Associate Professor of Biology and Biological Chemistry Pamela Baker's recent studies of periodontal disease add up to more than another warning about how important it is to brush one's teeth. Her work gets right down to your bones, straight through the marrow, where she tries to understand the immune system's cellular mechanisms for regulating bone mass.

"Bone, that looks so permanent, is always bone being added and bone being taken away," says Baker, who this year was awarded a three-year, $970,458 grant to study bone degeneration by the National Institute of Health. With periodontal disease, the most common of all bone diseases, the immune system reacts to bacteria and reduces the amount of bone mass. Through a 1994 grant, Baker and others created an animal model for periodontal disease, which was the first of its kind, and in the process discovered that all mice were not equally susceptible to bone loss. Now Baker will work with Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor to find out why and it's a safe bet she'll have help from her thesis students.

"Having a research project that I can involve students in is some of the best kind of learning we can give, " Baker says. One of her first thesis students recently received her Ph.D. in molecular biology and is working for the Center for Disease Control, Baker says, sounding a bit like a proud mother.