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Biology Picnic Recap

Thanks to everyone who came to the Biology Picnic on October 17th 2012. We estimated an attendance of over 150 faculty, staff, and students! Thank you also to The Pig who catered the event.

The picnic was full of fun activities – including corn hole, faculty fact match, as well as a guess-the-number-of-scientific-materials game. The winners for the guessing games received $10 gift cards to the UNC Bookstore:

  • Crickets: 133 – Colleen Bilancia guessed 133 (but kudos to Stacy Alvares for guessing 132)
  • Drosophila: 238 – Jeremy Greeter guessed 240
  • Pipet tips: 328 – Colleen Bilancia guessed 329
  • Pitfall traps: 325 – Kelsey Harvey guessed 330

Curious as to which fact matched which faculty member in the Faculty Fact Match?

Here are the  results from the faculty fact match! Thanks to everyone who submitted a fun fact.

Allen Hurlbert worked as a carny in Alaska.
Haven Wiley if given a choice among all birds, would choose to be a Turkey Vulture because they have a peaceful life floating about in the air all day.
  enjoys square dancing in his/her free time.
Pat Gensel once took a rifle to the bathroom to deter polar bears on Bathurst Island.
Christina Burch received All-ACC honors in 1995 for swimming at U. of Maryland.
  kept a black widow spider and her egg sack as a pet.
John Bruno is a talented kite-surfer.
  has five animals for pets: a cat, a gecko, dogs, ponies, and gerbils.
Bob Goldstein built a chicken coop in his/her backyard.
Joel Kingsolver lived in a teepee for a semester at Duke.
Bill Kier likes to wind-surf and recently biked 100 miles.
Maria Servedio is a descendent of a pope.
Ty Hedrick once had to dress up as a cowboy for work.
Bob Duronio likes to sing along to their favorite band “Queen”.
Steve Rogers is Captain America.
Lauren Buckley knows all the words to Soca Santa, a Caribbean Christmas tune
  runs ultamarathons.
Peter White is a Mad Men watcher and Bob Dylan listener.
  was clubbed by the police during the Columbia riots in 1968.
Bob Peet has two cats named Piper and Gleason who have a gmail account.
  is dropping everything to visit “The Wave” this Christmas.
Alan Weakley lived at the Goathouse cat refuge, which provides shelter for thousands of free-roaming cats.
  received a PhD 25 years after they initially started graduate school.
Sabrina Burmeister had a biology professor as an ancestor who had a porpoise named after him.
Mark Peifer eats whole carrots for lunch nearly every day.
Alain Laederach speaks fluent French and Swedish.
  skillfully flies large model airplanes.
Todd Vision plays jazz piano.
Charles Mitchell has retired from fishing.
  wears a white headband when running at night.
Jeff Dangl has named scientific reviews after Grateful Dead songs.
Keith Sockman can be seen on Wednesday nights and Saturday mornings racing around at 30mph in wool cycling apparel.
  was a Colorado ski bum.
Chris Willett plays basketball, tennis, and hockey.
David Pfennig collects fossils.
Kerry Bloom was the president of Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity in college.
Elaine Yeh did an industry post-doc at Ciba-Geigy, now known as Novartis.
Joe Kieber once held an aerophobic airplane passenger’s hand during an entire 3 hour flight on the way back from a conference.
Frank Conlon has been known to misspell his/her own name at the bottom of emails
James Umbanhower competes in an annual decathalon with his/her former college track team.
Corbin Jones has two dogs named after Chinese take-out: moo shu and chow fun

A huge thank you to Brian Nalley who took some great photographs of the event: