For further information, contact the MBL Communications Office at (508) 289-7423 or e-mail us at comm@mbl.edu

For Immediate Release: January 3, 2008
Contact: Gina Hebert, 508-289-7725, ghebert@mbl.edu

Biology teacher Carolyn Wilczynski of Binghamton High School, NY uses a webcam to communicate with Seth Bordenstein at the MBL during her class. Credit: Rebecca Towns / Press & Sun-Bulletin, Binghamton, NY		High school teachers at the 2007 Cornell Institute of Biology Teachers use contemporary bioinformatics tools to analyze Wolbachia symbiont DNA with Seth Bordenstein as part of a nationwide high school research project sponsored by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Credit: Seth Bordenstein

Researcher Bios:

		Sarah Bordenstein Sarah Bordenstein is an Education and Outreach Coordinator at the MBL. Her most notable development is Microbial Life, a digital library dedicated to the ecology, evolution and diversity of microbes. She currently acts as Project Manager for the Encyclopedia of Life Biodiversity Informatics Group and is affiliated with the International Census of Marine Microbes. Sarah is particularly interested in engaging teachers and students to contribute to our knowledge of biodiversity and empowering them to participate in the scientific discovery process by making learning resources, tools and datasets freely available online.
		Seth Bordenstein Seth Bordenstein received a B.S. in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, a M.S. in Biology, and a Ph.D. in Evolutionary Genetics from The University of Rochester. From 2002 to 2004 he was a National Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow at the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL), where he studied genome evolution of bacterial endosymbionts. In 2005 Bordenstein was appointed as assistant scientist in the Josephine Bay Paul Center of the MBL. He also currently holds a faculty appointment in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Brown University and is a founding member of the Mobile Genetic Element Cluster at the MBL.

• Microbial Life
• micro*scope
• Encyclopedia of Life

MBL Professional Development Resources for Teachers:

• Discover the Microbes Within: The Wolbachia Project
  Sponsored by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute
  Discovering the Microbial World Within Press Release
  
  
• Living in the Microbial World
  
  
• Quicktime movie (43 minutes) of webinar. Recorded live on 1/08/08 for NSDL-NSTA web seminar.