School of Biology and Ecology

Congratulations to Caleigh Charlebois, an NSFA junior in Zoology and Professional Writing and Honors student! Caleigh has been awarded the Goldwater Scholarship. This $7,500 award is given to undergraduate sophomores or juniors with strong research experience who plan to continue their careers with a Ph.D.  Read the press release here.

Cass Clemmer, an Orono woman with a background in public health education, last Friday started the Maine Coronavirus Community Assistance Facebook page. For more information, please read the Bangor Daily News story. The Facebook group can be found at Maine Coronavirus Community Assistance.

Due to COVID-19 precautions and the University of Maine campuses transitioning to online-only for the spring, the rest of the 2020 Spring Seminars have been cancelled. We are hoping to reschedule as many as possible for future semesters. Please check back for any future updates to this status. Thank you.

Unfortunately, due to precautions in light of COVID-19, Accepted Student Days have been cancelled for the Spring Semester (the events for NSFA/SBE were scheduled for 3/13 and 4/3). We will reach out to accepted students in the near future, and will post updates as we have them.

Per President Joan Ferrini-Mundy’s email sent at 4:20 pm on 3/11/20: “Dear colleagues, students and community members at the University of Maine and University of Maine at Machias: “Today, the World Health Organization declared the coronavirus (COVID-19) a pandemic, prompting the University of Maine System to transition to remote instruction for classes on all campuses […]

Please join us in 102 Murray Hall this Friday, March 13th at 3:10 pm for Dr. Andrei Alyokhin’s rescheduled talk, Of Mites and Men: Spirotetramat, Lysenko, and Frida Kahlo.  For our Spring Seminar Schedule, please visit the SBE Seminars page.

We sure hope to see you here! To register, visit UMaine Undergraduate Admissions.

This Friday, March 6, at 3:10 pm in Murray Hall, UMaine, Dr. Jess Vickruck will give a seminar titled “Nest site availability influences community structure, interspecific competition and evolution in wild bees.” SBE Seminar Series

Four people affiliated with UMaine are among the presenters on March 20 at the Bangor Arts Exchange, including SBE  Assistant Professor Danielle Levesque and Postdoctoral Research Associate Magdalena Blaszkiewicz. More on this at UMaine News.  

Listen to The Maine Question podcast, as Associate Professor Jacquelyn Gill discusses how and why some species have gone extinct while others have survived and what it means for how we and our planet adapt to the rapidly changing world we find ourselves in.

Assistant Professor Jared Talbot has been nominated for the Chi-Bin Chien Award, the new investigator award for the International Zebrafish Society. The award recognizes outstanding graduate students, postdoctoral trainees, or recently-appointed faculty members from any country who have made significant contributions to the field of zebrafish research and have exhibited the generosity and openness that […]

Please join us to support NSFA and learn about some of the research graduate students are doing, tomorrow (Wednesday, February 26) 10 am – 2 pm in 57 Stodder Hall, here at UMaine: 2020 Graduate Student Research Awards Competition Flyer

March 5 @ 4:00 pm – 6:00 pm, Fogler Library Classroom I or via Zoom Join faculty and graduate students from across disciplines to discuss what to consider when publishing, what to watch out for, who to consult in the process, how to respond to reviews, and tips for reaching audiences and gaining visibility of one’s work. […]

Jacquelyn Gill, a University of Maine paleoecologist, will explore fern resilience with an all-female research team that includes scientists from the University of Florida (lead institution), University of Wyoming, University of California Santa Cruz, and the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. Read more on this story in UMaine News.

  The SBE Spring 2020 Seminar Series is now available to view! Please visit the SBE Seminars page for more information.  

Through the month of December, Ana had the privilege of working with Dr. Frank van Breukelen and his lab at the University of Nevada Las Vegas, studying tenrecs. Read more about her lab exchange here.

University of Maine professor of biological sciences Brian McGill, whose research focuses on modeling large-scale ecology and global change, has been named one of the 2019 Highly Cited Researchers worldwide, according to the Web of Science Group. Read the full story here.

Three creative ornament contest entries graced this year’s SBE Holiday Tree in Murray Hall. Entries had to be created only out of materials available in each team’s lab. Danielle Levesque’s lab had the winning ornament with their flying squirrel trap. They also put a homemade flying squirrel sugar cookie on the tree. This one was […]

SBE’s own Jasmine Saros was recently named a Fellow by the Association for the Sciences of Limnology and Oceanography.  She was named Fellow due to her dedicated work in “[reconstructing] past environmental conditions in lakes,” and her “contributions to the association and to aquatic sciences.”  You can read more here! Published December 13, 2019.

The National Science Foundation EPSCoR recently awarded the University of Maine and Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences (along with other collaborators and organizations) a $20 million grant to help fund the Maine Environmental DNA Initiative (or Maine-eDNA).  Maine-eDNA hopes to position Maine as “a national leader in the understanding and sustainable use of coastal ecosystems,” […]