Fall 1995
Dear Colleagues,
On September 22 & 23 thirty-seven full- and part-time biology faculty from thirteen Iowa Community Colleges gathered at the Iowa Lakeside Laboratory in West Okoboji for the first Annual Conference of the Iowa Association of Community College Biology Teachers. Conference events included lecture presentations, field trips, planning sessions, officer elections, committee organization, and social activities.
The primary goal of the IACCBT is to promote the improvement of biology teaching at Iowa's community colleges.
The Annual Conference was just the beginning. Funds from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute granted to Iowa State University will provide support for the first few years. Future workshops, short courses, and conferences are being planned.
This newsletter will serve to keep members informed of association activities as well as other pertinent biology events. The IACCBT offers opportunities to meet other biology teachers, share experiences and teaching innovations, and learn new research developments.
I welcome you to join us in this venture!
The IACCBT held its first business meeting on Sept. 22 during the Conference of Iowa Community College Biology Teachers at the Iowa Lakeside Laboratory. Thirty-seven full and part-time community college biology faculty members attended the conference.
Officers chosen at the meeting were:
President: Gary Fulton, Marshalltown CC; Vice-President (President-Elect): Arlyn Ristau, Hawkeye CC; Treasurer: Karin VanMeter, Des Moines Area CC (Boone Campus); Secretary: Johanna Kruckeberg, Kirkwood CC (CR campus). Serving on committees will be: Newsletter: Mary Lou Lauer, Kirkwood CC (CR campus); Inservice and Education: Terri Ann Rogers and Barb Harvey (both of Hawkeye CC); By-Laws and Affiliation: Paul Kimball (Northeast Iowa CC) and Connie Vinton Schoepske (Hawkeye CC); Chairperson for the 1996 Conference to be held at Kirkwood CC in Cedar Rapids: Gary Donnermeyer (Kirkwood CC).
Items discussed at the meeting included ideas for future workshops and conferences, possible conference times, appropriate dues and when to start charging them (currently, activities are being funded by a Howard Hughes grant administered by ISU, with the amount of funding decreasing yearly), widening our membership, and soliciting corporate and institutional sponsorships.
Does your Community College or organization have a homepage on the WWW? Let us know and we'll print your URL, or the directions to any other Web site you think our members might like to browse.
Here's a short list of upcoming dates for biology-related conferences and meetings. If you know of any others coming up in 1996, please send the pertinent info to Mary Lou Lauer, IACCBT NEWS Editor (at Kirkwood CC, email address: mllauer@aol.com), for publication in the next issue.
NABT National Conference
October 25-28, 1995
Phoenix, AZ
Want more info? Call: 703/471-1134
or 1-800/406-0775
1st Community College Conference on Human Genetics
March 21-23, 1996
North Lake Community College, Dallas, TX
Want more info? Call: 214/659-5328
Human Anatomy & Physiology Society
Regional Meeting
April 12-13, 1996
Hawkeye Community College, Waterloo, IA
Want more info? Call: 319/296-2320, ext. 1468
IACCBT Fall 1996 Conference
September 1996
Site: Kirkwood Community College
in Cedar Rapids, Iowa
(Watch for more info in the next issue)
Tom Ingebritsen, Associate Professor in the Department of Zoology and Genetics at Iowa State University, announced plans at the IACCBT meeting in September to establish a Project BIO Community College Advisory Committee in cooperation with ISU. Project BIO has as its goals to promote communication among Iowa's biology teachers, share resources, promote articulation of curricula, and support continuing education.
Currently, seven Iowa community college faculty members have been recruited for the committee: Karin VanMeter (DMACC-Boone), Paul Mayes (EICC), Connie Vinton Schoepske (HCC), Carol Armstrong (ICCC), Mary Lou Lauer (KCC-CR), Tim Armstrong (IHCC), and Wilmar Jansma (KCC-IC). Ingebritsen is seeking two more individuals to represent the community colleges in western Iowa, and also several computer techonology experts to complete the committee.
The initial meeting of this group is scheduled to take place at in Ames on October 13th. Reports from the committee will be published in future issues of the IACCBT NEWS. If you are interested in finding out more about this very important advisory committee, please contact Tom Ingebritsen at ISU (email address: tsingebr@iastate.edu).
We're trying to compile and maintain a comprehensive mailing list for all the Iowa community college Biology instructors, both full- and part-time, but we're not sure if we have a complete and correct list just yet.
If you know someone who didn't receive a copy of IACCBT NEWS and would like one, would you please drop Johanna Kruckeberg a line (at Kirkwood CC in Cedar Rapids, email address: jkrucke@kirkwood.cc.ia.us) so that we can get that person on our mailing list? Many thanks!
Looking for an interesting educational workshop to attend? The following topics were suggested during our first IACCBT meeting as possible continuing education workshops to be offered at our Fall 1996 meeting, or as one- or two-day CE courses during this coming year:
Are there other topics you're interested in? If so, please alert CE Committee members
Ann Rogers (Hawkeye CC) or Barbara Harvey (Hawkeye CC). We'll plan CE offerings based on your needs.
Charles Drewes, co-principal investigator on ISU's Howard Hughes grant also urges you to send him your ideas for summer as well as school-year community college biology workshops. A certain amount of their grant money is set aside to fund these workshops. Charlie's email address: c_drewes@molebio.iastate.edu.
It's already time to start thinking about what program and workshops you'd like to have at our 2nd Annual IACCBT Conference next September in Cedar Rapids. A keynote speaker? Sessions that will count toward certification or recertification? More time to network with colleagues? Gary Donnermeyer (Kirkwood CC in CR, email address: gdonner @kirkwood.cc.ia.us) is the chairperson for next fall's conference. Please let him know your ideas for the conference so that we may begin lining up the program, the speakers, the facilities, and the food! for our second annual IACCBT conference.
Someday environmental engineers will use microbes to clean up chemical pollutants in much the same way that they have harnessed microbes to treat sewage, predicts Ananda M. Chakrabarty of the University of Illinois at Chicago. He outlined his current research during a presentation entitled, "Microbial Degradation of Toxic Chemicals: Molecular and Evolutionary Insights," when he received this year's Proctor and Gamble Award in Applied and Environmental Microbiology at the American Society for Microbiology's Annual Meeting in Washington, DC, May 1995.
Few bacteria naturally possess all the enzymes needed to convert chlorinated synthetic chemicals like polychlorinated biphenyls, Agent Orange, and dioxins into nontoxic constituents such as carbon dioxide, water, and halogen ions. But given enough time, some microbes in chemically contaminated environments do eventually figure out ways to use these substances, Chakrabarty says.
However, typically the microorganisms found at such sites do not work efficiently enough to be useful for large-scale environmental cleanups. Chakrabarty and other researchers are using a special chamber called a chemostat to find microorganisms that are more efficient at degrading chemical contaminants. The chemostat supplies no nutrients to the microorganisms other than the pollutant chemical. In less than a year of continuous exposure to a chemical such as Agent Orange, pseudomonads from soil have been shown to acquire all the enzymes they need to degrade the contaminant, Chakrabarty reports.
He sees chemostats being used more often to exert selective pressure on microorganisms in redesigning them to do specific degradative tasks. This approach could become part of an emerging set of genetic engineering technologies that may thrust bioremediation into an increasingly important role in cleaning up environmental contaminants. (Reprinted with permission from: ASM News, August 1995.)