One of the First Women to Graduate with a Ph.D.

Upon graduating from nearby Judson College, Janice Roberts took a research position at Birmingham’s Southern Research Institute. Confident in her desire to pursue a career in research, she enrolled in graduate school at the Extension Center for the University of Alabama (soon to become UAB) researching ribosomes under Dr. Donald Fattig’s mentorship. During that time, something unexpected happened: Janice developed a love of teaching. Since childhood, she declared she would never become an educator, but the teaching assistantship that helped fund her graduate studies sparked her passion for teaching and changed the trajectory of her career. In August 1971, Janice became the second woman to graduate with a master’s degree from UAB’s Department of Biology.

Later that year, Janice accepted a position as an instructor in the Biology Department at Jefferson State Community College (known then as Jefferson State Junior College). She thrived in the classroom, teaching courses in microbiology and freshman biology, as well as the interdisciplinary honors science course. In 1980, Janice took a leave of absence from JSCC to return to UAB to pursue her Ph.D. Janice’s doctoral research, performed under Dr. Patrick Dagg’s mentorship, studied caffeine-urethane interactions in mouse embryos. She was happy to be back at UAB among the close-knit group of graduate students. In 1983, Janice received her doctorate from UAB’s Department of Biology (only the second woman to do so) and then returned to her teaching career at JSCC. During her time at JSCC, Janice received many local, regional, and national accolades, including a Fulbright Teacher Exchange Fellowship in England, as well as the state of Alabama’s first ever Outstanding Junior College Faculty Award.

Janice retired from Jefferson State Community College in 2010 after 38 years of service. A long-time supporter of Birmingham’s arts scene, Janice is a docent for the Birmingham Museum of Art and leads tours of the museum. As a lay member of the Board of the American Pulmonology Medicine Institute, she helps promote scholarship programs for medical students. Since retirement, Janice has indulged her love of travel and has visited six of the seven continents. In her down time, she enjoys playing bridge and spending time with her family, especially her great nieces and nephews.

More Pioneering Women in UAB Biology

• Vithal Ghanta
• Nancy Love
• Mary Shepherd

First Woman to Graduate with a Bachelor’s Degree

After graduating from Birmingham’s Samuel Ullman High School (known today as UAB’s Ullman-Bell Complex), Mary Shepherd packed up her belongings and headed to Tuskegee University to pursue a degree in the sciences. During her junior year of college, she found out she was eligible to attend a state-supported school due to her husband’s status as a disabled veteran. In 1969, Mary and her husband moved back to Birmingham, and Mary transferred to UAB for her senior year. Adapting to UAB’s environment and academic requirements proved challenging. Being one of only a few African-American women in the program, she felt isolated and excluded, a far cry from her experience at Tuskegee. When her professor, Dr. Charles Crispens, saw her struggling, he stepped in to offer support—something Mary says she will never forget. Dr. Crispens inspired her stay in the program and encouraged her to focus on her course work and matriculation. In June 1970, Mary received her diploma, making her the first woman to ever graduate with a bachelor’s degree from the Department of Biology!

With her degree in hand, Mary had her heart set on teaching, so she returned to UAB to get a master’s degree in education. After receiving her certification, Mary spent 29 years teaching science in the Alabama public school system. Her longest tenure was at Hewitt-Trussville High School. In 2000, with her first grandchild on the way, Mary retired so that she could focus on her family. Nineteen years later, she and her husband are the proud grandparents of 10 grandkids. Outside of family time, Mary enjoys participating in her church, traveling, and serving her community.

More Pioneering Women in UAB Biology

• Vithal Ghanta
• Nancy Love
• Janice Roberts

UAB Department of Biology professors Dr. Charles Amsler and Dr. Jim McClintock, along with co-PIs Dr. Katrin Iken (University of Alaska, Fairbanks), Dr. Aaron Galloway (University of Oregon), and Dr. Andrew Klein (Texas A&M University), secured a $880,000 NSF grant to investigate brown macroalgae in the northern portion of the western Antarctic Peninsula region.

Brown macroalgae form extensive undersea forests in the northern part of the western Antarctic Peninsula (WAP) and play a key role in providing both physical structure and energy sources in shallow water communities. Further south on the WAP, these macroalgae become markedly less abundant and diverse, presumably because increased sea ice to the south reduces light available to the algae. This creates a fundamental change in ocean floor community processes and organization which impacts nutrition and food chain levels. As climate change has resulted in drastically reduced sea ice coverage in the southern WAP over the past 30 to 50 years, macroalgal communities typical of the northern part of the region should be expanding southward. In an effort to identify the extent and ramifications of the impact of this shift on the seafloor communities, a nine-person field team will travel to Antarctica in April and May 2019 to document the macroalgal communities and test hypotheses about the cause and consequences of the alteration of macroalgal communities. The field team consists of 3 UAB researchers - Dr. Charles Amsler, Maggie Amsler, and Sabrina Heiser, - as well 2 researchers with academic roots at UAB – Dr. Julie Schram and Dr. Katrin Iken. They hypothesize that increased sea ice cover along the region from north to south plays an important role in decreasing light available to the macroalgal communities. The team will use satellite data to choose study sites where variation in light due to differences in annual sea ice cover will be a major environmental variable. Their research should ultimately allow them to predict what community-level impacts might result from further changes in sea ice cover as a result of global climate change, which is already having other major impacts in the region.

The 2018 Provost’s Award for Faculty Excellence in Service Learning goes to Dr. Laurel Hitchcock, Associate Professor in the Department of Social Work.

Dr. Hitchcock deservedly receives this award for:

• She has worked to incorporate service learning activities for the online and face to face courses in her area to enrich the experience of her social work students.
• She organizes activities within the service learning opportunities to help her students reach out to the community and to help her students experience authentic social work challenges as part of their studies.
• She also works to assist other faculty in her department to have the same activities and online resources to be successful in their sections as well.
• She has collaborated with people across campus to gather the most effective resources for her students.

Dr. Stacy Krueger-Hadfield, assistant professor in the Department of Biology, was selected as the 2018 Norma J. Lang Early Career Fellow from the Phycological Society of America ($10,000) for her proposal "Spatiotemporal adaptation in the rocky intertidal: evolutionary responses of intertidal Chondrus crispus populations to climate change." Dr. Krueger-Hadfield is only the second Lang Fellow and was chosen from a very competitive pool of 31 applicants.

"Seaweeds are critical ecosystem engineers in near-shore marine ecosystems worldwide, and form the basis of lucrative aquaculture," says Dr. Krueger-Hadfield, summarizing the project. "Yet, these diverse eukaryotes have received collectively less attention, despite their ecological and economic importance. With the Norma J. Lang Early Career Fellowship, I will investigate genome-wide patterns of divergence and genetic diversity at small spatial scales across a gradient of rapid change in the red seaweed Chondrus crispus." Her research will allow her to see if there are changes between time points (which was also associated with several degrees Celsius temp increase) and along the French Atlantic coastline as they have spatial sampling in 2008 and 2018.