The ASMS Biology Department has been awarded two prestigious grants, a highly competitive $10,000 Toyota Tapestry grant as well as a $2,500 Best Buy Teach grant. The Toyota Tapestry grant will be used to study two streams bordering Mobile Bay. The Best Buy grant will be used to purchase digital cameras, GPS’s (global positioning systems), and a camcorder, all to be used in field biology courses. “Our Biology Department is on a roll,” says ASMS President/Director Dr. Jane Ellis. “We are proud of our grant recipients. I’m excited about the research that our Biology Department is going to conduct with this funding. Our students stand to learn so much.” Dr. James Njengere is the project director for the Toyota grant, although the planning for the grant was collaborative among the biology faculty. Barry McPhail was the principal writer for each of the grants. Njengere, who was accompanied by chemistry teacher Kevin Dolbeare, was recently flown to St. Louis to accept the Toyota grant on behalf of ASMS. All three teachers will be teaming up with students to study the ecomicrobiology of two streams bordering Mobile Bay in southern Alabama, one stream whose watershed is occupied almost entirely by the city of Daphne with a high human population, while the adjacent watershed is forested and all but unoccupied.”
This will not be uncharted waters for McPhail, who has led teams of students into Mobile Bay for research purposes for over a decade. Njengere says that ASMS students will take water samples from these streams, determine various chemical and physical qualities, and study their bacterial communities using a series of differential media and biochemical tests. Students will also be guided through an analysis of their results and “explore why bacterial communities might vary between populated and unpopulated areas,” says Njengere. Meanwhile, McPhail says that the Best Buy Teach grant will be used to purchase cameras that will enrich student presentations, allowing them to use more of their own images rather than borrowed ones. The GPS’s, McPhail says, will allow students to precisely document the exact place they collect data. “This makes possible a wide range of field studies where distribution and location are central to the analysis, for example, a map of the distribution of a particular plant or animal,” McPhail says. “From a previous grant from the Mobile Bay National Estuarine Program, the school has a site license for ArcView GIS, a highly sophisticated mapping program. Information from the handheld GPS’s can be downloaded and combined with the students’ field data to generate maps for analysis and display.” |
