UST Biology Professor Don Frohlich is one of those educators. He strives to make the most current scientific research results available to his students since he arrived at UST in 1994.

After cutting-edge discoveries in decoding genomes in recent years, Frohlich turned his efforts to establishing  a laboratory for research genomes, which make up organisms, including chromosomes, genes and DNA. In 2004, St. Thomas and Frohlich, grateful “for such a forward-looking university,” opened the bioinformatics lab. 

Bioinformatics is a fast growing, and newly emerged field in the life sciences which combines advanced skills from biology, management information science and mathematics to allow graduates to perform research in various genome sequence projects. UST was among the first universities nationwide to offer bioinformatics as a major at the undergraduate level.

After the genetic breakthroughs “that caused such a huge leap of excitement in the scientific community,” Frohlich said, many more scientists are needed to analyze and record the newly available data. Because of his efforts, UST was selected this year as one of 12 undergraduate universities in the country to participate in the prestigious Genome Education Project, offering UST undergraduates the rare opportunity to get in on the ground floor of this research.

“It’s a great time to go into this field, especially if you’re very young,” he said. “There’s a great need for catching up in recording the information that has become available. The human genome is 3.5 billion nucleotides (DNA components) long, and we know what only 5 percent of them do.” 

Some students who graduated from his bioinformatics classes now work at the genome sequencing center at Baylor College of Medicine. But Frohlich keeps up with most of his undergraduate research students over the years, listing 29 of them and their professional whereabouts on his resume as part of his own success story.

The seasoned professor is known for his enthusiasm, and he easily transfers his intensity in the classroom to another project in education – Paper Houses Across the Border, Inc. – a nonprofit organization that helps children in colonias along the Mexican border.

“We’re mainly concerned with the schools,” he said. “When teachers told us that some of their students were passing out in class from hunger, we built cafeterias at three schools to serve nutritious meals. We hope to build more.”

Each of those cafeterias took shape brick by brick, just as research at the bioinformatics lab could help shape genome sequencing one building block at a time.

That’s OK – Frohlich is accustomed to the small increments. They’re all part of his daily push for excellence, whether in a lab at UST or in the poorest districts of Mexico.

To contact Dr. Frohlich e-mail him at frohlich@stthom.edu. 

To learn more about Bioinformatics go to http://www.stthom.edu/bioinformatics

To learn more about the Biology Department go to http://www.stthom.edu/biology