Three new faculty members are bringing their expertise in microbiology and neuroscience to the West Virginia University Department of Biology.

Professors Jim Belanger, Rita Rio and Michelle Withers were recently welcomed into the department in the Eberly College of Arts and Sciences.

Belangers research interests include neuroethology, neurobiology, adaptive behavior and comparative physiology, although he primarily considers himself a neuroethologist. The WVU professor recently received a grant from the National Science Foundation for an ongoing project calledComparative Aspects of Goal-oriented Locomotion in Decapod Crustaceans.

An associate professor, Belanger earned his bachelors, masters and doctoral degrees in zoology from the University of Toronto. He was a research associate at the Arizona Research Labs Division of Neurobiology at the University of Arizona and the Biology Department at Tufts University. He also served as an assistant professor of biological sciences at Louisiana State University from 2000-07.

Rios research interests involve various aspects of microbiology such as host-microbe co-evolutionary dynamics and comparative genomics. She was recently invited to participate in a training course and workshop on annotation and bioinformatics analysis Glossina (tsetse fly) cDNAs sponsored by the World Health Organization in Cape Town, South Africa.

An assistant professor, Rio earned a bachelors degree with honors from the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Connecticut in 1995, a masters from Pennsylvania State University in 1998 and a masters and doctorate from Yale University. Rio was a research associate at the Department of Pediatric Cardiology at Penn State and a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology at the University of Connecticut.

Withers is a National Academies of Science Education fellow and mentor. She has been hired as a biology educator and assistant professor by the Eberly College and will help to develop curricula and research methods in the biology department.

Withers began her undergraduate studies at Marshall University. She transferred to the School of Public Health at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she received a degree in nutrition. In 1995, she earned a doctorate in neuroscience from the University of Arizona at Tucson, where she studied the development of embryonic spinal cord neurons.

Withers served as a postdoctoral researcher at Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass., and studied the production of simple behaviors by small neural networks. She taught in the Introductory Biology Program at Louisiana State University from 2000-07 and has been involved with the National Academies Summer Institute on Biology Education since 2004.