Denison prof shares passion for research

GRANVILLE - Heather Rhodes balances a love for teaching with a love for research by doing both at Denison University as a biology professor.

She had always been interested in physics and biology during high school, but Rhodes found neurobiology had an even better fit for her passion after her first year of undergraduate studies at the University of California, San Diego.

“I took a biopsychology class and was blown away by the things the nervous system can do. So I decided I wanted to study more of that,” she said.

That decision was cemented after Rhodes worked in a research lab that studied autism in the summer after her first year at college.

“I was very lucky to get a position at that lab very early in my college career,” she said. “It reinforced my fascination with the brain and how it works.”

After Rhodes earned her Bachelor of Science in animal physiology and neuroscience, she went on to earn a Ph.D. in neurobiology at Boston University.

During her time as a graduate student, Rhodes found that she had a love for teaching as well.

“When you’re researching, it can take months for you to see results from your study. But with teaching, you can see results much more rapidly,” she said. “Plus I love talking about science, and that’s what teaching is.”

Rhodes found that Denison provided an environment that allowed her to balance teaching and research and has been there for the last eight years.

During her time at the university, Rhodes has provided educational outreach through programs at The Works in Newark and taking her students to local schools to help learn more about science and promote diversity.

“We work on being more inclusive to help promote science to boys and girls. We’ve found that active learning brings everybody on board to learn and helps empower everyone,” she said.

During her graduate work, Rhodes said the student group was split evenly between men and women, but there were hardly any female faculty members. That’s helped shape her teaching methods, from group work to examples depicting things everyone can relate to instead of narrow references.

Rhodes tried a new class about multi-cellular life this past spring, and she had fun learning the specifics and then teaching her students.

Teaching has also provided her with opportunities to share her knowledge. Starting in 2017, Rhodes will serve as the associate director of the Grass Lab at the Marine Biological Laboratories at Woods Hole, Massachusetts.

“I’ll be helping maybe 10 summer fellows, either post-doctorate or graduate students, as they work on their research in the lab,” she said.

When she isn’t teaching, Rhodes has been researching different behaviors of frogs while they mate, specifically male frogs grabbing other male frogs like they’re females.

Starting with three hypotheses, she said they’ve disproved the frogs aren’t doing it to assert dominance and that they can’t tell the difference. Rhodes’ next step will be to see if it’s a tactic for a male to cut in during the reproductive cycle.

“Since we’ve disproven the first two, we’ll just have to show that the third reason is why they act like this,” she said. “We’ll have to show that this method works, check how often they do this and measure the benefit for the second male.”

While it may seem crazy to check out a frog’s mating habits, Rhodes’ research can provide a broader understanding to the world around us.

“Evolution rarely does just one thing once,” she said. “These frogs have the same hormones we have, so the same mechanisms may apply.”

The research will help test whether hormones introduced into the environment through man-made chemicals have caused disruptions in the ecosystem.

“If it’s affecting frogs, we’re trying to see what it could do to us,” Rhodes said.