common postictal aggression to anecdotal reports of aggression in patients with chronic epilepsy. However, linkages of epilepsy to aggression, if they exist, are complex and may inadvertently stigmatize people with epilepsy if they are not fully understood or described.

Ferns boast an independent gametophyte generation that apparently lacks effective means of regulating water loss. Specific mechanisms of fern gametophyte survival in dry regions remain unknown. We seek to understand fern adaptation to seasonal drought by examining gametophyte response to desiccation in situ. During seasonal desiccation, we measured microclimate drivers (humidity and temperature) and physiological response (thallus area and dark-adapted chlorophyll fluorescence).

Dr. Ite Offringa was born in the Netherlands but lived in Spain, Venezuela, and the Caribbean before pursuing her BS, MS, and PhD at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands. Following a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard Medical School, she started her lung cancer research lab at the Norris Comprehensive Cancer Center, at the University of Southern California in 1996. Dr. Offringa is an expert in the molecular biology and epigenomics of lung cancer and has led and participated in many interdisciplinary collaborations with clinicians, epidemiologists and biostatisticians.