The Institute of Arctic Biology (IAB) is a world leader in
Arctic research, graduate education and undergraduate research experience and serves
as an academic gateway to study the circumpolar arctic.
Biological research at IAB includes wildlife, conservation biology, ecology,
ecosystems, physiology, evolution, genetics, bioinformatics and computational
biology, and biomedicine. Examples of faculty and graduate student projects are
listed under each selection in the Research Area pull-down menu above.
Wildlife research focus
areas include predator-prey behavior and ecology, migration ecology and evolution,
wildlife diseases and effects of contaminants, salmon migration and effects of
marine-derived nutrients; nutritional physiology and ecology; stochastic population
processes; quantitative ecology, particularly development and application of
capture-recapture estimators; endangered species management and planning; remote
sensing; habitat and landscape processes; conservation biology; avian ecology; and
behavioral, population, and community ecology of insects, birds, and mammals.
Ecology and Ecosystem research
include climate change modeling, plant-herbivore interactions and co-evolution; tundra
ecosystem structure and function; biogeochemistry, ecosystem nutrient cycling and fine-root
dynamics; species diversity and ecosystem processes; plant-microbe interactions; CO 2 flux
in aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems; evolutionary and population ecology of insect-plant
interactions; and insect behavioral and chemical ecology.
Physiology research includes
neurobiology, molecular genetics of hibernation in mammals; biological rhythms and sleep;
overwintering biology of animals including insects; nutritional physiology of life histories
in ungulates: physiology of rut, pregnancy, lactation and neonatal development; stress
endocrinology and physiological ecology of birds; physiological ecology; evolutionary and
ecological immunology; neural regulation of thermoregulation, and behavioral and physiological
mechanisms by which animals cope with arctic environments.
Genetics and Evolutionary Biology
research includes population genetics of plants, animals, and fungi; molecular systematics;
population structure and adaptive evolution of sex and sex ratios in plants; and the genetic
basis of obesity in humans.
Biomedical research is concentrated
in the Center for Alaska Native Health Research (CANHR), which investigates weight, nutrition,
and health in Alaska Natives from a genetic, dietary, and cultural-behavioral perspective;
and the IDeA Network for Biomedical Research Excellence (INBRE), which focuses on wildlife
diseases and effects of contaminants, especially in subsistence species.
Bioinformatics research develops
graduate and undergraduate teaching and interdisciplinary research and involves faculty,
staff, and students of several academic units, including the Institute of Arctic Biology,
the Department of Biology and Wildlife, the Department of Mathematics, the Institute of
Marine Science, the Arctic Region Supercomputing Center, and the Graduate Program in
Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. This
interdisciplinary program in bioinformatics and computational biology is administered
through the Institute of Arctic Biology and supported in part by Alaska EPSCoR and Alaska
INBRE.
