Biology and Biomedical Sciences
Faculty in the Department of Biology and Biomedical Sciences who have been featured in our Faculty Scholarship Showcase.
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Heather Axen, Ph.D.
Associate Professor, McAuley Scholar
Biology and Biomedical Sciences
Heather Axen graduated from Cornell College in 2006 with a B.A. in biochemistry and molecular biology and continued on to complete her Ph.D. from the University of Vermont in 2011. After completing postdoctoral fellowships at the University of Vermont and Salve Regina University, she joined the faculty of Salve Regina University in 2015.
Dr. Axen loosely classifies herself as an evolutionary ecologist, with a current focus on how organisms use their DNA to deal with different kinds of stress. The combinations of genes an individual has are important in determining how that organism looks and functions. Understanding how DNA is turned on or off, and expressed, is important for discovering the best ways to treat disease, save endangered species, improve agriculture, and predicting how organisms will deal with stress. DNA can change over time, but often stressors happen on a shorter timescale, and organisms must use their genetic tools in different ways to be successful. As a scientist, Dr. Axen tries to understand how an organism uses its DNA to deal with different kinds of stress by investigating two different areas. In the first project she to understand how social animals deal with easily transmissible diseases, like COVID-19, by looking at the relationships between pathogens, social behavior, and genes. In this National Science Foundation funded work, she uses ant colonies, which are highly social and mimic our behavior in myriad ways, as a model for human societies. In her second set of investigations, she seeks to better understand long term outcomes of climate change on living systems by looking at how the environment in which an organism grows up affects its ability to use its DNA to cope with heat/cold stress. In these experiments she uses wild caught fruit flies from places like Colorado, Vermont, Rhode Island, California, Arizona, and Hawaii.
Anne Reid, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor | Biology and Biomedical Sciences
Dr. Anne Reid received her PhD in Microbiology from the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada in 2005. She then completed 3 years of postdoctoral training in Ottawa, Ontario before becoming a Research Scientist in Health Canada’s Bureau for Microbial Hazards, where she led the Salmonella research laboratory. Throughout her career, Dr. Reid has studied biological features of bacteria such as Escherichia coli and Salmonella enterica that contribute to their ability to cause gastroenteritis or food poisoning. As an Assistant Professor in the Biology and Biomedical Sciences department at Salve Regina University, Dr. Reid continues to study these pathogens with the help of undergraduate researchers, with a special focus on the fitness of these bacteria on fresh fruits and vegetables.
Jillian Wise, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor | Biology and Biomedical Sciences
Dr. Wise received her Ph.D in Biomedical Sciences from the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, followed by a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Oslo in Norway. She was an Instructor at Massachusetts General Hospital of Harvard Medical School prior to her appointment at Salve Regina University. As a cross-trained computational and translational researcher, her focus is on determining mechanisms of cancer cell evolution in response to therapies in order to develop and better connect cancer patients with their most effective treatment regimens. She uses comprehensive approaches to studying evolutions of cancer cell states through in-depth genomic and transcriptomic analyses. She also focuses on developing methods of studying genomic and transcriptomic changes across evolutionary time and creating machine learning applications for cancer detection. As an educator at Salve, Dr. Wise teaches undergraduate courses on genetics and bioinformatics as well as developing future researchers in computational cancer analytics.