Alumni News
Mary Dawson, BS ‘52
Dawson is emeritus curator of the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh. Her recent research project involves a rodent in Laos named Laonastes which belongs to a family thought to have become extinct 11 million years ago. Dawson is currently working with Richard Snider to establish a colony of these rodents at the Binder Park Zoo in Battle Creek.
Kenneth J. Boss, MS ‘59
Boss is a malacologist, emeritus professor of biology and curator of the molluscan collection at Harvard University, Museum of Comparative Zoology. Boss has written articles on the careers of distinguished malacologists Dall, Thiele and Von Martens.
Wendel Johnson, BS ‘63, MS ‘65
Johnson is a professor and lead biologist at the University of Wisconsin - Marinette. He was honored last summer in the 50th Anniversary Celebration of the Moose/Wolf Studies on Isle Royale sponsored by the National Park Service and Michigan Technological University.
Ajovi Scott-Emuakpor, MAT ‘68, PhD ‘70 & ‘77
Scott-Emuakpor is a professor of pediatrics and human development and faculty member in the African Studies Center at MSU. He also serves as division chief of Pediatric and Adolescent Hematology/Oncology at the Center for Bleeding and Clotting Disorders.
Hal Caswell, BS ‘71, PhD ‘74
Caswell is a senior scientist in the Biology Department at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and is involved in research on population viability of polar bears, emperor penguins, right whales, lemurs, and endangered plants. He received the 2008 Per Brinck Oikos Award from the Swedish Oikos Society, the 2007 Ecological Research Award from the Ecological Society of Japan, and a 2007 Unit Citation Award from the U.S. Department of the Interior.
Brenda Alston-Mills, MA ’72, PhD ‘84
Alston-Mills is associate dean and director of the Office of Organization and Professional Development for Diversity and Pluralism, at Michigan State University, College of Agriculture and Natural Resources. In 2008 she was honored with a community service award from the Raleigh/Wake Chapter (North Carolina) National PanHellenic Council.
Donald Straney, BS ‘73, MAT ‘73
Straney is in his seventh year as dean of the California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. He spent 23 years as a faculty member at MSU, including serving as department chair from 1987-95.
Mark A. Batzer, BS ‘83, MS ‘85
Batzer is the Dr. Mary Lou Applewhite Distinguished Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at Louisiana State University. His research on Platypus Genome Sequence and Analysis was one of the top 100 stories in science for 2008 by Discover magazine. He recently was selected as an LSU System Boyd Professor (the highest academic rank in the LSU System) and was elected a fellow of AAAS in 2007.
Mark McPeek, PhD ‘89
McPeek is a biological sciences professor at Dartmouth College and was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2008. He recently became Editor-In- Chief of the American Naturalist. Sunshine Menezes, BS ‘95, is Executive Director of the Metcalf Institute for Marine & Environmental Reporting at the University of Rhode Island.
Sunshine Menezes, BS '95
Menezes is Executive Director of the Metcalf Institute for Marine & Environmental Reporting at the University of Rhode Island.
Jennifer Neuwald, BS ‘95
Neuwald earned her PhD in Biology from Washington University in 2008 and is a postdoctoral research associate in the Department of Ecology, Evolution and Organismal Biology at Iowa State University.
Toni Lyn Morelli, BS '97
Morelli is a research ecologist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Forest Service. After graduating from MSU, she obtained a Ph.D in Ecology and Evolution from Stony Brook University and also conducted behavioral, ecological, and genetics research on endangered lemurs in Madagascar. Morelli now works with the USDA Forest Service to provide the latest climate change science to national forest managers.
Laura Sams, BS ‘00, MS ‘03, and Robert Sams, BS ‘03
The Sams siblings recently released the wildlife film The Riddle in a Bottle and children’s book A Pirate’s Quest. They have been traveling the country performing educational assemblies using the book and movie to inspire children to create their own stories about the natural world. They are currently developing fi lms on sharks and woodland animals - based on the children’s book First Snow in the Woods.
Karen Kapheim, BS '01
Kapheim is a doctoral student studying ecology and evolutionary biology at UCLA. Her research is on the evolutionary origins of social behavior. She has recently completed her study of Megalopta genalis, a nocturnal sweat bee, on Barro Colorado Island in the Republic of Panama.
Craig Stricker, PhD ‘03
Stricker is a research ecologist with the USGS Fort Collins Science Center and one of the principal investigators at the Stable Isotope Laboratory in Lakewood, Colorado. His recent studies include the nutritional ecology of salmonids and mammals (brown bears, wolves, sea lions), global change biology, and the biogeochemistry of sulfur as it pertains to mercury methylation.
Erica Garcia, PhD ‘06
Garcia is a research fellow at the Tropical Rivers and Coastal Knowledge Research Hub (TRaCK), Charles Darwin University, Australia. Garcia’s recent studies include the importance of key riverine species in influencing carbon and nutrient flow to higher trophic levels in both aquatic and terrestrial environments in the wet/dry tropics of northern Australia.
Danielle Salvatore, BS '06
Salvatore is a marine mammal (dolphin) trainer at Marineland, in St. Augustine, Fla. Salvatore works in the area of dophin conservation, and trains and cares for twelve Atlantic Bottlenose Dolphins, ranging in age from newborn calves to a fifty-six year old dolphin (the oldest known dolphin in any zoo or aquarium).
Aaron Tarone, PhD '07
After completing postdoctoral work at the University of Southern California in the molecular and computational biology program, Tarone accepted an assistant professorship in the entomology department, Texas A&M University. Tarone will be teaching undergraduate Forensic and Investigative Science courses. His research focus is the evolutionary ecology and developmental biology of blowflies: primary successional species on carrion and/or parasites of vertebrates.
Katherine Leitch, BS ‘08
Leitch received a Churchill Scholarship and is enjoying life in England. She is in a research-based MPhil program studying human reproductive biology at the University of Cambridge’s Department of Physiology, Development, and Neuroscience.
Timothy Fredricks, PhD '09
Fredricks has accepted a postdoctoral position with Bayer CropScience as an avian toxicologist, in Kansas.
We want to hear from you! Send us your news at zoology@msu.edu. or DEPARTMENT OF ZOOLOGY, 203 Natural Science Building, East Lansing, MI 48824-1115