Fieldwork on the world's coldest continent

In January 1996, Randi Weinstein, B.A. '88, traveled to Antarctica, the world's coldest, highest, windiest and most isolated continent.

Weinstein was participating in the Antarctica Biology Training Course sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF). Her fieldwork there included hours of ice-fishing to collect specimens for a research project on the control of cellular respiration in Antarctic fish. On several occasions, course participants were flown by helicopter to the ice's edge, where they conducted field tests and viewed the wildlife, including Weddell seals, Adelie penguins and killer whales.

Weinstein, a graduate of the UB Honors Program who also holds a Ph.D. in integrative biology from the University of California at Berkeley, visited two historic huts of Robert Falcon Scott, the British explorer who in 1912 reached the South Pole with four companions; the party perished from exposure and hunger on their attempted return to the McMurdo Sound region.

Participants in the NSF course were selected from a pool of more than 200 applicants from throughout the world. The 15 finalists spent the month of January-which occurs during the southern hemisphere's summer-at McMurdo Station.

"Antarctica is no longer isolated from the rest of the world, as it was in the days of the early explorers," Weinstein says. "I was able to send daily E-mail to my parents in Williamsville, N.Y. and, through the Internet, followed news reports of the severe winter weather then hitting the northeastern United States."

Weinstein is currently a National Institutes of Health postdoctoral fellow in the University of Arizona biochemistry department, where her research focuses on muscle atrophy following nerve injury.