The Peer Health Liaison program seeks to bridge a gap between BSD students and Student Health and Counseling Services. Liaisons undergo a training session with SHCH senior leadership to become well-versed in the services and resources available to students. They communicate with their students via a monthly email digest with up-to-date information on SHCH services. They additionally meet monthly with leadership to discuss items brought to their attention by their peers.
On a survey in Ethiopia, in 1974, paleoanthropologist Donald Johanson, AM’70, PhD’74, discovered “Lucy,” a 3.2 million-year-old bipedal hominin skeleton that was 40 percent intact. Classified in 1978 as the first known member of Australopithecus afarensis, Lucy is a direct ancestor of the modern human. The discovery changed our understanding of human evolution.
In 2006, paleontologist Neil Shubin discovered fossils of Tiktaalik roseae, the missing evolutionary link between fish and the first animals that waddled out of water onto land 375 million years ago. Shubin’s key discovery advanced evolutionary biology, and his best-selling book and television series sparked popular interest in the subject.
Clifton Ragsdale, Associate Professor in the Departments of Neurobiology and Organismal Biology and Anatomy, along with Organismal Biology graduate student Caroline Albertin and a team of researchers from University of California, Berkeley and Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology sequenced the genome of the California Two-spot octopus (Octopus bimaculoides).
In Dkikika Ethiopia in 2000, paleoanthropologist Zeresenay Alemseged, Professor of Organismal Biology and Anatomy, discovered "Selam," also referred to as "Lucy's baby." No other hominin skeleton of such antiquity is as complete as this one. Moreover, as the earliest juvenile hominin ever found, the Dikika child provides an unprecedented opportunity to study growth processes in our ancient relatives.
In a series of investigations starting in 1906, Robert R. Bensley demonstrated that the islets of Langerhans were specialized elements of the pancreas. He developed staining methods that distinguished between alpha cells and the beta cells that produce insulin. Bensley's work was fundamental to the discovery of insulin. He later developed techniques to disassemble cells and isolate cellular components by spinning them in a centrifuge, a technique he used in 1934 to isolate mitochondria.