School of Natural Resources and the Environment

Dr. Jessica Rick (BS Biology, University of Arizona; MS Integrated Biosciences, University of Minnesota; PhD Ecology, University of Wyoming) is an Assistant Professor in the School of Natural Resources and the Environment at the University of Arizona. Dr. Rick leads a diverse research group with interests in using genomics to better understand wildlife populations. Her group has worked across a variety of taxa, from frogs to fishes to bats to wolves, and has a broad interest in investigating how environmental change drives evolution at the population and species level, and in combining genomic and ecological techniques to connect gene flow processes at the individual and population level to macroevolutionary patterns. In this way, her research focuses on understanding the ways that changing environmental conditions can contribute to patterns of genetic variation across the space and time. In addition, Dr. Rick and her research group have used simulation studies to improve our understanding of the ways that bioinformatic treatment of genomic data can bias the results of population genomic and phylogenomic studies.

Prof. Katy Prudic, PhD has a passion for wild pollinators, especially butterflies. She is co-director of eButterfly, an online community science platform that harnesses the observations of thousands of butterfly enthusiasts North America. She combines this butterfly observational data with various sensor and satellite data to unravel a bit how climate change is impacting butterfly survival, reproduction, and plant affiliations. Her research encompasses precision conservation, human-computer networks, and data science. Her discoveries have been published in as Science, Proceedings of the National Academy, Proceedings of the Royal Society B and Behavioral Ecology and covered by Associated Press, BBC, CBC, National Geographic, the New York Times, and the Washington Post. She teaches Sustainable Earth (RNR 150) online, Data in the Wild (WFSC 221) and R Programming in Ecology (RNR 620) for the School of Natural Resources and the Environment at University of Arizona.

Our research is focused on microbe-mediated trace gas fluxes between the soil and atmosphere, their genomic basis, and methods to link gene to ecosystem function in the face of soil complexity and wide-ranging scales. Keywords: Soil Microbial Function, CO2, CH4, N2O, OCS, VOCs

Despite many therapeutic successes, cancer remains a major cause of mortality in the US. Natural products (NPs) represent the best source and inspiration for the discovery of drugs and molecular targets. Our aim is to discover effective and non-toxic NP-based anticancer drugs. Working with NCI we have recently discovered a class of plant-derived NPs useful in cancer immunotherapy. The main focus of our current research is to utilize medicinal chemistry approach to obtain their analogues for preclinical evaluation. Leslie Gunatilaka is Professor at the School of Natural Resources and the Environment and Director of the Natural Products Center. He is also Adjunct Professor of Department of Nutritional Sciences, and a member of the Arizona Cancer Center. He is a member of several professional societies, editorial boards, and pharmaceutical company advisory groups. He is a Fellow of the Academy of Sciences for the Developing World (TWAS), Italy, and the National Academy of Sciences, Sri Lanka. Dr. Gunatilaka has over 200 peer-reviewed publications and book chapters and over 150 communications in natural product science to his credit. He is the recipient of the Sri Lankan Presidents’ gold medal for “creating a center of excellence in natural products research at the University of Peradeniya, Sri Lanka” (1987), CaPCURE award for “dedication to ending prostate cancer as a risk for all men and their families” (2000), Research Faculty of the Year Award of the UA College of Agriculture and Life Sciences (2003), the UA Asian American Faculty, Staff and Alumni Association Outstanding Faculty Award (2005), and the UA Leading Edge Researcher Award for Innovative Research (2012). He has delivered over 100 invited lectures worldwide and was the Chief Guest and Plenary Lecturer at the International Herbal Medicine Conference held in Sri Lanka (2005), and the Keynote Speaker and the Guest of Honor at Chemtech-2007, an International Conference organized by the Institute of Chemistry, Ceylon. His current research interests include discovery, identification of protein targets, and structure-activity relationship (SAR) studies of natural product-based drugs to treat cancer, neurodegenerative, and other diseases from plants, and plant- and lichen-associated microorganisms, maximization of chemistry diversity and production of microbial and plant secondary metabolites, and scientific investigation of medicinal plants and herbal supplements. Keywords: Natural Product-Based Drug Discovery, Medicinal Chemistry, Cancer Immunotherapeutic Agents