Drexel University Graduate College recently announced the recipients of the 2023 Graduate Excellence Awards. These awards recognize high-achieving graduate and professional students across disciplines in mentorship, scholarship, civic engagement, service, research and teaching assistance. Congratulations to the College of Arts and Sciences students who were honored with these awards! 

Professor of Biodiversity, Earth and Environmental Science and Biology Sean O'Donnell, PhD, regularly works as an expert science consultant with natural history film crews. He shares more about his recent experience working in the rainforest of Costa Rica in this blog post. 

Executive Vice President and Nina Henderson Provost Paul Jensen recently announced the inaugural class of Nina Henderson Provost Scholars, which included three students from the College of Arts and Sciences. Congratulations to Jana Lenart, biological sciences, August Modiga, philosophy, politics and economics, and Disha Patel, chemistry.

New research on dampwood termites shows select members of the colony will experience brain changes in anticipation of cognitive demand. Drexel researchers measured developmental differences in the relative sizes of visual processing brain regions, called optic lobes, among dampwood termite castes to test whether optic lobe investment matches caste differences in exposure to visually complex environments.

 Susan Gurney, PhD, and Brett Condon, PhD, who co-teach the Science Education Alliance Phage Hunters Advancing Genomics and Evolutionary Science (SEA-PHAGES) course, had a novel solution to move their extremely hands-on lab online.

On Tuesday, June 8, 2021, the College of Arts and Sciences will celebrate the achievements of the Class of 2021 with a virtual commencement. The ceremony will be live-streamed from Mandell Theater, where a small party of dignitaries and speakers will gather.

Evolution is unfolding in real time within many natural animal populations and researchers are now observing how this influences biodiversity in the field. In a newly published study in Molecular Ecology a team of Drexel University scientists examined the biological variations in pea aphids, insects that reproduce frequently enough to evolve before our eyes, by tracing the prevalence of their protective endosymbiont, Hamiltonella defensa, which the insects use to ward off parasitoid wasps.

Drexel students now have access to a one-stop shop for academic support with Drexel’s new Writing and Tutoring Centers! In May, several of Drexel’s academic tutoring centers moved to the Korman Center, co-locating to support student academic success. Read on to learn more about these resources — and how you can take advantage of them!

We are pleased to recognize the recent grants, publications, presentations, awards and honors of the members of the College of Arts and Sciences.

Meghan Barrett, a PhD candidate in Drexel University’s Department of Biology within the College of Arts and Sciences, is sharing her passion for… bugs … with undergraduates and the world. 

We are pleased to recognize the recent grants, publications, presentations, awards and honors of members of the College of Arts and Sciences.

Freshmen and sophomore biology students at Drexel can take the elective BIO 213, which introduces them to independent, novel research and a hands-on learning opportunity working with fruit flies.

Biological Sciences major and BS + MD student Anuranita Gupta will address graduates as the class of 2018 representative at the College of Arts and Sciences Commencement ceremony on June 15, 2018.

A sixth-grade science fair project in 2014 led to the discovery that erythritol, the main component of Truvia, is a natural insecticide. Today, that discovery is the basis of a new Drexel-backed startup, BioLogic Insecticide. Simon D. Kaschock-Marenda, now a freshman at Drexel in the College of Engineering, was 11 when he noticed that Drosophila melanogaster, commonly known as fruit flies, died much quicker when they fed on Truvia than on other sweeteners. His father, Daniel Marenda, PhD, professor of biology in the College of Arts and Sciences, was unconvinced at first.

The typical images that “climate change” conjures include disappearing coastlines and melting polar ice. But what about animals’ brains — including our own? Can they be affected by the changing climate? Sean O’Donnell, PhD, professor in the College of Arts and Sciences, argues that they absolutely can.

Eva Karasmanis receives the Ruth L. Kirschstein award courtesy of the National Cancer Institute (an agency of the National Institutes of Health).

The bushmeat market in the city of Malabo is bustling—more so today than it was nearly two decades ago, when Gail Hearn, PhD, began what is now one of the region’s longest continuously running studies of commercial hunting activity.  Hearn’s team has now published its comprehensive results of 13 years of daily monitoring bushmeat market activity.

A new Drexel study suggests that social behavior evolved very differently in the brains of social insects than in vertebrate animals such as mammals, birds and fish.

A Drexel-led team has described a new dinosaur species with the most complete skeleton ever found of one of the largest animals to ever walk the Earth. At 85 feet (26 m) long and weighing about 65 tons (59,300 kg) in life, Dreadnoughtus schrani is the largest land animal for which a body mass can be accurately calculated.

In a study that began as a sixth-grade science fair project, researchers at Drexel University have found that a popular non-nutritive sweetener, erythritol, may be an effective and human-safe insecticide. Erythritol, the main component of the sweetener Truvia®, was toxic to Drosophila melanogaster fruit flies in a dose-dependent manner in the Drexel team’s study, published in PLOS ONE. The flies consumed erythritol when sugar was available and even seemed to prefer it. No other sweeteners tested had these toxic effects.

When grad student Mitchell D'Rozario noticed his fellow teaching assistants struggling to be prepared to teach classes, he created workshops to help them strengthen their skills.

As part of city’s vibrant scientific and technological community, Drexel University will play a big role in the 2013 Philadelphia Science Festival and Philly Tech Week on April 18-28. From a 29-story video game, to cutting-edge robotics, to an interactive Jazz concert, Drexel’s students, faculty and professional staff will be part of the programming for both week-long celebrations of the inquisitive and innovative spirits that are part of the fabric of the city.

Scientists from the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University have described another new lobe-finned fossil fish species from the same time and place in the Canadian Arctic as the famous precursor to limbed animals, Tiktaalik roseae, which they discovered several years ago. 

New research recently published in Neuron, co-authored by Drexel's Dr. Jeffery Twiss, is one of the strongest indicators yet of molecular signaling from end to end in peripheral nerve cells. The team's new discoveries may help scientists better understand nerve cells' distress signals and nerve cell repair, so they can eventually control and enhance the process to speed up recovery from nerve injuries.

Many of the world’s tropical protected areas are struggling to sustain their biodiversity, according to a study just published in Nature by more than 200 scientists from around the world. Among them, Drexel's  Dr. Sean O’Donnell, highlighted the important, beneficial role of private landowners who work to preserve biodiversity in their land surrounding tropical reserves.

New research suggests that climate change could exacerbate existing threats to critically endangered leatherback turtles and nearly wipe out the population in the eastern Pacific. Deaths of turtle eggs and hatchlings in nests buried at hotter, drier beaches are the leading projected cause of the potential climate-related decline, according to a new study in the journal Nature Climate Change by a research team from Drexel, Princeton University, other institutions and government agencies.

Drexel University researchers have found that the climate conditions at a major leatherback turtle nesting beach affects the early survival of turtle eggs and hatchlings. They predict, based on projections from multiple models, that egg and hatchling survival will drop by half in the next 100 years as a result of global climate change.

Drexel University will play a big role in the celebration of science at the annual Philadelphia Science Festival. The festival, which runs from April 20-29, brings scientists and science enthusiasts together for a week of science-related exhibits, demonstrations and gatherings throughout the city. Drexel students, faculty and professional staff will take part in events each day during the festival. Click "read more" for a full schedule of all Drexel-related activities during the week.

Researchers are bringing the latest technological advancements in 3-D printing to the study of ancient life. Using scale models of real fossils, for the first time, they will be able to test hypotheses about how dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals moved and lived in their environments.

Drexel's new Papadakis Integrated Sciences Building features a five-story vertical wall of living plants – the largest such wall in North America and the only one at a U.S. university. Scientists and students at Drexel are studying the biowall, an active living filter that removes volatile organic compounds from the air, to get a better understanding of how it works.

The collaboration will further Philadelphia’s reputation as a leader in the Natural and Environmental Sciences; The Pew Charitable Trusts Announces $1 million grant