UAH Professor Amy Bishop, PhD (Harvard) charged with capital murder

UAH Assistant Professor of Biology, Dr. Amy Bishop was taken into custody outside the Shelby Center for Science and Technology on the UAH campus Friday afternoon. She is charged with capital murder.

She is accused of shooting and killing three biology faculty members in a third floor conference room during a faculty meeting, and wounding three others. The shooting happened around 3:57PM CST. Dr. Bishop was arrested without incident approximately 10 minutes later. The 40-year-old woman joined the UAH faculty in 2003 after graduating from Harvard with a genetics degree in 1993.

She and her husband Jim Anderson are the inventors of the a portable cell-incubator they called “InQ,” which won them a state competition award and $25,000 business-start-up seed money in a business competition. UAH President David Williams said in November 2008 that their invention would “change the way biological and medical research is conducted.” The Huntsville Angel Network also gave Prodigy Biosystems $1.25 million in startup funding.

Dead are:
• Dr. Gopi Podila, Biology Department Chair & Professor of Plant Molecular Biology & Biotechnology
• Dr. Maria Ragland Davis, Professor Biotechnology & Plant Genomics
• Dr. Adriel Johnson, Professor of Physiology

Wounded are:
• Dr. Joseph Leahy, Professor of Microbiology
• Dr. Luis Rogello Cruz-Vera, Professor of Molecular Biology
• Stephanie Monticciolo, Biology Department Assistant