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The spring semester is moving right along for CSUN Biology, with a nice week of cooler weather and even a little rain to clear the air. Tropical Semester students are back with their field project results in hand, and more Biology faculty are presenting their recent research for Colloquium.
Graduating Biology major Marine Barsegyan has been selected as the 2025-26 Wolfson Scholar, the highest academic honor awarded to CSUN undergraduates. Barsegyan will be recognized in this year’s Honors Convocation and the College of Science and Mathematics Commencement Ceremony, as well as the Biology Honors Reception.
The Biology Colloquium seminar series continues this week with back-to-back presentations by CSUN Professors of Biology David Gray and Chhandak Basu. Dr. Gray studies the evolution of mating signals and behaviors, especially in field crickets, and Dr. Basu studies plants’ physiological and genomic responses to environmental stresses. Colloquium seminars are held this semester at 2:30pm in Chaparral Hall room 5125.
Honors Reception and graduation plans drawn near
The Honors Reception, to be held at 10:30am Friday, May 15, will recognize all Biology students who have received awards and honors this year. Faculty whose student mentees have received awards, especially extramural honors and scholarships, should let Sarah Cohen know to include them.
Master’s students graduating in Fall 2025, Spring 2026, or Summer 2026 should also RSVP using this form to join in the first-ever Biology Department graduate hooding ceremony as part of the Honors Reception.
Finally, graduating seniors are still encouraged to share their stories as part of this year’s CSUN Grad Story survey.
Yoder Lab uses time-traveling method to reveal the resiliency of “California holly”
Toyon, Heteromeles arbutifolia, is an important shrub in California chaparral communities — and its dark green leaves and bright red fruits make it one of the more distinctive shrubs lining Griffith Park’s trails or crowning the Hollywood Hills. Those features also make toyon a possible indicator for the health of the native plant communities where it grows. According to a new paper from the Yoder Lab, the prognosis for toyon is pretty good.
Recent graduate Daniel Dakduk worked with Biology professor Jeremy Yoder to build an analysis of toyon populations using TARDIS, a method that uses crowdsourced records of flowering and fruit production to train machine-learning models of population health, then project flowering and fruiting activity in time periods without direct observations. Dakduk and Yoder compared projected toyon flowering activity in the early 20th century to flowering activity in recent decades. Global temperatures have increased about 1.5°C since the year 1900, but the analysis found that most toyon are flowering as well as they did 125 years ago. That’s good news for toyon and for the natural communities that rely on it — though other aspects of the analysis suggested that toyon is facing more variable conditions, and may not have many opportunities to shift its geographic range if climate change continues.
The full paper has been published online by The American Journal of Botany, and it’s described in a campus news release that went out this week.