Molecular Biology

David P. Clark did his graduate work on bacterial antibiotic resistance to earn his Ph.D. from Bristol University, in the West of England. During this time, he visited the British Government's biological warfare facility at Porton Down and was privileged to walk inside the (disused) Black Death fermenter. He later crossed the Atlantic to work as a postdoctoral researcher at Yale University and then the University of Illinois. David Clark recently retired from teaching Molecular Biology and Bacterial Physiology at Southern Illinois University which he joined in 1981. His research into the Regulation of Alcohol Fermentation in E. coli was funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, from 1982 till 2007. From 1984-1991 he was also involved in a project to use genetically altered bacteria to remove contaminating sulfur from coal, jointly funded by the US Department of Energy and the Illinois Coal Development Board. In 1991 he received a Royal Society Guest Research Fellowship to work at Sheffield University, England while on sabbatical leave. He has supervised 11 master’s and 7 PhD students and published approximately 70 articles in scientific journals. He has written or co-authored several textbooks, starting with Molecular Biology Made Simple and Fun (with Lonnie Russell; (Cache River Press, First edition, 1997) which is now in its fourth edition. Other books are Molecular Biology and Biotechnology (both published by Elsevier) He recently wrote a popular science book, Germs, Genes, & Civilization: How Epidemics Shaped Who We Are Today (2010, Financial Times Press/Pearson). David is unmarried, but his life is supervised by two cats, Little George and Mr Ralph.

Nanette J. Pazdernik, Ph.D. is a co-author of Biotechnology, 2nd edition and Molecular Biology, 2nd edition, with Dr. David Clark. The second edition of Molecular Biology won a Texty award from the Textbook and Academic Authors Association in 2013. She has also authored an on-line study guide to accompany the update edition of Molecular Biology. She has taught courses in General Biology, Genetics, as well as Anatomy and Physiology at Southwestern Illinois College, McKendree University, and Harris-Stowe University. She received her BA in Biology from Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin, in 1990 and her PhD in Molecular, Cellular, Developmental Biology and Genetics from the University of Minnesota in 1996. Her doctoral thesis studied how alterations in the structure of lactose permease affect its ability to transport sugar across the membrane of E. coli. Following her degrees, she investigated the IL-1 and TNF signal transduction pathways that control apoptosis and immunity at Indiana University School of Medicine. She has most recently studied the various molecules that maintain the stem cell fate in C. elegans at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, MO. She is married and the mother of three children, ages 15, 12, and 8, which always make her realize the role biology plays in personality and development!