NSU Horizons Fall 2007

horizons 5 F lorida needs nurses. In fact, the Sunshine State will need an additional 41,584 registered nurses by 2011, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. That’s why NSU and Baptist Health South Florida joined forces in May to provide 80 full scholarships to entry-level nursing students. The free tuition is offered to students who pursue a bachelor of science in nursing degree at NSU’s nursing program at South Miami Hospital. “This strong partnership will provide a steady pipeline of nurses for South Florida, especially Miami-Dade County,” said Diane Whitehead, R.N., M.S.N., Ed.D, NSU’s associate dean of nursing. The scholarships will be awarded to students who have at least 30 college credits and are accepted into NSU’s nursing program. They will be given to new nursing students each year. Scholarship recipients will be able to complete their degrees in 27 months. After graduation, they will have guaranteed jobs for the next three years at one of Baptist Health South Florida’s hospitals. n Virgin Shark Birth Phenomenon: NSU Scientists Discover Hammerhead Can Reproduce Without Sex T he Guy Harvey Research Institute (GHRI) at NSU’s Oceanographic Center made worldwide headlines when it released its findings of a virgin shark birth. The institute’s sci- entists—led by Mahmood Shivji, Ph.D., GHRI director, and Demian Chapman, then a GHRI graduatestudent—teamed up with colleagues from the Queen’s University Belfast, UK, and the Henry Doorly Zoo in Nebraska to investigate the unexpected birth of a baby hammerhead shark in the zoo’s aquarium in 2001. This birth was puzzling because none of the three candidate mothers in the tank had been exposed to male hammerheads since their capture more than three years earlier. By developing and using DNA profiling techniques, the researchers were able to examine the genetic makeup of the sharks and identify the actual mother. The extraordinary discovery, however, was that the baby shark’s DNA only matched up with the mother’s—meaning there was no DNA of paternal origin in the baby shark. This unusual form of reproduction, known as “parthenogenesis” (Greek for “virgin birth”), is only seen infrequently in some vertebrate groups such as birds, reptiles, and amphibians. However, it had never before been observed in sharks and raises concerns about producing reduced genetic diversity in shark populations if parthenogenesis becomes more prevalent in the wild due to shark overfishing. The research team’s paper was published in the British Royal Society’s scientific journal, Biology Letters , in May 2007 and was covered in more than 400 media venues worldwide, including The New York Times , National Geographic , Time magazine, NPR, and the BBC. n Photo credit: Demian Chapman, graduate student, GHRI Photo credit: Henry Doorly Zoo Baptist Health South Florida Offers NSU 80 Nursing Scholarships