Departments
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Week of 11 September 1998 |
Vol. II, No. 5 |
Feature Article
Biology department adds faculty anticipating frontiers of the future
by Eric McHenry
The CAS department of biology, appropriately, is growing. Newly appointed Chairman and Professor Geoffrey Cooper says that in five years his department will be 15 full-time members stronger than it was at the end of 1997. Five of those new scholars, including Cooper, are already on board; one more will arrive for the spring semester.
The expansion has been undertaken to increase BU's depth in three subspecialities: the molecular biology of cell regulation, molecular ecology and evolution, and neurobiology. Cooper, who in January came to BU from a pathology professorship at Harvard University, says the opportunity to oversee such growth in a department was "what was attractive to me about the position."
"These are three of the major areas in which I and other people foresee the movement of biology in the next couple of decades," he says.
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Geoffrey Cooper, professor
and chairman of the biology department
Photo by Kalman Zabarsky
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Ulla Hansen also joined BU's biology department in January, coming as a full professor from Harvard. Her research concerns the regulation of gene expression. The department has also made appointments to four assistant professorships: Michael Sorenson, who studies the evolution of bird species, began in January; Chris Schneider, whose research involves species evolution in the tropics, moved from Australia to begin work August 15; Kim McCall, a specialist in the mechanisms of cell death in development, arrived September 1; and Jim Deshler, a messenger RNA expert, will join the department January 1, 1999.
"We're also in the process of recruiting a senior neurobiologist, which will be the start of growth in that area," says Cooper.
As scientists at work on various genomic sequencing studies, including the U.S. Department of Energy's Human Genome Project, complete their maps of genetic material, research in the three areas Cooper has identified becomes increasingly promising. The strength of his department's faculty in those areas, he says, will determine the extent to which BU can enter and influence conversation within the scientific and medical communities.
"We're going to know the entire genetic sequences of whole organisms, including humans, over the next decade," he says. "And that's really going to change biology. We'll have a whole database in computers that will say what all the genes in a given organism are. We're then going to be able to ask, using various sorts of manipulation, what particular genes do.
"In cell regulation and development, it's clear that we're going to be able to advance to the next level of analysis -- to see how cells work in the context of whole organisms. That's why I've chosen to build a strong group in the molecular biology of development and differentiation. Neurobiology: same thing. This has been called the decade of the brain. That's clearly a frontier, and again, the ability to have whole genomic sequences is going to allow new kinds of questions to be addressed."
The field of molecular ecology and evolution will also burgeon, he predicts, as the tools of contemporary molecular