Dr. Elwira Sliwinska, BRAVO! foreign faculty mentor from Bydgoszcz, Poland will visit UA from January 19 – February 1, 2006. Her visit is timed to coincide with the 17th Annual UBRP Conference, and she is particularly eager to interact with students interested in coming to Poland to work with her through BRAVO!

Dr. Sliwinska is the head of the Laboratory of Molecular Biology and Cytometry in the Department of Genetics and Plant Breeding at the University of Technology and Agriculture in Bydgoszcz where she uses biotechnology and molecular biology techniques to do cell biology, plant breeding, and seed science. She is an expert in flow cytometry, a technique used to detect particular components of complex biomolecular assemblies, including live cells, with exquisite sensitivity and selectivity.

This will be Dr. Sliwinska’s third trip to Tucson. She worked for a year with Dr. David Galbraith in the Department of Plant Sciences and for a second year in the Department of Physiology with Dr. Heddwen Brooks.

While in Tucson Dr. Sliwinska will initiate a new project with Dr. Galbraith to determine nuclear DNA contents within tropical rain forest species. Very little is known about the nuclear DNA contents even of the major tree species growing in the rain forest and they may contain chemicals working as florochrome inhibitors. Sliwinska’s work will include developing the best procedure (plant organs, buffer composition, nuclei isolation method) for flow cytometric sample preparation and the right internal standard for DNA content analysis. The next step, which could be done either in Tucson or in Bydgoszcz, will be to perform flow cytometric analyses of genome size for the selected species. She also plans to work with Dr. Brooks to prepare a manuscript on the work they did together.

Dr. Sliwinska hosted UBRP/BRAVO! alum, Hardeep Phull ’03, in Poland for a semester and Dr. Iwona Jedrzejczyk, one of Sliwinska’s students, spent six months in the Galbraith lab. In her spare time Dr. Sliwinska enjoys hiking and cooking. For more information about Dr. Sliwinska and her lab see: http://wr.atr.bydgoszcz.pl/genetyka/Elwira/english.html
UBRP students interested in meeting with Dr. Sliwinska, and in taking her for lunch or dinner during her stay (paid for by UBRP), are encouraged to contact the UBRP Office (621-9348).