Meet the newest members of the Faculty of the School of Biological Sciences
2007-2008
Steven Allison
Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology
Steven Allison received a B.S. in Biology and minor in Chemistry from the Pennsylvania State University. He earned his Ph.D. in Ecology from Stanford University, and was a NOAA Climate and Global Change postdoctoral fellow at UC Irvine. In 2007, he joined the faculty of the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology as an assistant professor. His research focuses on the interface between microbial ecology and ecosystem processes. In particular, he is interested in the extracellular enzymes that microbes use to break down dead organic material. He also studies how microbes and their enzymes respond to environmental change, such as global warming and nitrogen deposition.
Michael J. Buchmeier Molecular Biology and Biochemistry
Community and Environmental Medicine
Michael J. Buchmeier received his BS and MS degrees in Microbiology at Washington State University, and his Ph.D. in virology and immunology from McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. He took additional postdoctoral training at Scripps Clinic and Research Foundation from 1976-79, and from 1979 until 2007 was a faculty member at The Scripps Research Institute and most recently as in the Departments of Immunology and Molecular and Integrative Neuroscience. Over the past three decades, Dr. Buchmeier has pursued research on a broad range of problems on virus-induced demyelinating and neurodegenerative diseases, and in viral pathogenesis focusing on emerging viral infections. He has co-authored more than 170 articles, and edited one book, Neurovirology. He has been the recipient of an American Heart Association Established Investigator award, was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology, and has been honored as a Burroughs-Wellcome Professor in the Microbiological Sciences. He has served on numerous peer review committees for the National Science Foundation, The National Institutes of Health, and the National Multiple Sclerosis Society, and serves as an associate editor of PLoS Pathogens, and Microbiology and Molecular Biology Reviews, and serves on the editorial boards of Journal of Virology, Virology, Viral Immunology, BMC Microbiology, and The Virus Journal. At UCI Professor Buchmeier serves as an associate director of the Pacific Southwest Center for Biodefense and Emerging Infectious Diseases, and will join the Center for Virus Research and the Center for Immunology.
Kailen Mooney
Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology
Kailen Mooney received his B.A. in Environmental Science at Wesleyan University in 1991, after which he worked as an environmental policy analyst for the Natural Resources Defense Council. He moved to the University of Colorado at Boulder where he completed his Ph.D. in Biology in 2004 and conducted postdoctoral research at Cornell University from 2005-2007.
Kailen investigates how complex networks of interactions among plants, insects and birds determine the biodiversity and species composition of ecological communities. He has worked in the pine forests of the Rocky Mountains, the French Mediterranean and abandoned agricultural fields of Northeast North America. In particular, Kailen has studied how predators indirectly facilitate plant growth by controlling populations of herbivorous insects and how plant genetics affect such dynamics.
Jose Ranz
Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology
José Ranz received his Ph.D in Biology from the Independent University of Barcelona, Spain. There, he analyzed the extent to which the eukaryotic chromosome can accommodate large-scale rearrangements. Afterwards, he moved to Harvard University, where he pioneered the use of microarray technologies in the study of genes expressed preferentially in one of the genders across different species as well as in their hybrid progeny. More recently, Dr. Ranz moved to the University of Cambridge to study the molecular mechanisms that originate chromosomal rearrangements.
In his laboratory at UC Irvine, Dr. Ranz uses high-throughput technologies and computational methods to analyze how chromosomal rearrangements affect gene expression and how trans-acting factors contribute to the divergence of the expression network between species. These modifications can be key to explaining the phenotypic diversity we observe in nature.
Craig Stark received his A.B. in Psychology from Harvard University and his Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology from Carnegie Mellon University. After postdoctoral research at UC San Diego, he joined the faculty at Johns Hopkins University in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences.
Dr. Stark's research investigates the neural bases of human long-term memory. He uses functional neuroimaging (fMRI), experimental psychology, neuropsychological studies of amnesic patients, and studies of aging and dementia to investigate how the neural systems supporting these various types of memory operate and interact. Particular emphasis is placed on understanding the human hippocampus and other components of the medial temporal lobe.
