Ed Meenen (seated) talking to Gordon Lark at the Lark Endowment Dinner, 2019

Shortly after the COVID-19 pandemic began last spring, the School of Biological Sciences checked in with our alumni across the country and beyond to see how they were managing. The self-isolating Edward Meenen (BS’86) responded from his ancestral family community in Clay Center, Kansas. My “morning decision,” he quipped, “is what to put on to go to the living room!”

Though not the most philosophical response, Ed’s humor was well appreciated at a time when lock downs, quarantining and sheltering at home became the new, hopefully temporary, “normal.”

Ed worked with the late K. Gordon Lark,  founder of the Department of Biology, now SBS, at Kansas State University and decided to follow him to the U as Lark’s lab technician before moving to the labs of Ray Gesteland (now an SBS emeritus faculty member) and finally Robert Weiss. Ed's understanding of micro environments increased exponentially at a time when Lark was establishing and rapidly growing micro and cell biology at the U. The Kansas native recalls his introduction to the Mountain/Southwest through skiing and a field trip to Southern Utah, both of which were particularly memorable. So too was his work in Baldomero “Toto” Olivera’s lab researching conotoxins, ion channels, neurobiology ad molecular biodiversity using the subject model of venomous marine snails.

Earlier, Ed was drafted into the Army where he trained as a veterinary technician. There he spent most of his time at Walter Reed Medical Center stationed at Forest Glen in the research section. The veterinarians and their technicians were attached to the research group to provide veterinary support for the research groups. “People do not believe my military stories,” he says with his signature wry humor. “So I don’t often tell them (even my parents were not sure of my tales).”

Currently, Ed manages the two Kansas family farms, one of which he grew up on. Both are mainly for grain production:  wheat, corn and soybeans. “The farms are rented out on shares,” he explains, “which means that a portion of each crop belongs to the family (my sister, my sister-in-law and myself). The crops are delivered to the grain elevators. I then take over and market the grain.”

The farms require extraordinary administrative skill: “I must pay the bills as the family is responsible for their share of fertilizers, spraying for weed and fungus control,” he explains. Ed is also responsible to see that all the paper work is complete at the Farm Service Agency and that the crop insurance paper work is complete.

“I am responsible for all the bookkeeping and accounting reports that are given to the certified public accountant who prepares the IRS papers.” Finally, he cuts the checks to family members for their regular distributions.

In October 2019, Ed made the trip by pickup to honor his mentor Gordon Lark at a special dinner that included Lark’s wife Antje and, among many other colleagues hired and mentored by Lark during his tenure, Nobel laureate Mario Capecchi. The former Department Chair was visibly delighted to see his friend Ed Meenen as the two of them reminisced on days of yore doing cutting edge research together at the School of Biological Sciences.

The K. Gordon Lark Endowment is currently on its way to becoming fully funded.
You can join Mr. Meenen, Mario Capecchi and others who have made a donation to honor the legacy of SBS’s founder here.

Michele Lefebvre, PhD’05, knows exactly what graduate students in the School of Biological Sciences need to know about their academic careers at the University of Utah.

“What you learn here,” she advises them, “will apply to any career path you choose. The abilities to critically read, analyze, and write will serve you well on whatever profession you pursue.” It’s the kind of advice that has proven true for her as she navigates the pandemic as an environmental scientist based in Hilo on Hawaii's Big Island.

It hasn’t been without its challenges. “Living on an island in the middle of the Pacific, away from family, has been isolating and hard. Working a full-time, professionally challenging job with two elementary school-aged children at home has also been hard.” But her training and persistence have paid off, and even during an unprecedented pandemic she understands the opportunity in this time of global loss and grief. “I hope our individual searches for what’s important during this time, turn into decisions that improve our lives moving forward.”

The perspective she currently has undoubtedly stems at least in part from her time at the U, in particular in the lab of Don Feener. Following her graduation with a BA in biology from Boston University, Lefebvre realized she wanted to continue conducting research, and Feener was very well respected in the field as a researcher and mentor. “I’m grateful for his patience and the great example he set, which gave me the confidence to tackle the challenges in the program.” The training, which she calls "rigorous," requiring that she develop a skill for attention to detail, translated “directly to the work I currently do,” she says. A Florida native, Lefebvre also has fond memories of learning how to ski while in Utah.

“I started working in environmental consulting after I graduated,” she explains further. “At first, I learned how to conduct biological surveys and write biological reports and impact analysis.” Lefebvre later transitioned to preparing and managing documents that comply with the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA).

Currently, Lefebvre is employed as an environmental impact assessment specialist and project manager for Stantec, an international professional services company in the design and consulting industry. There she conducts impact analyses on resources as a result of a given proposed project. This involves coordinating baseline surveys including biological and cultural inventories. She also assists with stakeholder coordination, which underscores the company's tagline:  "We design with community in mind."

Outside of work Lefebvre loves going to the beach with her two daughters, watching (and sometimes swimming with) turtles, snorkeling, and playing in the sand. She also enjoys gardening—her family grows sweet potatoes, bananas, and papaya in their yard and they have a small herb garden. To top it off, Michele loves staying active and runs the Big Island half marathon every year.

It's the culmination of a life of inquiry, passion and hard work, qualities that other graduate students in the School of Biological Sciences are poised to emulate … even during these difficult times when uncertainty reigns.

Julia Bailey-Serres, BS’81, is known for her research on mechanisms of plant adaptive responses to environmental stresses. She remembers enrolling in “a lot of lab classes in genetics, animal physiology and chemistry” at the U. And she fondly recalls a team-taught lab with now Nobel laureate Mario Capecchi. Other teachers and mentors she is quick to mention are Ray Gesteland, Joe Dickinson and E. Tucker Gurney, all emeritus faculty now.

A California native, Bailey-Serres transferred as a sophomore to the U where she immediately got a job in a lab with the late George Edmunds, an aquatic entomologist. “It was an early opportunity to understand what research was,” she says. “It gave me a home and then paid for a summer school class in electron microscopy on insects.”

After graduation, she attended he University of Edinburgh where she earned her PhD studying rearrangements of mitochondrial DNA in sorghum, a genus of flowering plants in the grass family Poaceae. Now Director at the Center for Plant Cell Biology and Distinguished Professor of Genetics at the University of California, Riverside, she was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2016 and, in 2020, recognized as a Distinguished Alumna of the School of Biological Sciences.

In addition to Edmunds, while at the U Bailey-Serres was mentored by SBS’s David Wolstenholme who would “steal” her away from his colleague. Cell and molecular biology outside of bacteria and viruses were just beginning to emerge, and Wolstenholme, who would become Department Chair, “didn’t guide me as much as just provided opportunities. [It was a] tremendous undergraduate opportunity,” she says, doing electron microscopy as well as some molecular biology. The research experience was accented by her work during her junior year as a teaching assistant for the non-majors biology class. “I was self-supporting as a student and needed the money for tuition.” Getting paid for lab work, she wryly attests, was “a lot more interesting than washing dishes.”

Even so, she remembers, “I was just this naïve young person interested in science and David gave me the push I needed.” She remembers Wolstenholme's explaining that she really needed to go to graduate school. As a consequence of her research experience at the U, Bailey-Serres has always had an undergraduate researcher in her own lab, over 100 to date. Fittingly, her first faculty award at Riverside was for her work with budding undergraduate researchers. The kind of relationship she formed with Wolstenholme was arguably prologue to what would become what is now the recently launched Science Research Initiative for undergraduates in the U’s College of Science.

Grains in the Rain

The Bailey-Serres group develops basic plant research discoveries into technologies or approaches that improve agriculture. By pursuing translational plant biology, says Bailey-Serres, “we aim to harness genetic mechanisms that provide climate change resilience to crops, particularly flooding, drought and nutrient stress resilience.” Her lab works from the single cell to the whole plant level. Their studies have defined mechanisms of low oxygen sensing and post-transcriptional gene regulation, from the epigenome to the "mRNPome" and translatome. “This knowledge is of importance to efforts that seek to stabilize crop yields,” she explains. “As Earth’s population grows, arable land decreases, and climatic patterns change.”

In a 2019 paper published in Science she disclosed how other crops compare to rice when submerged in water. Her research found that the plants – a wild-growing tomato, a tomato used for farming and a plant similar to alfalfa – all share at least 68 families of genes in common that are activated in response to flooding. “We hope to take advantage of what we learned about rice in order to help activate the genes in other plants that could help them survive waterlogging,” the paper reported.

Bailey-Serres has been involved in improving climate resilience in crops since her post doctoral fellowship at Berkeley where she first connected hypoxia responses with changes in translation. Traditional plant breeding demonstrated the presence of a gene that could confer submergence resistance (the SUB1 locus), but early breeding of the submergence locus into popular rice cultivars was mostly unsuccessful because it led to strains that had lost other desirable traits.

To get around this, Bailey-Serres was a member of a team that characterized the SUB1 locus molecularly. In her nomination of Bailey-Serres for the Distinguished Alumni Award, SBS’s Leslie Sieburth wrote that the 30-year research veteran’s “studies have led to much broader understanding of plant responses to hypoxia, and allowed marker-assisted breeding which introduced this gene to popular rice varieties.” By 2014, the rice cultivars that carried SUB1A were distributed to more than 4 million farmers throughout Asia. Sieburth applauded Bailey’s “extended … studies to understanding the gene regulatory networks underlying hypoxic responses, [including] the evolution of these responses in monocots and eudicots.”

The Climate Challenge

 While finding survival strategies for rice and other crops has always been critical, with climate change the challenge has become even greater. Currently, Bailey-Serres is embedded in a research group with other full professors in the Netherlands while she directs the National Research Traineeship program for graduate studies bridging plant biology and engineering. She also continues to collaborate with Sieburth, also a plant biologist, while continually being informed by others working in the field like Distinguished Professor and former SBS Chair Jim Ehleringer who is looking at how climate change effects where plants grow.

In addition to her research, Bailey-Serres is dedicated to promoting science education and professional development as well as fostering diversity and innovation in collaborative and interdisciplinary research. An example of this outreach is high school senior Susan Su who in 2018 took her project developed in the Bailey-Serres lab to the International Science and Engineering Fair where she placed third in her category (Plant Sciences). Su is now a student at MIT.

The technical advances taking place in plant translational research exemplify how basic research discoveries spawned at the School of Biological Sciences and elsewhere are being translated into methods to develop and improve important crop traits. Dr. Julia Bailey-Serres and her research group are at the forefront of making sure that happens.