Todd B. Alder contracted COVID-19 early on in the pandemic and today still suffers from residual effects. But being just a “long hauler” as opposed to the alternative is what he calls being “lucky.” Says Alder, “Like many of us (I am guessing), this virus has disrupted my life with family and friends, my law practice, and my ability to travel. But on the plus side, I am really enjoying the Zoom calls where I am wearing a dress shirt and tie on top and something very questionable on the bottom.”

It's a scenario of late that many of us find ourselves experiencing (working on Zoom, not necessarily being pant-less), but the light touch that this biologist-turned-patent-attorney has towards not only the pandemic but work and life itself is evident. And so is his generosity. In April Alder was a featured alum in the School of Biological Sciences’ BioLuminaries speaker series (on Zoom, of course). As a registered patent attorney and partner at Thorpe North and Western (TNW) in Sandy, Alder illuminated the circuitous path one can take as a biology student toward fulfillment and job security… not to mention the love of chihuahuas.

More on that later.

The Road Less Traveled

Alder points to his PhD advisor, SBS’s Gary Rose, as the mentor who gave him “great direction over the years, particularly when I was stuck.” At the time Rose’s lab primarily focused on the neurophysiology of electrosensory systems in electric fish. Alder took an alternate path to study neuronal mechanisms underlying temporal processing in the auditory midbrain, a subject related to Rose’s PhD dissertation from a decade earlier. It was Rose’s broad way of thinking about science, research and the labyrinth that is life and career that still benefits Alder today.

“My dissertation was very broad over some fairly diverse scientific disciplines. This would not have been possible without Gary's early influence in teaching that young graduate student to not only see the world in a different way, but to approach problems and question them in a different way as well. I will always be grateful to Gary for helping me to see that there are no isolated questions or problems in science, but that everything has a much broader context and, as Robert Frost wrote, ‘that has made all the difference.’"

That difference played out while Alder was at the U in a remarkably refreshing and surprising way. “I was recording from a neuron in the midbrain of an anuran amphibian,” he explains, “and I thought of a test to further understand how these particular neurons worked.” Normally, neurons are not held in a stable state long enough for the kind of procedure Alder was planning. “But I stopped the program that was making the frog calls and quickly wrote a section of code so the program could do the test.”

It was that recompiling of the code—and a few crossed fingers—that led to a startling discovery. Once he turned the equipment back on the neuron in question was still there. From that test Alder showed that the generally accepted theory explaining how a neuron differentiates between high and low pulse rates was wrong. It turns out that neurons do not accomplish this differentiation though energy integration. Instead, Alder found that neurons were actually counting the number of pulses that occur within the range of pulse rates to which the neuron is tuned.

“That was one of the most exciting days of my life,” Alder says, “and I have always been amazed that those very complex questions were answered with [a] test performed on one neuron (it was repeated of course).” Alder graduated from SBS with his PhD in 2000.

Tripping the Patent Fantastic

Over the course of seven years, the mixture of biology, neurophysiology, molecular biology, etc. actually led to a degree in law which in turn opened up many opportunities for Alder to work with some very diverse and fascinating technologies. Enter his work in patent law following a clerkship at TNW beginning in 2002.

A Utah native, Alder hasn’t moved far geographically (he still lives in Utah and received all three of his degrees, including his law degree, from the U). But career-wise and developmentally it has been a galactic trip. For this reason he is quick to remind up-and-coming biologists at the U that education is not, and should never have been, about getting a job. “If you really contemplate the principles you are learning and integrate them into your life, it will change you and the way you think. To me, that is worth so much more than what type of job your degree can get you.”

About dogs … and a bear

Perhaps because of his wide-ranging academic, research and now patent career, Alder’s interests, like his dissertation, are broad and diverse. He loves to rock hound, watch horror movies, study theoretical physics and philosophy, collect old books, and “seriously mess with door-to-door sales people.” (Hopefully, while masked.) “Oh, and I once goosed a black bear in the wild, which made him terribly grumpy. But that is a story for a different day... .”

Which brings us to another enduring interest of Todd Alder’s and that is his love of chihuahuas. One advantage of working from home non-stop, quarantined from everyone else, is that your pets become a fixture, a pain and, if cuddly enough, a kind of accessory for that dress shirt above that questionable garment immediately below.

You can watch a recording of the BioLuminaries lecture by Todd Alder and co-presenter Heng Xie (PhD’04) on SBS’s YouTube Channel here.

By David Pace

The Uinta Basin in the northeast corner of Utah can seem like a ways “out there” near the border of Colorado and one of the most famous dinosaur quarries in the world. In fact as of last month, says  Vernal-based Ace Arthur C. Madsen, BS’79, “it took six months for the pandemic to reach my corner of the state. Now I have two to three patients a week developing Covid-19 or succumbing to it. I believe the mask and hand sanitizer culture is here to stay.”

It’s a sobering reality for a rural and oil-industry region of the state next to some of the most beautiful and remote landscapes in the state, including Flaming Gorge and the Green River drainage as it flows toward its confluence with the Colorado to the south near Moab. But it is home for Dr. Madsen who has raised his family there and is now grandfather to a whopping fifteen grandchildren.

The University of Utah was the place for Madsen to chase his dream of becoming a doctor. Today he is in private practice in internal medicine. As an undergraduate he recalls Richard Van Norman who taught Botany as one of his favorite professors.“He was friendly, liked to spend one-on-one time with his students and seemed to really care about what we thought and our future plans.”

“My background in basic biological science, biochemistry and molecular biology provided me with a solid background and was invaluable to me in my research activities and medical school.” The Department of Biology, now the School of Biological Sciences, was a bit of a boot camp for him and other pre-med students.

“I am very grateful for the no nonsense approach” of many mentors, he says, including the late Gordon Lark, the late James L. Lords, and emeritus professors William R. Gray and Bob Vickery. Once Madsen had graduated in biology, the rigors of his training continued with the late Dr. Frank Moody and as a research assistant at the U’s Medical School in the departments of Pediatric Neurology with Drs. PF Bray and JT Wu as well as the Department of Surgery with Dr. Layton F. Rikkers, now an emeritus professor of surgery at the University of Wisconsin.

In 1981 Madsen graduated with his MD, receiving the Outstanding Research Award. During that time he secured eight publications and 10 abstracts, predominantly on oncofetal antigens such as carcino embryonic antigen (CEA) and alpha-fetoprotein (AFP). Following his graduation from the U Medical School he completed his residency in 1984 in Internal Medicine at Duke University.

Madsen isn’t the only alumnus in his family from the University of Utah. His wife Zoe graduated in mathematics with a minor in chemistry in 1975, and his son Adam earned his BS in biology in 2006 before following his father’s footsteps to medical school. While at the U, Adam, who quarterbacked for the Utes, was named Scholar-Athlete in the Mountain West Athletic Conference in 2004 and was part of the undefeated and Nationally-ranked Tostito’s Fiesta Bowl Champions football team in 2005.

Father (right, in photo above) and son both practice in Vernal.

In addition to his medical practice and his grandfathering, Madsen works in wood and stained glass as hobbies. When asked what advice he would give to current students in the School of Biological Sciences, he is succinct and quick to number what he thinks future graduates from the U should do. 1. “Study hard. It is difficult to get anywhere without good grades. 2. Get involved with research. 3. Get married--best move I made in life.”

By David Pace

Adam Madsen, BA’06 in Biology, was the quintessential student-athlete.

To be a student-athlete requires extraordinary talent on the field and in the classroom. This is particularly true with science degrees due to the rigorous curriculum.

Madsen grew up in the Uinta Basin area, living in both Roosevelt and Vernal, two small farming towns in northeastern Utah.

He graduated Valedictorian from Uintah High School, in Vernal, and excelled not just in academics but also in athletics. He was named Academic All-State in football, baseball, and basketball. In baseball, he was named Utah 3A State MVP, Region X MVP, and USA TODAY– Honorable Mention All-American. In football, he made All-State as quarterback, Region X MVP, National Football Foundation and College Hall of Fame Scholar-Athlete Award, and was USA TODAY– Honorable Mention All-American.

After high school, Madsen went to Dixie State University in St. George with athletic scholarships to play football and baseball. At Dixie State he was named NJCAA Football Distinguished Academic All-American, team captain, two-time Dixie Rotary Bowl Champion, and three-time Western States Football League Conference Champion.

He earned an Associate of Science degree at Dixie, then transferred to the University of Utah to play quarterback for coach Urban Meyer and the Utah Utes. At Utah, he was named Scholar-Athlete in the Mountain West Athletic Conference in 2004 and was part of the undefeated and Nationally-ranked Tostito’s Fiesta Bowl Champions football team in 2005.

“I was a Pre-Med student at the time and in considering options, Utah was the best place to further my medical career pursuit and play football,” says Madsen. “The U had a strong reputation in my family, having grown up in Utah and having my mother and father both graduate from the College of Science in the 1970s,” says Madsen.

Left to right, Ty 10; Ally 7; Matt 5; Mya 12; and wife Marci

(Madsen’s mother, Zoe Madsen, earned a B.S. degree in mathematics and a minor in chemistry in 1975, and his father, Arthur Ace Madsen, completed a B.S. degree in Biology in 1976.)

“Being a student-athlete had several challenges. Football was basically a full-time job as far as hours per week it consumed,” says Madsen. “Weekends were mostly focused on football time as well. It wasn’t easy to juggle classes and make ends meet with football’s schedule.”

For Madsen to enroll in some upper-division biochemistry classes, he had to get special permission from team coaches, including Urban Meyer, since he would miss parts of team meetings during the week.

“On a typical day, I would have classes in the morning then have football practice from about 1 o’clock to 7 o’clock, then go directly to the Marriott library where I would stay until 11 o’clock or midnight,” says Madsen. “However, I would not trade my experience of playing football for anything! I learned so many valuable life lessons and made so many life friendships with players and coaches.”

At the U, Madsen’s favorite professor was Charles “Chuck” Grissom, a chemistry teacher who taught many of the upper-division biochemistry classes. “Grissom was available to discuss and answer questions, even with huge class sizes. Also, he showed he cared about students on an individual level,” says Madsen.

“I remember the Monday in class just after our Utah football team got the Fiesta Bowl bid, he brought bags of Tostito’s chips and let me help throw them out to the class. This was a small and simple thing but helped keep us engaged in his teaching.”

After graduating from the U, Madsen attended medical school at Des Moines University College of Osteopathic Medicine, in Iowa, and completed an Orthopedic Surgery Internship and Residency at Ohio University Doctors Hospital, in Columbus, Ohio.

Today, Madsen is an orthopedic surgeon in his hometown, Vernal, Utah. He practices general orthopedics including diagnosing and treating operative and non-operative injuries. He specializes in fractures, arthritis, partial knee replacement, sports medicine, ACL and ligament reconstruction, arthroscopic surgery, and foot and ankle conditions.

“My primary goal is to provide excellent orthopedic patient care to the people of this small-town community.” says Madsen.

His patients often include young student-athletes – much like himself at that age – who are striving to excel in the classroom and on the field.

Madsen and his wife, Marci, have four children: Mya, 12; Ty, 10; Ally, 7; and Matt, 5.

Last year the College of Science celebrated its 50-year anniversary. When the College was formed, in 1970, Lee K. Roberts, BS’72, had nearly completed his bachelor’s degree in Biology.

“My undergraduate training at the U gave me a strong background in science in general and biology in particular. It helped motivate me to pursue an advanced degree,” says Roberts.

“Dr. Stephen Durrant taught two evolution courses that really excited me,” says Roberts. “First, was a course on comparative anatomy. The course was part lecture but mostly dissection of representative animal classes from worms to mammals. The second class was the evolution of man; which, in addition to examining various hominid skulls and bones, was my first exposure to reading research papers to supplement the textbook. My first look at how science is done.”

Roberts remembers many of his biology professors, including Fred Evans, Gordon Lark, James Lords, and current emeritus professor Robert Vickery. The early 1970s was an exciting time in the biology department. Gordon Lark was the chairman, and he was building a world-class faculty at the U.

“I took a protozoology course from Dr. Fred Evans. As an extra credit option, I did a little research project to characterize a protozoan he’d found in the crook of a tree. It was my first experience in conducting experiments to solve a problem,” recalls Roberts.

As an undergraduate, Roberts worked part-time at the Radiobiology Lab in the University's School of Medicine. After graduating in 1972 with his biology degree, he joined the Radiobiology Lab as a full-time technician performing clinical chemistry analyses and assisting the lab’s veterinarians with surgeries and autopsies.

“In 1975 I started graduate school in the Department of Anatomy, University of Utah School of Medicine, working toward a Ph.D. degree. Early in my graduate training I attended a seminar on tumor immunology, and I was hooked by the mystery of the immune system,” says Roberts.

Roberts was able to complete his doctorate degree in 1980 in anatomy and published a dissertation on how the cellular immune response influences the emergence and growth of skin cancers.

For the next two years Roberts worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the Immunobiology Laboratory at the University of New Mexico School of Medicine, in Albuquerque. He focused on gaining technical expertise in flow cytometry, monoclonal antibody techniques, and T-cell cloning.

“In 1982 I returned to the University of Utah School of Medicine as a faculty member in the Department of Dermatology,” says Roberts. “I also became the Director of the Flow Cytometry and Monoclonal Antibody Core Facility of the Utah Regional Cancer Center.” His research group was focused on immunobiology of the skin, immunological mechanisms associated with photo carcinogenesis, and characterization of cloned regulatory T-cells involved in the immune response to skin cancer.

In 1989, Dr. Roberts exited his academic appointment at the U to pursue a 30-year career in pharmaceutical and biotechnology R&D and management.  “I was lucky to work on several cutting-edge vaccine and immunotherapy technologies.”  He is currently retired in Memphis, TN; but continues with some biotech consulting.

“My best advice for students is to pursue your passion, no matter what barriers you face. Be tenacious in what you want to accomplish and you’ll find a way to get there,” says Roberts. “Find a good mentor. Better yet, find a group of mentors!”

Lee and his wife Dawn are dedicated Utah fans. “We try to get to at least one Utah football game during the season, as well as their end of season bowl game,” he says. “When I get back to Salt Lake I always include a visit to the campus. I love the sights, sounds, smells, and feel of the campus and the academic research environment.

“Living in Memphis limits our access to live Utah sports, so we purchased the PAC-12 channel so we can watch all the Utah football and basketball games during the season. And of course I own a full collection of Utah-branded shirts, pants, sweatshirts and jackets!”

When asked about the Covid-19 pandemic, Roberts had the following to say:

Snowbird, UT, with wife Dawn (B.S., Education '71) and grandsons Dillon and Judah.

“I’ve been very interested in following the scientific and medical research into the description of the SARS-CoV-2 virus and Covid-19 disease. Reminds me of when I was a postdoc in 1981 and the early days of the discovery of HIV and AIDS. The exception being that contemporary gene sequencing technology has greatly accelerated the identification of SARS-CoV-2 and characterization of the spike protein antigen.

“Given my vaccine research and development background I’ve also followed with great interest the development, clinical testing and regulatory approval of the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna mRNA based anti-SARS-CoV-2 vaccines.”

“I’m heartened that science worked! In real time it demonstrated the global effort of public health officials and scientists working through the scientific process to understand and discover effective clinical responses to curb the Covid-19 pandemic.”

“Conversely, I’m disappointed by the general public and political pushback against scientific facts, scientists and public health initiatives to address the Covid-19 pandemic. I hope that in the future we, the community of scientists, are able to improve the public and political trust in the scientific process, scientific facts and the scientific enterprise.”

In 1985 a scholarship was established in the School of Biological Sciences in honor of Stephen D. Durrant, referenced above, to support students studying mammalogy. You can find a listing of established endowments and scholarships that alumni regularly donate to here. 

When Dr. Nancy Parry, BS’63, was eight years old, she talked her mother into taking her to a fortune teller in Ogden. On the way there her mother asked her what she wanted to do for a career. “I want to be a doctor,” she replied with some embarrassment, believing her mother would find the notion preposterous.

“Well. That’s nice,” said her mother.

The tarot card reader who was wearing the garb of a gypsy dealt her four cards while Nancy’s mother took notes. “Oh, you’re going to be a doctor,” the card reader announced. Her mother was floored.

Eventually, Parry, who grew up in Salt Lake City, attended the University of  Utah for her bachelor’s where she recalls in particular the late anatomy professor John Legler as having a formative influence on her. But with the tarot reader’s other-worldly endorsement, thought Parry, “I didn’t study real hard. I mean, I was going to be doctor,” as if it were a done deal.

Confident in the outcome, and further inspired by a boy she was dating who also wanted a medical career, Parry eventually applied to medical school on the east coast. She was declined. “So I jumped into the car and went back to the fortune teller. ‘You told me I was going to be a doctor, and I didn’t get into medical school,’” Parry exclaimed. The fortune teller dealt the four cards again. “You applied to the wrong coast,” she said.

Parry was soon selected as an alternative candidate at the University of California, Irvine and was given two days to get to the west coast. “I went to the anatomy class and it was hot and this guy fainted from the heat and the strong formaldehyde odor, so when he dropped out of med school, I replaced him.”

She was “in.”

In the 1960s, female medical students were a rarity. It was a stigma that Parry had to fight for the rest of her life, even during her training. “I was going with this guy during medical school,” she remembers, “and he said to me one time--made a fatal mistake--he said when we get done with our training we’ll open up a practice and you can assist me. That was the end of that relationship.”

With her signature determination, Parry set up a solo medical practice with her sister, Janet Parry, R.N. (BS'66), and located in Anaheim where she was a general practitioner for thirty years. Parry looked young at the time because, at 28 years old, she was. At work in a 24-bed hospital she remembers arriving during visiting hours. A nurse tried to stop her, telling her visiting hours were over.  “I’m the doctor” Parry told her and proceeded, only to hear behind her back, “You’ve got to be kidding.”

It was a different time in more ways than the fact that women were rarely doctors. During a visit with a patient regularly brought to the office by her son, Parry determined that the woman was unfortunately going to require a hysterectomy. “So I brought in her son.” says Parry.

“Your mother has cancer of the cervix,” she explained.

“Wait a minute,” said the man.

“Don’t worry she’ll be fine…”

“No, wait a minute,” he said again. “I’m not her son, I’m her taxi driver!”

Needless to say, it was the era before HIPPA laws.

Eventually, the two sisters would form Parry Development Company with Nancy's lifelong friend, also a U alumna, Susan Flandro, (BS'63 & JD'68). Together they built a three-story medical office building and then a six-story building with offices for 70 physicians. The company also built a five-operating-room outpatient surgery center in Anaheim.  At one point Nancy had to put her home  up for collateral for the bank loan.

Following their stint in Southern California, the two sisters set up shop in Ketchum, the ski town adjacent to Sun Valley, Idaho, where they opened a small medical office.  Before that, however, Parry needed to advance her provisional ER privileges at the hospital to active status, and commuted to Salmon for months to get her hours logged.

Parry eventually expanded her interests to hyperbarics, a type of treatment that employs a pressurized HBOT chamber used to help wounded warriors with TBI and PTSD and to speed up healing of tissues starved for oxygen. She also trained on a BEMER P.EM.F. device that increases oxygen and nutrient delivery at the cellular level be 30% and potentially decreases the body's inflammation by the same percentage.

In research she has worked on telomeres, the repetitive nucleotide sequences at each end of a chromosome. Activation of telomeres lengthens the shortened chromosome ends for the prevention and repair of the neurodegenerative changes of aging. Additionally, she has addressed topics to the medical sector on the P53 gene and its relationship to bio-identical progesterone. Up-regulating the p53 turns out to be a tumor suppressor gene that in humans is encoded by another gene that may protect patients from breast, uterine, cervix, ovary, prostate and colon cancers.

Through the ups and downs of breaking the “glass ceiling”—which was more of a recurring rather than singular event—Parry developed Parkinson’s and in 2020 she retired from her medical career of 50+ years. Passing the baton, this doctor who helped pioneer women in medicine arranged to have another female physician take over her practice, hard-won, and well-earned.

The pandemic has given Parry more time to read. She also continues advising her friends and fellow doctors and researchers remotely by phone. Her advice to students today is simple: “Don’t give up!”

At her retirement party in August, she had the audience in stitches, regaling them with hilarious stories about her time in the medical field.

Nancy Parry’s acerbic humor and willingness to laugh at herself have endeared her to friends and rivals, whether it’s about fortune tellers or that time she donated a vasectomy procedure to the fireman’s ball auction, only to have to make good on it months later.

“We raised $750 for a good cause,” she says with a smile.

The Legler Endowed Lectureship in Human Anatomy, currently held by Mark Nielsen, supports the full cadaver lab for pre-med students at the School of Biological Sciences. 

You can support the legacy of Legler and Nielsen through a donation to the endowment here.

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.

The School of Biological Sciences claims all of our alumni, but sometimes there’s a kind of harmonic convergence that elevates an entire family of U biologists into the spotlight.

Such is the case with the Idaho Daines Family of orthopedic surgeons—Joseph “Pete,”,BS’68; Michael, BS’99; and Brad, BS’05—a virtual dynasty in orthopedic surgery. Brian, who as an undergraduate attended BYU (the U’s traditional rival to the south) also practices orthopedics but in Arizona. The oldest son Gordon was the outlier. He found his passion in history and is now a university archivist with a doctorate in education.

The University of Utah Daines Dynasty goes back three generations, beginning in 1920 when the grandfather of Pete’s wife Susan--also mother to his sons--attended undergraduate school at the U and then went on to medical school in New York City, ultimately returning to the west to start a general medical practice in Preston.

Michael Daines, MD

Born in 1945, Pete was at first a math major at the U but changed to biology/pre-med before attending Columbia Medical School followed by an orthopedic residency at George Washington University. His father, who died a year after Pete’s return to Idaho in 1979, also practiced orthopedics in Boise.

Years later Pete’s son Michael would also graduate from the U and head east to medical school at Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons, followed by a residency in orthopedics at the University of Iowa. Later he was awarded a fellowship to Oxford University to study shoulder surgery for a year. He now specializes in shoulder surgery in addition to general orthopedic surgery at West Idaho Orthopedics near Boise, where he and his siblings grew up.

Not to be outdone by his older brothers, Brad entered medical school at the University of Washington following his graduation from the School of Biological Sciences. Subsequently, he completed a residency at the University of Vermont in orthopedic surgery followed by fellowship training in total joint replacement at the Hospital for Special Surgery/Cornell University. Brad focuses on hip and knee replacement which can include robotics.

For the first few years in practice, his father Pete was his assistant in the operating room. “I ended up not really quitting totally, from practice until 2018,” Pete says. In addition to assisting Brad, he provided medical evaluations for insurance companies, conducted independent exams and wrote up patient histories and reports for attorneys. "To have my dad with me has been an awesome experience” Brad said in a 2016 KBOI 2News story “because he is sort of a calming presence."

"How does it feel seeing three of your four boys following in your footsteps?" the reporter asked Pete in the same story. "Well,” said the patriarch, “it's sort of an ego trip, but I think it's great. I just wanted my sons to do something that they enjoyed." Says Brad, "Like my brothers, I always thought I was going to be a doctor. I didn't ever feel any pressure, but I noticed that my dad liked his job."

Clearly orthopedics is in the Daines Family blood, and clearly the University of Utah’s Biology Department--now the School of Biological Sciences--played a role in the family’s success.

Both Michael and Brad remember the invaluable experience they had in the Biology Undergraduate Research Program (BioURP) with Rosemary Gray, now an emerita faculty. Michael was a research assistant with Sandy Parkinson while Brad found a research mentor in Dave Carrier. “I learned a lot from him about the scientific method,” says Brad. “In addition, because his work did involve animal subjects, I learned much about the balance of the ethical treatment of animals and the need for scientific advancement. We worked with canine subjects, and the length to which he went to ensure good care of these animals was impressive.”

Additionally, Brad really found his groove in the honors program and his upper level biology classes were also an incredible experience, particularly, he remembers, comparative vertebral morphology. Membership in the University Chorus and Sigma Chi fraternity gave him a musical and social outlet.

Both brothers recall the “incredible athletic programs” at the U which gave them a reprieve from the lab and the classroom. Along with sports, there was a love of the mountains and skiing. The combination of the Daines family legacy, recreational opportunities and the academic reputation of the U would converge for a memorable experience for both.

Michael’s research experience in the Parkinson lab was a segue for Columbia Medical, his father’s alma mater. While in New York City, Michael had the singular experience of living through the attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. Later, during his Oxford fellowship in the UK, he also worked on several research projects related to the shoulder.

An avid hunter, fisherman and triathlete, Michael enjoys spending time with his three kids, along with his hunting dog “Hawkeye.”

For all of the Daines, there have, of course, been challenges due to the current pandemic, including for Brian in Arizona who, his father remarks, finds himself overworked, doing “everything” related to joint medicine in a small clinic.

“I traveled a lot with my wife,” says Pete, remembering pre-COVID-19 times when he floated European rivers through places like Budapest and Vienna, sometimes through spectacular tunnels 30 miles long. A music enthusiast, he also sang bass in a choir and for five years sat on the board of the Boise Philharmonic. Along with Michael Brad also loves to fish and with his father enjoys music, opera in particular.

While the pandemic has slowed these activities, it has consorted to bring the family, which now includes thirteen grandchildren, closer together. Clearly the spread of the coronavirus has impacted the Daines and their respective medical practices just as it did Pete’s early relatives during the 1918 flu pandemic. “It was a bad pandemic as well,” Pete says, referencing family letters left behind, but “nothing like this one. [Back then] they lost family, this, that and the other thing. It took two years to get past it. That’s what it does. It comes and turns your life upside down.” Even so, he says, the earlier pandemic didn’t keep people out of work as much as the current one.

Says Michael, “I have had to navigate the need to care for patients and also keep my office staff safe. As a small business owner, we have had to find creative solutions to keep people working and keep the doors open.” Brad, too, has had to make the adjustments to the way he works.  “Life is always uncertain,” he says, referring to the past year. His advice? “Remain flexible and do the best you can every day. Embrace the fact that life will take you down unexpected paths. Upon reflection, many of the best things in my life happened when my plan deviated.”

Michael agrees: “Take your opportunities when they come up and have no fear!”

Will the Daines tradition of orthopedic surgery carry on into the next generation? “I think there’s going to be some of my grandkids going into medicine,” says Pete. “It probably isn’t going to be the conglomeration [of a medical life] like I got. I don’t know how that happened,” he quips, referring to three-fourths of his progeny who are surgeons.

“They just wanted to go and they did. Back then I could take my kids into the operating room with proper supervision and they could watch things. You can’t do that now. It’s not allowed. I had that opportunity to have some stuff in the operating room and I think that cemented for them going into medicine…. I didn’t mean for them to all become doctors, but that’s what happened. I’m very proud of them.”

As for Brad, his children are still too young (7 and 5) to have shown any interest in a career in medicine-- yet."