JUNIOR ROSS HAYNES DIDN'T ACQUIRE THE PERFECT SUNTAN DURING THE LAST TWO SUMMERS. He spent his freshman and sophomore summers under the fluorescent lights in JMU's research labs, but his dedication has won him a different place in the sun. Haynes earned an American Society for Microbiology 2004 Undergraduate Research Fellowship. The highly competitive national award will fund Haynes' research in environmental biology and pay for a trip to the professional ASM meeting in New Orleans in May.

Haynes' research involves developing methods to capture delicate plasmids for use in research, according to James Herrick, Haynes' research mentor and JMU biology professor. "Antibiotic resistance genes are frequently transferred horizontally, i.e., from mature cell to mature cell via circles of DNA called plasmids," says Herrick. "Haynes is capturing these plasmids directly from local stream bottom sediments in order to determine whether antibiotic use in humans and agriculture can affect the environmental reservoir of antibiotic resistance in native stream bacteria."

Haynes has conducted research with Herrick since his freshman year, when he enrolled in Herrick's honors zoology course. "Ross works very well on his own," says Herrick. "I often give him projects to develop new methods, and you can only do that with your best researchers."

The American Society for Microbiology is the largest single-discipline society in the world, and its undergraduate fellowships are aimed at students who want to pursue graduate study in microbiology. Fellows will conduct eight weeks of research in summer 2004 at their home institutions with an ASM-member faculty mentor. Students will also present their research results at the 2005 ASM annual meeting.

In November, seven of Herrick's lab students presented their
research at a meeting of the Virginia branch of the American Society for Microbiology. Senior biology major Nhu-Oanh Pham earned second place for her poster detailing research on environmental bacteria at the Chemical and Biological Science Undergraduate Research Symposium at the University of Maryland.