#IAmScience
May 22, 2020
Newest Bond LSC faculty addition adds to focus on inflammation
Olga Baker, professor of Otolaryngology, will join Bond LSC June 1, 2020, as our newest principal investigator with a focus on inflammation. | photo by Roger Meissen, Bond LSC By Lauren Hines | Bond LSC Olga Baker is the type of person who acts when she sees a problem. In her home country of Venezuela, Baker worked as a dentist who was part of a team that treated head and neck cancer patients. “They told me how much they suffered as I used to do their cavities and fix their teeth,” Baker said. “That’s how…
May 15, 2020
#IAmScience Michael Petris
By Becca Wolf | Bond LSC Growing up more than 9,000 miles away in Melbourne, Australia, Michael Petris never thought he would work at MU, especially since he could not even locate the state of Missouri on a map. Now a professor of biochemistry, Petris was introduced to science early on in his life by his mother, who was a microbiologist and a high school science teacher, who made sure to immerse her children in the science field. He remembers growing up watching Australian wildlife documentaries and being interested in his science classes at school. After completing secondary…
May 1, 2020
#IAmScience Bruna Luz
By Lauren Hines | Bond LSC At four years old, first year Ph.D. student Bruna Luz was running around and catching bugs in her backyard just to stare at them, trying to understand how they worked. “Biology has always been part of my life,” Luz said. Now, Luz studies soybean genetics and how soybeans interact with rhizobia in the Gary Stacey lab at Bond LSC. Rhizobia are bacteria that fix nitrogen in the soil, providing nutrients to the soybean plant. In exchange, the bacteria feed off of photosynthesis products created by the plant, forming a symbiotic…
April 24, 2020
#IAmScience Jessica Milano-Foster
By Becca Wolf | Bond LSC The placenta is a crucial organ that develops in a woman’s body during pregnancy that provides oxygen and nutrients to the fetus. After her experience doing research on this organ while getting her master’s degree at the University of Kansas Medical Center, current MU Ph.D. student Jessica Milano-Foster has become passionate about studying it. To continue her education, she has teamed up with Laura Schulz’s lab in the MU School of Medicine and Michael Roberts’ lab at Bond LSC to look at the role of…
April 17, 2020
#IAmScience Bing Stacey
By Lauren Hines | Bond LSC Bing Stacey works on her soybean genetics papers in her office with the company of a plant on the windowsill and a large tropical photo of the Philippines on the second floor of Bond LSC. For the past few years, Bing Stacey has been working towards uncovering the secrets of soybean genes. That work aims to identify what different genes do within the soybean genome so that they can be manipulated and create higher crop yields. Soybeans are a major source of cooking oil and protein…
Feb. 14, 2020
#IAmScience Mel Oliver
By Lauren Hines | Bond LSC With his wide range of teas laid out along the windowsill, and his small posters still in stacks on the floor, Mel Oliver is still setting up his new office at Bond LSC after arriving in December. It takes a while to settle into a new space like the office on the south side of Bond LSC’s third floor, especially after spending 30 years in a job like the one he held with the US Department of Agriculture until he retired late last year. On most days, he types away at…
Jan. 24, 2020
#IAmScience Kaitlyn Waters
By Mariah Cox | Bond LSC It’s common knowledge that all Ph.D. candidates must complete research in preparation for a dissertation, but what happens when one’s faculty mentor moves to a different school before completion? Kaitlyn Waters found herself in that situation as she was preparing for the final year of her Ph.D. program. Waters, a current veterinary medical sciences Ph.D. candidate at Mississippi State University (MSU), is finishing her research in the Bond Life Sciences Center with primary investigator Henry Wan. Wan came to Mizzou last summer from MSU as…
Jan. 10, 2020
#IAmScience Karen Segovia
By Mariah Cox | Bond LSC Karen Segovia wanted to work with animals the moment her childhood dog fell sick. With few veterinarians near the rural town in Perú where she grew up, she felt powerless to help, and that inspired her to eventually go to veterinary school. But it was her preparation for her dissertation to meet the degree requirements at San Marcos National University veterinary school that refined Segovia’s focus on something smaller. Already interested in virology, her research narrowed in viruses and avian flu. A connection with a…
Dec. 5, 2019
#IAmScience Mannie Liscum
For Mannie Liscum, thinking is a privilege, and his job gives him the chance to be fascinated by human’s capacity to conceptualize and learn new things. “It’s my goal to use as much of the stuff between my ears as I can while I’m here,” said the Bond LSC primary investigator. “And that’s what drives a lot of people into science.” Along with that internal tick to learn, he’s inspired by the scientific pursuit to better understand the world. He said it’s easy to see things and from one mindset, but in reality, it’s always…
Nov. 28, 2019
Jordyn Lucas #IAmScience
By Danielle Pycior | Bond LSC Fourteen billion years ago, the universe began expanding. Four billion years ago, the earth formed. Four million years ago, humans began to roam the Earth. Four years ago, Jordyn Lucas began her graduate degree studying the origins of life in the lab of Donald Burke at Bond LSC. “We have this really cool grant from NASA that I’m working on,” she said. “We’re working with RNA to see if it would have been a good progenitor molecule for life, and testing the bounds of what it can do on its…
Nov. 15, 2019
#IAmScience Clayton Kranawetter
By Mariah Cox | Bond LSC Taking things apart to figure out how they function was a huge part of Clayton Kranawetter’s childhood. From dismantling his parents’ old computer to disassembling a baseball pitching machine, he’s always been curious about the way things work. Kranawetter always looked for old machines or items that weren’t being used anymore to take apart and analyze. The comical part is that he never put them back together. Throughout his life, Kranawetter has carried a sense of curiosity about him that has led him to learn new hobbies or languages…
Nov. 8, 2019
#IAmScience Maddy Creach
“Science is concrete, but it isn’t rigid. Research is constantly new and fresh.” By Danielle Pycior | Bond LSC For Maddy Creach, a scientific career was always the end goal, and television and books have played a part in that inspiration. When she was a kid, her “big science nerd” of a dad watched NOVA all the time with her along with dinosaur documentaries, and she could always turn to him for support in her career aspirations. That support has continued for her current dream — to work for NASA’s plant research team. Astronaut Scott…