Homepage of Valerie C. Clark

Valerie C. Clark, PhD student
Department of Chemistry
Columbia University
344 Havemeyer Hall Box 3161
New York, NY 10027

Lab Phone: 212-854-5356
Email: vcc2003@columbia.edu
   
Currently Hot!!! New frog family!

Brief History and Research Interests:

I was born and raised in Maryland suburbia (jpeg), then moved to Gainesville to attend the University of Florida, where I completed my B.S. degrees in Zoology and Biochemistry in 2002. My senior thesis concerned argulid parasites of the enormous schooling Rana heckscheri (River frog) tadpoles in Northern Florida. Immediately upon graduation, I moved back to Maryland for a summer internship in the Laboratory of Bioorganic Chemistry, NIDDK, NIH, where I benefited greatly from the guidance of Dr. John W. Daly. I worked with him on his frog-alkaloid projects, and most notably we found the first instance of a Dendrobatid poison frog that modifies its sequestered alkaloids (Daly et al. 2003).
In fall of 2003 I moved to Manhattan to begin my Master’s degree in Conservation Biology in the newly formed outgrowth of CERC (Center for Environmental Research and Conservation), the Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Environmental Biology (aka E3B) of Columbia University. I spent the fall taking classes and organizing my expedition to Madagascar, which was funded by Herpetology Curator Dr. Christopher Raxworthy of the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH). I spent the spring (February-May) in Madagascar (in Ranomafana and south to Tolongoina), where I collected frog (Mantella and Mantidactylus spp.; subfamily Mantellinae) specimens and a great variety of invertebrates. Although I had many research objectives, the main goal of my research was to determine the invertebrate source of frog skin alkaloids by injecting my Malagasy samples onto a Micromass™ GC-TOF-MS (Gas Chromatography-Time of Flight-Mass Spectrometer) at what was Columbia’s Biosphere 2 Center. I have many fascinating finds that I shall soon write up.
Currently, I am a first year PhD student in the Department of Chemistry at Columbia. The career shift from ecology to chemistry happened somewhat unintentionally. The knowledge and skills that I will gain as a student in this Department will be instrumental to my success in continuing with and expanding upon the frog-alkaloid projects. For my PhD thesis, my main project will likely focus on interactions of small molecules (e.g. ginkgolides) with their biopolymeric receptors. Generally, I just think natural products and their potential as drugs or drug leads is really interesting.
For more about my academic interests and history, please see my Curriculum Vitae (VCCCV). Also check out the summary of my Madagascar expedition below.

Publications and Press:
Daly, J. W., H. M. Garraffo, T. F. Spande, V. C. Clark, J. Ma, H. Ziffer and J. F. Cover Jr. (2003). "Evidence for an enantioselective pumiliotoxin 7-hydroxylase in dendrobatid poison frogs of the genus Dendrobates." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA 100: 11092-11097. (PDF)
The above paper generated the following five press articles:
Science News: Science News, Vol. 164, No. 10, Sept. 6, 2003, p. 148. PDF (OR Unformatted within my pages)
C&E News: September 8, 2003; Volume 81, Number 36, page 15 (PDF) (Word file)
New York Times Science Times: September 2, 2003
From "The Scientist": http://www.biomedcentral.com/news/20030902/02
En francais: http://www.infoscience.fr/articles/articles_aff.php3?Ref=799

Clark, V. C. (2001). "Rana heckscheri-Ectoparasites." Herpetological Review 32(1): 36. (PDF)
Clark, V. C. (1998). Frog Skin Secretions. Reptile Hobbyist. 3: 78-82. (PDF)

Acknowledged within:
Daly, J. W., T. Kaneko, J. Wilham, H. M. Garraffo, T. F. Spande, A. Espinosa and M. A. Donnelly (2002). "Bioactive alkaloids of frog skin: Combinatorial bioprospecting reveals that pumiliotoxins have an arthropod source." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA 99(22): 13996-14001. (PDF)

Mantella Mission (Madagascar expedition):
Coming soon I will give a summary of my research in Madagascar, and subsequent analyses by me at Biosphere and my colleague Valerie Prisca Rakatomalala at CAS in Antananarivo, Madagascar. Please also see the photos in the gallery. To succinctly summarize, over the course of three months, we collected Mantella frogs and various potential dietary arthropods in the Ranomafana region of southeastern Madagascar in order to determine the dietary alkaloid source of some of the alkaloids present in the skin of Mantella. Extracts prepared from the frog skins and arthropods were run on a GC-MS and compared to Daly's library (Daly et al. 1999) to identify alkaloids.

Personal Preferences:
In addition to my apparent obsession with frogs and nitrogenous compounds, I am also an avid diver. I started diving in fall 1997 and have dived over 170 times in Florida, Belize (max depth 140 ft), and Madagascar. When I am exploring terrestrially, I likely have a camera in hand; I use Nikon Coolpix 995 and Nikon N90s (with Fuji Velvia). I also did a bit of B&W photography as an undergrad.
Here are some of my favorites: Animal=frogs, all 4837 species; color= blue and green; food= crustaceans, sushi, mushrooms, dark chocolate, and vanilla beans—the more originally prepared the better; Music= Rock (esp. classic), reggae, classical, punk, others like D. Byrne, Café Tacuba, and in general groovy tunes; TV=nature and cooking programs; Movies= Star Wars and Lord of the Rings, but in general I prefer comedies, and don't watch many movies or much TV; prefer cats over dogs; love long hair; Cooking is fun; I have been keeping exotic geckos and frogs for 15 years; I love happy fuzzy people with open minds and hearts.
Dislikes: Licorice, bills, negativity.

Photo Phreak (Great Gallery) Copyright Valerie C. Clark:
Note: All photographs are in low resolution so they load fast and so that you can't do much with them. I have super high resolution photographs available for purchase. Make an offer. If you put my low resolution photos on your site, provide a link on your site to my site and tell me about it.

Wild Wonderful Madagascar

Other Animals
Landscapes
Architecture

More Original Photographs

Florida
Arizona
VCC (that's me!!)
Other
Published photo (slide)


Preferred Publications (Literature List):
Click on the link above to go to a page of some frog/chemistry references from my endnote files. More soon.

Daly, J. W., H. M. Garraffo, P. Jain, T. F. Spande, R. R. Snelling, C. Jaramillo and A. S. Rand (2000). "Arthropod-frog connection: decahyrdroquinoline and pyrrolizidine alkaloids common to microsympatric myrmicine ants and dendrobatid frogs." Journal of Chemical Ecology 26(1): 73-85. PDF

Click here for Prof. Jerrold Meinwald's 1953-2003 publication list: PDF He has written a lot of really interesting papers dealing with chemical ecology, primarly that of insects.
Click here to link to natural products guru Prof. Koji Nakanishi's publication list, on his website.
Professors Koji Nakanishi and Jerrold Meinwald in July 2003 photo

Mentors:
The following people have served as advisors and I consider them my mentors. We are a product of those around us. There are other intellectuals whom I consider influential who are not mentioned here because they have not yet served on an offical committee...
Dr. John W. Daly (NIDDK, NIH), Dr. Christopher J. Raxworthy (Herpetology, AMNH), Prof. Koji Nakanishi (Columbia Chemistry), Prof. Max Nickerson (UF/FLMNH), Prof . Steven A. Benner (UF Chemistry)

Links You’ll Love:
Also check out the links embedded in the above text. Some are not repeated here.

Google

Academic Links:

Nakanishi Group (Col. Chem)
Ecology (E3B, Columbia)
Miguel Vences (U. of Amsterdam)
    

Reading:

Nature:

Dr. John W. Daly related links:

Email:

Other:

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