Reflections Magazine Issue #77 - Fall 2012 | Page 13

Campus Feature

Recent SHU biology graduates and national award winners, Jared Pirkle and
Lauren Coe, pose with SHU Professors of Biology Dr. Carl Kaster (far left) and
Dr. Jun Tsuji (far right).

However, when it came to the larvae, there
was no discernible difference in their weight,
suggesting plant color did not affect growth
and development patterns.
“The larvae just like to eat. They were all
equal weight,” Coe said.
Coe credits Dr. Tsuji, who guided through
more than two years of research on her project.
“He was a great guidance to me and gave
me a lot of tips and suggestions,” Coe said.
“And the editing is still going. We’re still trying
to get (the research) published. Jun’s even continuing experiments.”
Pirkle, a native of Deerfield, Mich., earned
the third place John Johnson Award in organismal biology for his poster presentation on the
circadian activity of the house mouse.

“I’ve always been really fascinated with sleep
studies, and this was a roundabout way to approach this topic,” Pirkle said. “They’ve used the
house mouse before in other research. They were
easy enough to use and I had the resources where
I could pull a sleep study together.”
Pirkle was able to kind of quantify the ruggedness of the pacemaker, or the biological
clock that orchestrates light and dark cycles.
He was then able to graph that out and compare
to human behavior. “We’re very similar to mice
in a lot of ways,” Pirkle said.

Pirkle’s research was guided and supervised
by SHU Professor of Biology Dr. Carl Kaster.
“Most organisms, including humans, have
an internal circadian clock that anticipates daily
environmental changes, such as day and night,”
Kaster said. “Mice use their internal clocks to
regulate their behavior, so that they rest during
the day and are active in the evening. Jared experimentally manipulated the length of the dark
phase in a 24-hour cycle of light and darkness
and discovered that these conditions significantly affected the wheel-running activity of
the mice.”
“Carl has truly been fantastic,” Pirkle said.
“He gives back what you put into it, and that’s
what I appreciate the most. I made sure that my
effort would always match his. That’s all I can
really expect fro