Biotechnology

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. Dr 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, including Molecular Biology and Biotechnology, both published by Elsevier.

Nanette J. Pazdernik has devoted her career to the understanding of molecular biology and biotechnology, and then disseminating that knowledge by writing and teaching. She is a co-author of Biotechnology, 2nd edition and Molecular Biology, 3rd edition, with Dr. David P. Clark and Dr. Michelle McGehee. Both the second and third edition of Molecular Biology won a Texty award from the Textbook and Academic Authors Association. 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, and her PhD in Molecular, Cellular, Developmental Biology and Genetics from the University of Minnesota. Her doctoral thesis studied protein structure-function relationships. Following her degrees, she investigated the signal transduction pathways that control apoptosis and immunity at Indiana University School of Medicine. In a second post-doctoral position, she studied the various molecules that maintain the stem cell niche in the Department of Genetics at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, MO. Currently, Dr. Pazdernik works in the biotech industry as a scientific writer.