Stories

Dean Williams, environmental science professor, talks about horned frogs.

TCU’s "Horny Toad Project," led by biology professor Dean Williams, Ph.D., has played a critical role in the Fort Worth Zoo’s record-breaking release of 617 Texas horned lizards into the wild.

One in eight women in the United States will be diagnosed with breast cancer in her lifetime. It is the most common cancer among women globally, with more than 2 million new cases each year according to the Susan G. Komen Foundation. TCU biology professor Mikaela Stewart is innovating the way we research breast cancer in efforts to transform these harrowing statistics into stories of victory.

CSE faculty and students traveled to Pittsburgh in November to present in the North American meeting of the Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry (SETAC), with two works receiving awards.

Carnivorous plants have a wild array of adaptations that help them flourish in nutrient-poor environments, which include strategies to lure prey to their traps. John Horner, TCU biology professor, is an evolutionary ecologist with research interests in plant-insect interactions. Here he answers some in-depth questions about these fascinating plants.

Biology graduate student, Kimberlee Whitmore, biology alumna, Maddy Hannappel, and Matt Chumchal, biology professor and director of the Pre-Health Professions Institute, worked with a team of high school students and their teacher, Andrew Brinker, from the Texas Academy of Biomedical Sciences. They collected dragonflies for the Dragonfly Mercury Project at the Fort Worth Nature Center and Refuge.

TCU is involved in conservation and preservation efforts. This Earth Day, we look back at stories on how the College of Science & Engineering is making an impact, both locally and globally.

Matt Chumchal, TCU professor of biology, along with eight coauthors, recently had a paper, "Use of Riparian Spiders as Sentinels of Persistent and Bioavailable Chemical Contaminants in Aquatic Ecosystems: A Review," published in Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry (ET&C), an international scientific journal. The article reviews the use of riparian spiders as sentinels of environmental pollution, and suggests the development of national-scale programs to monitor chemical contaminants in aquatic ecosystems using spiders.

Associate professor of biology, Marlo Jeffries, and co-PI Dalton Allen (M.S. Biology 2021, Ph.D. Biology 2024) were awarded a $10,164 grant from the American Association of Laboratory Animal Sciences (AALAS) to support portions of Allen's dissertation work that aims to determine whether toxicological tests that feature marine fish embryos or invertebrates can replace those that use marine fish larvae.