News

Apr 22, 2021

Little crop of horrors

An international team of researchers has received a grant from the Human Frontier Science Program to investigate how carnivory-related genes, such as those involved in digestion, could help crops not only avoid pests, but also thrive in low-nutrient environments.

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Apr 09, 2021

New position will support graduate and post-graduate training

Donna Korzick, professor of physiology and kinesiology, recently assumed a new role as director of graduate training initiatives in the Huck Institutes for the Life Sciences. In this role, Korzick is dedicating half of her time to support the application for and execution of training grants from organizations like the National Institutes of Health.

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Mar 25, 2021

Three Huck Students Collect Grad School Awards

Two students from the intercollegiate graduate degree program in plant biology and one from ecology have been named among the recipients of prestigious 2020-21 Penn State Graduate School awards.

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Mar 18, 2021

Ottar Bjørnstad elected to Norwegian Academy of Sciences and Letters

Ottar N. Bjørnstad, distinguished professor of entomology and biology and J. Lloyd & Dorothy Foehr Huck Chair of Epidemiology at Penn State, has been elected to the Norwegian Academy of Sciences and Letters. Bjørnstad was recommended as a result of his significant contributions to the fields of population ecology and quantitative epidemiology.

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Mar 08, 2021

New Appointments to Build on Excellence in Graduate Training

Two familiar faces within the Huck's graduate program system will be adding new roles to support the Institutes' portfolio of extramurally-funded programs.

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Mar 03, 2021

Wolf social group dynamics matter for infectious disease spread, models suggest

By modeling wolves in Yellowstone National Park, researchers have discovered that how a population is organized into social groups affects the spread of infectious diseases within the population. The findings may be applicable to any social species and could be useful in the protection of endangered species that suffer from disease outbreaks.

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Mar 01, 2021

Unique study of isolated bobcat population confirms accuracy of extinction model

The reintroduction of 32 bobcats to an island off the coast of Georgia more than three decades ago created an ideal experiment to examine the accuracy of a genetic-modeling technique that predicts extinction of isolated wildlife populations.

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Feb 18, 2021

Silencing the alarm

An enzyme in the saliva of certain insects prevents their food plants from warning neighboring plants of an attack.

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Feb 04, 2021

The business of bees

The economic value of insect pollination services is much higher than previously thought in the U.S., new research finds.

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Feb 02, 2021

Summer weather conditions influence winter survival of honey bees

Winter survival of honey bee colonies is strongly influenced by summer temperatures and precipitation in the prior year, according to Penn State researchers, who said their findings suggest that honey bees have a "goldilocks" preferred range of summer conditions outside of which their probability of surviving the winter falls.

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