Hi, I’m Dr. Wendy Hood. I’m a biology professor at Auburn University.  At Auburn, I teach biology class titled Comparative Anatomy, but an equally important part of my job is doing biological research.

 

I love my job for many reasons.  Doing research allows me to contribute to our understanding of the world that we live in.  I enjoy having the opportunity to include college students in my work. Those students include undergraduate college students, including young men and women who are only a few years older than you who have recently entered college.  I also have several students in my lab that finished their bachelors' degree and have gone on to graduate school, where they are working toward careers in biology, much like my own.  I love introducing students to the ideas and animals I am fascinated with, working with the students to collect data, and helping these students establish careers of their own.  I also get to work with other professors who are just as passionate and as inspired by the natural world as I am.

 

I’m fascinated by the biological factors that contribute to differences in performance of individuals.  Take a moment to look around your classroom. Everyone in the room is different.  Not only does everyone look different, but everyone has different things they are really good at, and admittedly, all of us can also name a few things we aren’t so good at.  In nearly every species on earth, we find differences in performance between individuals.  Research in my lab focuses on the role that physiology plays in determining the differences between individuals in how many offspring they produce and how long they live. Individual differences in reproduction and lifespan are important because they determine how many offspring each contributes to the next generation.

 

At some point in your life, you probably heard an adult imply that raising kids can be exhausting.  It turns out that having children does require a lot of energy and producing child can be hard on the body.  Reproduction appears to have both positive and negative impacts on the body that trickle all they way down to the mitochondria, the intracellular organelles that you will be learning about in class.

 

In my lab, we are currently studying how reproduction influences how mitochondria work. The change in mitochondria that occurs during reproduction may play an important role in determining how long we live.  We are trying to figure out how reproduction influences aging.

 

Dr. Wendy Hood.

March 1, 2020