To our alumni and the Biology Department community:
As we begin 2026, I want to express my gratitude for your contributions to the Biology Department and to update you on exciting new happenings. The Department of Biology continues to lead the way in the College of Science and Technology and Temple University. As we welcomed our new President, John Fry, I was honored to represent Biology by giving one of the nine research talks at the Investiture ceremonies last Spring. Our former chair, Shohreh Amini, was elected to serve as the president of the Faculty Senate. We are also well represented in the CST Dean’s office with former chair Bob Sanders serving as associate dean for faculty affairs and Sergei Pond serving as associate dean for research. Dr. Brent Sewall is now the director of the Field Station at the Ambler Campus, where we have developed an ecology-based curriculum enabling students to spend an entire year at Ambler.
Our professors and students have been recognized within and beyond Temple for the impact of their amazing work. The director of the Institute for Genomic Medicine, Sudhir Kumar, received the George Beadle Award from the Genetics Society of America and was honored as author of one of the top-100 most-cited scientific works in the history, as determined by the journal Nature. Two Biology professors were awarded the CST Dean’s Distinguished Award for Excellence in Research in the last three years: Wei-dong Yang for his pioneering work in high-resolution microscopy and Sergei Pond for his work on the evolutionary dynamics of the COVID19 virus.
Jay Lunden won the CST Italia-Eire Foundation Teacher of the Year Award for his herculean efforts in revising our introductory courses. DAndrea Quattrini, a recent PhD graduate who is a Curator of Invertebrates at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) in 2025. This award is the highest honor bestowed by the U.S. government on outstanding scientists early in their careers. PhD candidate Hannah Verdonk received the Graduate Student Excellence Award from the Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution. And last but definitely not least, two undergraduate Biology majors, Nala Hamilton and Diana Tiburcio, were recipients of the prestigious Goldwater Scholarship in 2023, marking the first time two women from Temple’s STEM programs were selected in the same year.
The Department has wished farewell to retiring longtime faculty and welcomed new faculty--if you haven’t visited in a while, you might not recognize us! Joel Sheffield, Richard Waring and Karen Palter have retired and are missed, although their legacy lives on in our halls. Last year, we welcomed two new faculty members to our department: Samira Abdulai-Saiku and Yu-Chieh David Chen. They bolster our neurobiology program as they delve into sex differences in cognitive aging and the early development of neuronal circuitry in sensory systems. They join a vibrant and research-active faculty who had over $15M in external research funding in 2025.
We have established new programs in undergraduate and graduate education. In addition to the BS in Biology, students can now pursue undergraduate degrees in Genomic Medicine, Integrative Genetics and Genomics, or Ecology, Evolution, and Biodiversity. These exciting new curricula provide our students with educational experiences that are tailored to their interests and career paths. We have also introduced a Professional Science Masters (PSM) in Sustainability--the first inter-collegiate graduate program at Temple--representing a truly interdisciplinary program shared with the College of Liberal Arts. We are keeping up with the ever-changing landscape of Biology with PhD and PSM programs in Bioinformatics that span departments within the college. We are now developing new courses and programs in the use of Artificial Intelligence in Biology to ensure that our students are prepared for the future that is on the horizon.
If you are an alumni, I hope that you will remember your time in Biology and the ways that it has shaped your life and your career. We would love to hear from you, whether it be to share your story with us or with a CST publication, volunteer as a mentor to some of our current students, help us recruit the next generation of biologists or send us your ideas for what we could do in the future. Let us know how you would like to help advance Biology further; we are always extremely grateful for your time, treasure and talent. I hope that you will come back to campus soon to see some of the new architecture and to say goodbye to our Bio-Life building, as it will be finding a new life in the campus Master Plan that will be announced publicly this Spring.
Please stay in touch and come back soon to visit!
Sincerely,
Erik Cordes
Professor and Chair
Department of Biology