Ted Battley's interests are in Microbial Ecology, specifically in studying the thermodynamics of microbial growth. At present his work has involved the construction of growth-process equations representing microbial growth; the relationship of the efficiency of microbial growth to the electron content of the cells; the determination of cellular enthalpy and entropy; the calculation of the free energy, enthalpy, entropy, and absorbed heat of formation of microbial cells; and the calculation of the free energy, enthalpy, entropy, and absorbed heat exchanges accompanying microbial growth. These studies have been made using Saccharomyces cerevisiae, Escherichia coli, and Pseudomonas saccharophila as experimental subjects. As a part of these studies he is investigating the use of the equation ΔX = ΔH – ΔQ as a better representation than the Gibbs free energy equation, ΔG = ΔH – TΔS, of the energy exchanges accompanying microbial growth, where ΔQ represents the absorbed thermal energy change at the temperature of the microbial growth process, and ΔX represents the free energy change using ΔQ. He is presently investigating whether the free-energy of solution of the solutes comprising the basic materials for cellular synthesis, as represented by a growth-process equation, becomes a part of the free-energy of formation of the cells that are grown. He has also studied the use of anabolic growth-process equations in calculating the accompanying energy exchanges during the anaerobic "origin of life" environmental conditions. This last project is predicated on the supposition that the elemental composition of progenotes as self-reproducing, organic catalysts is not markedly different from that of present day microbial cells.
In 1994 he received the first Dubrunfaut Award of the International Society for Biological Calorimetry, for his work on the indirect calorimetry of microbial growth, and in 2010 the Lavosier Medal of the same Society, for career achievement.

"Biodiversity" includes the diversity of taxa and their traits. How did this diversity come about? What is its history: what happened, when? What are the factors responsible for this diversification?
Geeta is interested in understanding the historical paths of biodiversification and in using this history to understand underlying processes. A goal of this research is to integrate understanding of multiple processes (developmental, morphogenetic, physiological) at multiple levels (molecular, cellular, organismal) to obtain a comprehensive understanding of evolving biological systems (plants). This work involves the marriage of multiple disciplines, e.g., traditional botany and modern molecular genetics and phylogenetics (reconstruction of evolutionary relationships among taxa and using the phylogenetic framework to analyse data from many species).

Geeta has studied developmental and evolutionary patterns of variation in characters at different levels of organization: morphological (leaf development), cellular (reproductive development), genomic (nuclear DNA amount), and molecular (Knox, a homeobox multigene family). Current research in the lab. includes evolutionary studies of Dioscorea, the true yams, and of compound leaf and reproductive development in angiosperms.

George Hechtel studies the sponges of the North Carolina continental shelf. He is working on the taxonomy of a collection of Demospongiae from the outer continental shelf off Onslow Bay, North Carolina. Previous studies on the area have concentrated on inshore waters. The region is a transitional one in a zoogeographic sense. Cerame, Vivas and Gray (1966) suggested that the Carolina shelf had cold water, inshore mixed, and offshore tropical regions. Hechtel's preliminary studies on sponges reveal a Caribbean fauna on the outer shelf.

Robert R. Sokal is a S.U.N.Y. Distinguished Professor Emeritus and is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has long been active in promoting the use of statistics in biology and co-founded the field of numerical taxonomy. Together with P.H.A. Sneath, he authored the two defining texts in this field. Along with colleague F. James Rohlf, he is the author of the very popular biostatistics book, Biometry, now in its third edition. He has been the editor of the American Naturalist and the president of several learned societies.
Currently he is involved in the following areas of research:

Analysis of population structure based on human blood groups and polymorphisms, especially in Europe.
Ethnohistory of Europe as related to gene frequency patterns. Visit our Ethnohistory WWW page for related information.
The relation between language and genetic variation.
Genetic evidence for the origin of Indo-Europeans.
Several projects on spatial analysis in population biology.

George Williams has long been recognized as a leading theoritician in natural selection, life history evolution, and the evolution of behavior. He worked for many years on the evolutionary biology of fishes, and is a noted contributor to the literature on the evolution of sex. He is the author of the classic book Adaptation and Natural Selection and authored other important books, including Sex and Evolution (1975), Natural Selection: Domains, Levels, and Challenges (1992), and Why We Get Sick: the New Science of Darwinian Medicine (1996 with R. M. Nesse).
Williams is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and is a Guggenheim Fellow. He was the editor of the American Naturalist and the Quarterly Review of Biology and was the president of the Society for the Study of Evolution in 1989. Williams was recognized by the Ecological Society of America as its Eminent Ecologist in1989. He was awarded the Elliot Medal by the National Science Foundation in 1992, and shared the prestegious Crafoord Prize with Ernst Mayr and John Maynard Smith in 1999.