Timothy Alan Kral Swell biology

LITTLE ROCK — SELF PORTRAIT

Date and place of birth: Sept. 29, 1951, Cleveland My three favorite artists are Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dali and Victor Vasarely.

I wish I had a piece of artwork by Rene Magritte.

Always in my refrigerator: Diet Sunkist A gadget I can't live without is a computer.

My favorite entree is filet mignon.

My favorite dessert is anything dark chocolate.

When I drink, my favorites are Rombauer chardonnay and Johnnie Walker Blue Label Scotch.

My favorite vacation spot is Australia.

I'd like to visit New Zealand.

I wish I knew more about astronomy and geology.

I stay home to watch Monk.

My favorite planet is Mars. My favorite color is red.

The smartest person I know is my wife, Connie.

I like to listen to classical music.

The book I've been recommending lately is The Last Lecture [by Randy Pausch]. It is life-changing.

Three people I'd invite to a fantasy dinner party are Jesus, Muhammad and Buddha. I think that we'd discover that there's a lot more in common than all the strife in the world.

One word to sum me up: organizedFAYETTEVILLE - There's nothing phony about Tim Kral.

During a recent general microbiology lecture at the University of Arkansas, he stood before about 200 students, wearing jeans and a striped polo-style shirt.

Confirming on his watch that it was time to start class, he hushed the chatter by tapping on the microphone clipped to his collar. After covering current events - soybean rust, swine flu, seasonal flu vaccine - he wrapped up some history about figures in microbiology. On that day it was Thomas Bramwell Welch, a Methodist minister who pasteurized grape juice - preventing its fermentation into wine - so it could be used for church Communion.

After discussing the types and sizes of some microscopic organisms, Kral gave the class a break with what he calls "halftime funnies." The material that rainy day was church bulletin bloopers.

He's a stickler for details and accuracy - as a scientist should be. But he's also a dreamer, equally enthusiastic about science and art and unabashedly devoted to his wife and teenage daughter. In class, he uses humor to keep students' attention. He's more interested that they understand concepts than memorize terms, and he wants them to think.

"Always be aware that what we know is the tip of the iceberg, and always challenge what we know," he told his class.

Jeanne McLachlin, associate director of the premedical program, says Kral doesn't want students to be "mired in minutiae" but rather to "get the big picture and see how it's relevant in everyday life."

Kral, 57, won the 2009 Charles and Nadine Baum Faculty Teaching Award last spring. At the Baumlecture, which he gave a few weeks ago to faculty, he encouraged them to experiment as teachers.

"You should never be satisfied with your teaching. You should always try to improve," he told them.

Several teachers influenced him - in the ways helearned and now teaches.

"I try to be interactive. I don't stand up there and preach. I try to use the Socratic method, asking questions and encouraging questions. It doesn't always work," he says.

Kral urges his students to take risks and to learn from their mistakes. When he can't get someone to answer a question, he asks for a wrong answer. And he thanks them for it.

"Talk about a learning experience. It's not just standing up there and telling them the answer, but getting a back and forth [dialogue]," he says. "It gets into how they think, why they're thinking that, and it gets them to participate."

Tammy Lorince, instructor and laboratory coordinator for biological sciences, is a former student of Kral's. "He makes the material approachable," never talkingabove students' heads, and he makes class fun. When she first started lecturing, she tried to emulate his style.

SIGNS OF A SCIENTIST

Kral was born and reared in Cleveland, where his dad, George, worked factory jobs, and his late mom, Elsie, worked as a sales clerk and in a bakery. When Kral was 13, his family, including his younger sister, moved to the Parma suburb, where he attended an all-boys Catholic high school.

Starting his senior year and through college, he worked at the Zodiac Room, a classy restaurant in Higbee's department store. He aspired to go to a prestigious Jesuit school, John Carroll University, in University Heights, Ohio. He applied for a John Huntington Foundation grant all four years, which, along with his restaurant gig, paid for college. Living at home to save on costs and withouta car, it was a two-hour journey one way to get to school each day.

From the time Kral was a little boy - when observing nature in the fields and the woods, catching frogs, snakes and turtles - he'd always wanted to be a biology professor.

"I run into students today who keep changing their minds or they don't know. And I've always known," he says.

Science fiction programs like The Outer Limits and The Twilight Zone got him interested in space, and he now does astrobiology research, looking for life on Mars.

Kral started doing research in college, although there wasn't a formal program for undergraduates. He liked coming up with the ideas, creating the research questions and developing the approach. For graduate school, he chose the University of Florida, which offered an assistantship that covered many of the expenses.

He narrowed his focus to microbiology, intrigued because it explored "the basic units of life, the smallest entities of life."

Kral learned a lot of his teaching methods from his microbial structure professor and later developed a similar course at the UA. He also focused his doctoral research on the cell membrane, which, more than just a barrier, is "very fluid." (He alsoknows the precious nature of blood. So far, he has donated 189 units - almost 24 gallons.)

At the Temple University School of Medicine in Philadelphia, where Kral did postdoctoral work, a brilliant, chain-smoking professor taught him about research techniques and data interpretation.

After about a decade in school, he looked for a "real job" at the annual meeting of the American Society for Microbiology in Dallas. He had an interview with the soonto-be chairman of what was then the UA's department of botany and bacteriology (it has changed names twice since). During a campus visit then, Kral recalls one professor noting that he had married at 40 and was rearing his family in this great place. As coincidence would have it, Kral would do the same.

LIFE ELSEWHERE

When Kral came to the UA in 1981, he expanded on the streptococcus mutans research he'd done at Temple University. Here, he studied the fluoride resistance of this bacteria that causes tooth decay. From his office window on the sixth floor of the Science and Engineering Building, he can see Ferritor Hall, built in 2000, which houses his lab.

But, in 1992, he redirected his research to another passion: astrobiology. Over the years, he has received more than $100,000 in funding from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to study the possibility of life on Mars. That money also pays for him to take students to visit the NASA center in California. Chris McKay, Kral's contact at the NASA Ames Research Center, gave him some ideas that led to his research today: They both think a "very old" micro-organism called a methanogen could exist on Mars.

"It's responsible on Earth for the methane we have, which is natural gas," Kral says.

Nothing lives on Mars' surface because ultraviolet radiation from the sun probably sterilizes the surface, he says. But this micro-organism could live below the surface.

The idea got a boost a few years ago when researchers discovered methane in Mars' atmosphere. Methanogens create methane as part of their metabolism.

To research these anaerobes - organisms killed by oxygen - Kral and his students work in his lab with an anaerobic, or oxygen-free, chamber.

Kral and McKay have published papers about the possibility of methanogens on Mars, as well as on a moon of Saturn, named Enceladus, which has a geyser that contains methane.

It was a risk for Kral to switch research topics midstream, as many scientists spend their entire career focused on one topic.

"It's risky to change because, if you're trying to move up the ladder and get promoted, there could be such a big gap in your productivity because you're starting a new area. But that'swhat I wanted to do, so I did it," he says.

In the late 1990s, he was involved in the creation of what is now the Arkansas Center for Space and Planetary Sciences, which was dedicatedin 2000. The UA now offers a graduate program in that field.

MINDFUL MENTOR

Over the years, Kral has taught more than 5,000 students and advised a few thousand. "Students knew that I cared, and so they would come to me for advice."

In 1995, he became the Liebolt Chair of Premedical Sciences, directing the premedical program, which soon consumed much of his time. He chaired an advisory committee, which evaluated every student and sent recommendations to medical schools- while still advising other students, teaching classes and doing research.

By 2002, he realized he wasn't seeing much of his family and he really wanted to devote more time to research. So, he resigned from the premed directorship. He continued to mentor students, enjoying the interaction with them and helping them succeed. He has guided more than 40 honors students. Many doctors in the area have had Kral as a professor and mentor.

"They come into your lab as neophytes, and you show them how to do things," he says, such as making media, growing organisms, taking readings and running tests. "It's just so neat to see them finish and move on."

Kral recently returned to the premed program's advisory committee. This fall, he's the mentor for a weekly Fulbright Perspectives course,which acclimates first-year students to college life. In the spring, he'll teach a graduatelevel astrobiology course and a space center seminar.

James Walker, a professor in biological sciences, regularly shares stimulating conversation with Kral over lunch. He calls Kral "a good guy in all regards" who is widely respected on campus and serves on many committees.

"He can ask a good challenging question in any forum, but he tries to do it in a way that is not offensive," he says.

McLachlin calls Kral "eternally positive."

"Even if he's annoyed at a situation, he will find humorin it," she says.

INSTANT CHEMISTRY

Kral clearly remembers the day he met his future wife. It was April 14, 1988, and he was receiving the Mortar Board Outstanding Faculty Member award. He was introduced to Connie Hendrix, who worked in the UA's development office as a Mortar Board adviser.

They immediately hit it off and he asked her to lunch the following Monday, the 18th, at Hugo's. After they'd dated for a while, Connie took a job in Athens, Ga. He sent her a different bouquet of flowers the 18th of each month and then visited her in 1991, on the third anniversary of that first lunch.

As they exchanged gifts, she gave him a glamour shot (now framed in his office) and he gave her a wrapped box. She said yes as soon as she saw the engagement ring, although he never asked a question. He was 40 when they wed on Feb. 29, 1992, an unseasonably gorgeous day, and they still celebrate their two "anniversaries" each year.

Connie liked that he seemed solid and stable. And, while not skeptics, they both question authority.

"I think we both come at life from an intellectual standpoint," she says. "Marrying me was probably one of the most impulsive things he's done in his life."

When they couldn't get pregnant, they turned to adoption. They remember sitting at a Razorbacks basketball game in January 1995 when their adoption lawyer left his seat across the arena from them at halftime. When they got home, he'd left a message about a woman who'd given birth at a local hospital. Three days later, Bethany Stirling Kral was theirs.

Now 13, she shares her parents' love of music and art and Razorbacks. She takes guitar lessons, accompanies them to art openings and creates her own artwork. The family have Razorbacks baseball seats in the front row behind the visiting team's dugout.

In their Fayetteville home, which they share with a friendly beagle named Darwin, artwork fills every room. Overflow pieces decorateKral's campus office.

Every morning, K ral spends 30 minutes on the exercise bike in the upstairs room, decorated with several animation cels - including Marvin the Martian. Then he takes his daughter to school before heading to work.

A small front room serves as a gallery for drawings and etchings by artists such as Salvador Dali, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Juan Miro, Alexander Calder, Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse and Marc Chagall. Kral started collecting artwork about 1985, with four pieces - including a Picasso and a Dali - from a gallery in Las Vegas. The pieces are inexpensive but original.

Kral buys some art while traveling, some off the Internet, some from galleries he has kept in touch with - like Regency Fine Art, a gallery outside Atlanta. He likes the primitive styles of Jane Wooster Scott and French artist Michel Delacroix. The little girl in a fantasy piece by Lynn Lupetti reminded him and his wife of their daughter.

"I kind of like my collection."