Biology of Microorganisms

Michael T. Madigan received a bachelor's degree in biology and education from Wisconsin State University at Stevens Point in 1971 and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in 1974 and 1976, respectively, from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, Department of Bacteriology. His graduate work involved study of the biology of hot, spring photosynthetic bacteria under the direction of Thomas D. Brock. Following three years of postdoctoral training in the Department of Microbiology, Indiana University, where he worked on photosynthetic bacteria with Howard Gest, he moved to Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, where he is now Professor of Microbiology. He has beer a coauthor of Biology of Microorganisms since the fourth edition (1984) and teaches courses in introductory microbiology and bacterial diversity. In 1988 he was selected as the outstanding teacher in the College of Science, and in 1993 its outstanding researcher. His research has dealt almost exclusively with anoxygenic phototrophic bacteria, especially those species that inhabit extreme environments. He has published nearly 85 research papers, has coedited a major treatise on photosynthetic bacteria, and is Chief Editor for North America of the journal Archives of Microbiology. His nonscientific interests include reading, hiking, tree planting, and caring for his dogs, and horses. He lives aside a quiet lake about five miles from the SIU campus with his wife, Nancy, two dogs, Willie and Plum, and King and Feenkönig (horses).

John M. Martinko attended The Cleveland State University and majored in biology with a chemistry minor. As an undergraduate student he participated in a cooperative education program, gaining research experience in several microbiology and immunology laboratories. He then worked for two years at Case Western Reserve University as a laboratory manager, continuing his cooperative education research on the structure, serology, and epidemiology of Streptococcus pyogenes. He next went to the State University of New York at Buffalo where he did research on antibody specificity and idiotypes for his M.A. and Ph.D. (1978) in Microbiology. As a postdoctoral fellow, he worked at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York on the structure of major his to compatibility complex proteins. Since 1981, he has been in the Department of Microbiology at Southem Illinois University at Carbondale where he is currently the Chair and Associate Professor. His research interests include the effects of growth hormone on the immune response and the immunological identification of soybean brown stem rot disease. His teaching interests in include undergraduate and graduate courses in imintmology and a team-taught general microbiology course, where he is responsible for immunology, host defense, and infectious diseases. He lives with his wife Judy, a junior high school science teacher, and their daughters, Martha and Helen, in Carbondale where he has been active in coaching his daughters' soccer and softball teams. He tries to find time to play soccer and golf.

Jack Parker received his bachelor's degree in biology and also received his doctoral degree in a biology program (Ph.D., Purdue University, 1973). However, his research project dealt with bacterial physiology and he completed his Ph.D. research while in the microbiology department at the University of Michigan. Following this he spent four years studying bacterial genetics at York University in Toronto, Ontario. He has taught courses in bacterial genetics, general genetics, human genetics, molecular biology, and molecular genetics, and has participated in courses in introductory microbiology, medical microbiology, and virology primarily at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, where he is nom a Professor in the Department of Microbiology and Dean of the College of Science. His re search has been in the broad area of molecular genetics and gene expression and has beer focused most specifically on studies of how cells control the accuracy of protein, synthesis. He is the author of approximately 50 research papers. His home is on the edge of the Shawnee National Forest in deep southern Illinois where he lives with his wife, Beth, and three children, Justine, D'Arcy, and Grant.