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the 31 st Annual Biophysical Society Meeting and in 1991 received the Public Health Service Special Recognition Award.

The Mechanism of Intracellular Ca e+ Oscillation and Electrical Bursting in Pancreatic O-Cells Teresa CHAr, Ph. D., is a full professor in the Department of Biologi- cal Sciences, University of Pittsburgh. She received a B.A. from the University of Utah in 1959 and a Ph .D. in 1961 at the same university. From 1964 to 1969 she was a research fellow at the University of California at San Diego, working in the area of critical phenomena and polymer configurations. She became an NIH Special Fellow during 1969--1970 and worked on the DNA unwinding mechanism. In 1971, she became a faculty member at the University of Pittsburgh and was awarded a Career Development Award from NIH. Her recent research interest is focused on the following four areas: (i) nonlinear dynamics and chaos theory in excitable cells, (ii) phase-resetting in cardiac cells and multi-stability phenomena in cardiac arrhythmias, (iii) mathemati- cal modeling for pancreatic 0-cell electrical activity and agonist-in- duced cytosolic calcium oscillations, and (iv) elucidation of the kinetic properties of ion channels by maximum analysis methods. She has published a number of papers in biophysical, biomathematical, and physiological journals.

The Mechanism of Accumulation of High Levels of Vanadium by Ascid- ians from Seawater: Biophysical Approaches to a Remarkable Phenom- enon Hitoshi MICHmATA, D. Sc., has been a professor and Director of the marine biological laboratory at Hiroshima University since 1992. He graduated from Niigata University in 1971, studied radiation biology in a postgraduate course at the University of Tokyo, and received his D. Sc. in 1976 from that institution. He became a lecturer at Toyama University in 1976 and then an associate professor at the same univer- sity. In 1991 he transferred to Hiroshima University as an associate professor. His postdoctoral work was performed at both Stazione Zoologica in Naples and Brandeis University in Boston on the accu- mulation of vanadium by ascidians. He is currently working on the same problem from chemical and physiological point of view.