You can host a party. You can host a TV show.

But in Associate Professor of Biology Lee Abrahamsen’s profession, a “host” is more likely to harbor a parasite. 

Rachel Blaustein ’18 of Needham, Mass., stands with Associate Professor of Biology Lee Abrahamsen during a biology lab in 2016.

Many people think of a biological host in terms of disease — a person plays host to the flu virus. But a bacterium can host a piece of “donor” DNA.

A host, Abrahamsen says, “is really anything that harbors something else in a way that allows the ‘something else’ to survive.”

Abrahamsen’s priority used to be virology; she used embryonic lung cells as hosts to grow the human herpes virus. About a decade ago, in order to bring more senior thesis students into her work, she shifted to bacteriology, studying antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

“The host becomes the thing that’s infected,” she said. “So the host can be a single cell, or it can be a whole organism. We’ve looked at different strains of antibiotic-resistant staph in people, in students, in dogs, and in horses. All of those are hosts.

“It’s not so much about the specific species involved, but more about the relationship between one organism and another. It really does swap meaning depending on what you’re talking about.”

A tiara-wearing taxidermy pig stands on a shelf in the Carnegie Science Hall office of Associate Professor of Biology Lee Abrahamsen.

“I like her smile,” says Abrahamsen. “I’ve always liked her smile. And her snout.”

It’s not exactly a Wilbur-type pig but a javelina, a New World species common in South America and the U.S. Southwest. Biology students from those areas often recognize the creature when they enter Abrahamsen’s office. “They’ve hunted javelinas,” she says. “Other students come in and say, ‘What is that?'”

The specimen in Abrahamsen’s office is a baby, she adds. Adult male javelinas can grow to 100 pounds.

A tiara-wearing stuffed javelina surveys the scene from a shelf in the Carnegie Science Hall office of Associate Professor of Biology Lee Abrahamsen. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Abrahamsen has enjoyed the pig, smile and all, since 1989 when she and Pamela Baker ’69, now retired as the Helen A. Papaioanou Professor Emerita of Biological Sciences, began to share a faculty position and an office in Carnegie.

“We found it in a trash pile,” she remembers. At the time, many items in the college’s collection of pressed plants and stuffed animals, known as the Stanton Museum, were being sent to the Maine State Museum.

Baker, who had worked in the Stanton as a student, immediately recognized the pig, as well as a stuffed porcupine and squirrel. They chose to save the pig. Some pig!

“Everybody should have a tiara.”

This­ pig shall remain nameless. “We just always called her ‘the pig.’ We thought about it over the years and just couldn’t come up with a good one, which is odd. I name everything,” Abrahamsen says.

But that doesn’t mean she and Baker didn’t shower their “girl” with attention. Over the years, they dressed her in feather boas, pieces of glitter, and once, fairy wings. Most recently, she has sported a tiara. “At one point, Pam and I decided that everybody should have a tiara,” says Abrahamsen.

Lee Abrahamsen poses with “the pig.” (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

When Abrahamsen asked Baker for a pig comment, she sent a sentiment that speaks for both biologists.

“I always liked it as a reminder that all the cells and molecules that we taught about really did add up to be organisms of amazing kinds.”

Because of her own experiences in college, Abrahamsen keenly understands that as students change and grow, they need help adjusting their career plans. “We know there’s development that goes on, but sometimes it’s not thought about in terms of where a student begins — what they’re capable of thinking and understanding in their freshman year — versus their senior year.”

Learn more about Abrahamsen and medical studies at �ֲ���ý by watching a short video.

Eighty-nine percent of �ֲ���ý College students who worked with the college’s Medical Studies Committee in applying to health care-related graduate programs for fall 2007 matriculation were accepted.

According to a report issued this week by the committee, 32 of 36 �ֲ���ý applicants to medical (allopathic) or osteopathic schools, or 89 percent, were accepted. Nationally, about 45 percent of applicants to allopathic schools were accepted.

A national acceptance rate for osteopathic schools wasn’t available. However, in the 2007-08 academic year, 4,243 of 11,459 osteopathic school applicants, or 37 percent, were enrolled (as opposed to accepted; not all accepted applicants will enroll).

Fifteen out of 17 �ֲ���ý applicants to other health-related programs, such as dental, nursing, nurse practitioner or veterinary medicine, were accepted, or 88 percent.

All told, 47 out of 53 �ֲ���ý applicants who worked with the committee were accepted into graduate programs in the health professions.

�ֲ���ý students are typically accepted into graduate programs in the health professions at a rate higher than the national average. This speaks to both the quality of �ֲ���ý students and the way �ֲ���ý prepares students for life after graduation.

During the 2006-07 academic year, the �ֲ���ý Medical Studies Committee had more than 300 counseling appointments lasting at least 30 minutes with students and alumni interested in health careers. The college’s medical studies program helps students satisfy medical school requirements by, for instance, guiding students with their course selections and helping set up job-shadowing or internship opportunities.

Nearly 91 percent of �ֲ���ý students who worked with the committee and applied to allopathic schools were accepted for fall 2007. Sixty-three percent of all �ֲ���ý students who applied to allopathic programs were accepted, whether or not they worked with the committee.

Nationally, in 2007, 18,858 of 42,315 applicants (44.6 percent) to allopathic medical schools were accepted, according to information from the American Association of Medical Colleges.

Lee Abrahamsen, chair of the Medical Studies Committee and an associate professor of biology, notes that students at �ֲ���ý and elsewhere show an increasing interest in graduate programs in public health. “That reflects the growing perception of health as a global issue that has to be understood from many perspectives,” she says.

In response, �ֲ���ý has developed a four-course public health concentration as part of its new general education curriculum.

“Emerging infections, pollution, antibiotic resistance, who can or should be immunized — even laws that require car seats for children — are all public health issues,” notes. “So public health is multidisciplinary, and including it in the curriculum allows our students to use what they learn from courses, travel, community engagement and other experiences to approach important issues that affect everybody.”

During the last two years, �ֲ���ý applicants to allopathic and osteopathic programs have been 15 percent neuroscience majors, 24 percent biology majors, 29 percent biochemistry majors, 10 percent psychology and 22 percent other majors including art, philosophy, chemistry, English and religion.

Several years ago, students in Lee Abrahamsen’s 300-level virology course undertook a project for a hepatitis-C support group at a local hospital.

Members of the group craved information about everyday impacts the disease would have — “things like, ‘Can I share my towels with my family without infecting them?’ ” Abrahamsen explains. “The students developed this nice little booklet for them. It was a really neat project.”

That’s the kind of community orientation that won Abrahamsen, associate professor of biology, a prestigious award from the Maine Campus Compact. In April 2007, Abrahamsen was one of three Maine college educators to receive the consortium’s Donald Harward Faculty Award for Service-Learning Excellence (named for �ֲ���ý President Emeritus Harward).

Abrahamsen’s activities in this realm, coupled with her keen interest in pedagogy in the sciences, go back at least a decade. Students in her 100-level course “Learning and Teaching Biology” developed and helped teach curricular units in nearby schools. In 2004, she collaborated with a high school biology teacher to revamp a biotechnology course in that teacher’s school. Last year, Abrahamsen’s bacteriology students worked with a local horse farm to find an effective antibiotic for an outbreak of hoof disease.

“My role is to be a facilitator and resource,” says Abrahamsen, who encourages upper-level students to propose a service-learning project in place of a non-final exam. “Students really own it. They really get into this far more than they would if I assigned a project and said, OK, here’s what you’re going to do.”

In the �ֲ���ý contingent were Rachel Austin, assistant professor of chemistry; three associate professors from the biology department, Pamela Baker, Lee Abrahamsen and Nancy Kleckner; and John Kelsey, professor of psychology. �ֲ���ý was one of 29 colleges and universities to send a team to the institute, which took place at Santa Clara University, Santa Clara, Calif.

The SENCER Summer Institute was designed to support a national reform effort broadening the relevance of undergraduate science education. “The overall idea was that learning can be improved by connecting the teaching of science to current global issues, particularly those which are complex and largely unsolved,” says Pamela Baker.

“Many of the issues we face as citizens have a science or technology dimension,” Baker continues. “While not everyone can be an expert on everything, learning to be a critical thinker and knowing how scientfic knowledge is produced can help people contribute to these debates and decisions.”

Participants in the SENCER institute proposed courses that teach rigorous science content through problems that require scientific knowledge and expertise.

SENCER is planned as a five-year national dissemination project that will promote reform through faculty development, a focus on local systemic change and improved assessment strategies. The project is supported with a grant from the National Science Foundation and has three goals: 1) to improve science education, especially for students who will never major in a scientific field; 2) to connect science education reform to more robust and relevant general education programs; and 3) to stimulate informed civic engagement with scientific questions on the part of today’s students.

Divorcing scientific facts from the social context and the research methodology of the era in which they were discovered “makes it very difficult for people to apply those facts in the real world,” says Baker. “Making an effort to tie science education to real-life issues not only motivates students to learn the facts, but helps them learn to apply the scientific thinking process to issues they encounter in the future.”

She added, “It was gratifying to see that �ֲ���ý is quite far ahead of many places in doing this kind of teaching.”

The Association of American Colleges and Universities is the leading national association devoted to advancing and strengthening liberal learning for all students, regardless of academic specialization or intended career. Founded in 1915, AAC&U has more than 700 accredited public and private colleges and universities of every type and size.