Ogechukwu Nwosu is working with Dr. Wolfgang Stephan in the Zoology Department. Oge hopes to add to our understanding of the population genetics of diseases such as Sickle Cell Anemia, which is of great concern in her native Nigeria, by studying population dynamics in Drosophila as a model system. She will clone and sequence the white gene in Drosophila and use that information to ask questions about the rates of mutation in that gene within and between populations. Valerie Pate worked with Dr. Avise Cohen in the Zoology Department. She studied the traveling waves of motor activity in the isolated lamprey spinal cord.
Lampreys are capable of regenerating spinal cord tissue and function.
The importance of her research project is clear to Valerie. She is very excited about learning things that may lead ultimately to the development of techniques to repair spinal cord injuries in humans and restore movement to people with severe head, neck and back trauma. Valerie will attend the University of Maryland at Baltimore Medical School next year. Leor Weinberger is working with Dr. Marco Columbini on ion channels in mitochondrial membranes . Specifically, Leor is studying how proteins which are produced in the cytoplasm from nuclear genes are inserted into organelles such as the mitochcondrion.