The Future is Here
Dear Friends, Alumni, and Current Members of the UT Department of Microbiology:
In this edition of our annual newsletter, we focus our attention on what makes our department great: the people of its past, present, and future who comprise a community dedicated to exploring the unseen world and sharing this knowledge with others.
Many changes occurring within our department and on campus are providing extraordinary opportunities and challenges for our community. We have a new budget model that will change how we prioritize our expenditures and investments in the future. Our College of Arts and Sciences is undergoing structural modifications that will change how we as a department interface with administration and the rest of campus. The Office of Research has announced strategic initiatives that will change how we contextualize our research programs as we seek new funding and develop collaborations with others.
We are seeing changes in career goals of our students, with an increased emphasis on health-related careers, particularly in infectious disease and immunology. This demand for a health-related curriculum provides us with an opportunity to develop new courses and programs that meet the needs of the future health workforce of the nation.
Our campus is experiencing dramatic increases in enrollment which will change how we teach effectively. Increased enrollment expands our reach, giving us the opportunity to educate more students about the importance and fascinating features of microbes. It also challenges us to change our pedagogy to enhance learning in large class sizes and to be creative in identifying space and resources to ensure that critical hands-on, modernized instructional lab experiences are available to all registered students.
Our collective ability to meet all of these challenges and thrive as a department is due to the ongoing effort and creativity of our people. I am pleased to announce the arrival this year of our new assistant professors, Lindsey Burcham and Andrew Monteith. They bring new research and instructional expertise in infectious diseases and immunology, relevant to the new campus Human Health and Wellness initiative. They are launching their independent research programs and building new collaborations within the department, across campus, and beyond.
Our talented undergraduate instructional team includes Distinguished Lecturer Elizabeth McPherson and Research Assistant Professor Gary LeCleir, as well as new members: Lecturer Jessica Pyle and Research Assistant Professor Zachary Burcham. These extremely talented instructors help us move into the future through their excellence in classroom instruction, by their continuous improvement of the curriculum, and by supporting the graduate student teaching assistants under their supervision.
Our faculty offer high-demand courses that span the tremendous breadth of microbiology, from ecology, physiology, and molecular biology to virology, immunology, and pathogenesis. In addition, in collaboration with our sister biology departments, we have created a new global health concentration within the biology BS degree. This concentration emphasizes the One Health integration of environmental, agricultural, and human, and public health.
Graduate students are the thread that weaves through, and binds the department together with their research, teaching, and service. In this edition of the newsletter we present the stories from several graduate students and their past, present and future perspectives. I hope you’ll agree with me that thanks to them, the future is very bright!
Heidi Goodrich-Blair
Department Head
David and Sandra White Professor of Microbiology