Two assistant professors from the Georgia Tech College of Sciences, Jenny McGuire and Lutz Warnke, have received 2020 Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Awards from the National Science Foundation (NSF).
As NSF's most prestigious award, the CAREER program supports early-career faculty who integrate excellence in education and research, serve as academic role models, and lead advances in the mission of their organization. The award comes with a federal grant for research and education activities for five consecutive years.
“Never underestimate what a National Science Foundation CAREER Award can do for a young scientist,” says Julia Kubanek, College of Sciences Associate Dean for Research. “Many of our senior faculty at Georgia Tech started their funding history as NSF CAREER awardees. They act as a springboard for faculty success in so many ways.”
Kubanek, who is also a professor in Biological Sciences and in Chemistry and Biochemistry, emphasizes the length of the grant: five years. “The funding that comes with an NSF CAREER award provides substantial support to get a faculty member’s fresh and unique research ideas off to a strong start.” The NSF also likes to see research and education combined as a way to inspire creative teaching methods that give students a more hands-on approach.
For Jenny McGuire, assistant professor in Biological Sciences and in Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, the CAREER grant will support paleoecological research exploring how plants and animals respond to environmental change and allow her to test these theories in a deep, ancient cave in Wyoming — where clues left by past environmental shifts could provide insights for current and future climate change.
For Lutz Warnke, assistant professor in Mathematics, the CAREER grant will support fundamental research at the interface of discrete mathematics and probability, exploring the fascinating properties of random networks (or graphs) and their remarkable applications in graph theory, extremal combinatorics, and other areas.
Jenny McGuire: Do Species Track Climate? Paleoecology to Disentangle Niche Dynamics
Since 2015, Jenny McGuire has spent her summers rappelling 30 feet into Wyoming’s Natural Trap Cave, digging for fossils that can provide some insight into the impact past climatic and environmental changes had on plant and animal species 20,000-30,000 years ago. McGuire’s work looks at how those changes in climate might have affected animal migration patterns.
“I was incredibly excited to get the award, because it is going to allow me to do some really exciting work,” says McGuire, who is also a past NSF Division of Environmental Biology awardee. “My project looks at the climate fidelity that different plant and animal species exhibited during past periods of climate change, so that we can characterize the extent to which they will respond to future change. By understanding how species respond to changing climate, we can identify which species and strategies to prioritize to conserve biodiversity going forward.”
Along with increasing our understanding of ecosystem and species-level responses to climate change and drought, McGuire’s spelunking expeditions and research help educate students and communities about how climate affects ecosystems.
Many of McGuire’s cave finds are brought back to Georgia Tech for what she calls Fossil Fridays, when the public is invited to help sift through the gravel and dirt to look for fossils. These “fossil discovery opportunities” reach people from across the broader Atlanta community, as well as East African undergraduate students who participate in workshops facilitated by the Conservation Paleobiology in Africa program.
“We are living in a time of rapid change,” McGuire notes. “Given the extent of the change, it is hard to predict how ecosystems are going to respond by observing snapshots of time. We use organisms' responses to past climatic and environmental changes to determine how things will play out, given the extreme changes that are anticipated.”
Lutz Warnke: Understanding the Evolution of Random Graphs with Complex Dependencies: Phase Transition and Beyond
Lutz Warnke — who is also a recipient of the 2014 Richard-Rado-Prize, the 2016 Dénes König Prize, a 2018 Sloan Research Fellowship, and a NSF Division of Mathematical Sciences award — is fascinated by graph processes and networks, which are useful mathematical abstractions that consist of collections of points with links, or line-segments, connecting them. The more links you add, the more complex those networks become.
“Time-evolving random networks/random graph processes play an important role in several branches of mathematics and applied sciences, including statistical physics, complex networks, and extremal combinatorics,” Warnke says. “Unfortunately, for these processes, there is nowadays a widening gap between simulation-based results and theoretical understanding. I hope to develop new mathematical theory for such random graph processes, in order to better understand their properties, improve existing methods of analysis, and rigorously justify their applications.”
Warnke is using these random graph processes to attack difficult open problems in combinatorics. He explains "they provide a systematic way to give powerful probabilistic guarantees for hard-to-answer deterministic questions, such as the construction of complex graphs with unusual properties/constraints. I am particularly fascinated by the fact that the usage of randomness helps in extremal combinatorics and graph theory, and by developing new ways of analysis/new random processes I am trying to significantly increase the range of combinatorial applications."
The CAREER grant will also allow him to spend more time on the phase transition of random graphs. He explains, “This refers to a sudden change of their typical properties, as we add more and more links to the graph (similar to how the state of water changes as we increase the temperature). I am trying to understand whether the phase transition of a wide variety of random graph processes share essential ‘universal’ features, as predicted by the profound universality paradigm from physics.”
“It is a great honor to receive the NSF CAREER award,” says Warnke. “I gratefully acknowledge this recognition and support from NSF, which will now help/allow me to further advance my research program, and pursue some of the most challenging problems in probabilistic combinatorics.”
McGuire and Warnke are among a number of 2020 NSF CAREER awardees representing Georgia Tech. Learn more about Jenny McGuire and Lutz Warnke, and about the CAREER Program.
The Biological Sciences Seminar featuring Jianlong Wang, originally scheduled for April 2, 2020, has been postponed. Please visit biosci.gatech.edu for further updates.
Arjun Raj, Ph.D.
Department of Bioengineering
Department of Genetics
University of Pennsylvania
ABSTRACT
Anti-cancer therapies can often kill the vast majority of tumor cells but a few rare cells remain and grow despite treatment. Non-genetic variability has emerged as a potential contributor to this behavior. However, it remains unclear what drives this variability, and what the ultimate phenotypic consequences are. We have developed a set of new single cell barcoding technologies (Time Machine and FateMap) that have enabled us to show how different types of variability can translate into different drug-resistant outcomes upon treatment with drug. In particular, we found that even a genetically and epigenetically clonal population harbors enough latent variability to produce an entire ecosystem of different resistant cell types, and show preliminary evidence suggesting that these cell types can contribute to tumor development in distinct ways.
Hosts: Drs. Annalise Paaby & Joe Lachance
Event Details
Natalie Lai Man Wu, Ph.D.
Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center
ABSTRACT
In the peripheral nervous system (PNS), Schwann cells are highly versatile glial cells that undertake a broad repertoire of functions, including myelination of axons for saltatory conduction, modulation of synaptic activity at the neuromuscular junction and pain initiation in the dermis. Following nerve injury, quiescent mature Schwann cells exhibit remarkable plasticity by de-differentiating to a pro-repair progenitor-like phenotype to orchestrate nerve regeneration. These highly dynamic processes need to be tightly regulated to prevent pathologies, such as cancer. To date, the molecular mechanisms and signals driving Schwann cell development, myelination and plasticity are not fully understood. In this talk, I will present 1) how Schwann cells in the PNS develop into myelin-forming cells via precise temporal control mediated by the transcriptional factor, Zeb2 and the HIPPO pathway, 2) how these differentiated cells or their progenitors are reprogrammed into tumorigenic cells in nerve cancer via HIPPO pathway dysregulation, and 3) how Schwann cells in nerve tumors demonstrate a tumor cell lineage trajectory during malignant transformation using innovative single-cell genomics. This work advocates an innovative and comprehensive approach to understand the remarkable versatility of Schwann cells in peripheral nerves.
Host: Dr. Alberto Stolfi
Event Details
Kimberly Tanner, Ph.D.
Professor & Director of The Science Education Partnership and Assessment Laboratory (SEPAL)
Department of Biology
San Francisco State University
ABSTRACT
Through the language they use, instructors create classroom environments that have the potential to impact learning by affecting student motivation, resistance, belonging, and self-efficacy. However, despite the critical importance of instructor language to the student experience, little research has investigated what instructors are saying in undergraduate classrooms. We systematically investigated instructor language that was not directly relate to content and defined this as Instructor Talk and identified five robust categories of Instructor Talk that can characterize ~90% of non-content language found in over 60 courses: 1) Building Instructor/Student Relationships, 2) Establishing Classroom Culture, 3) Explaining Pedagogical Choices, 4) Sharing Personal Experience, and 5) Unmasking Science. The remaining ~10% of instances of Instructor Talk in these settings were categorized as negatively-phrased or potentially discouraging in nature. Attention to Instructor Talk in undergraduate classrooms may be key for instructors to create inclusive learning environments and promote student learning.
Hosts: Drs. Chrissy Spencer and Colin Harrison
Event Details
Kimberly Tanner, Ph.D.
Professor & Director of The Science Education Partnership and Assessment Laboratory (SEPAL)
Department of Biology
San Francisco State University
How do experts structure their thinking about the concepts in their discipline? How is this different from the way those new to a discipline organized these same ideas? How, if at all, does undergraduate education in a discipline affect how an individual organizes their disciplinary knowledge? In this interactive session, participants will engage in exploring differences in expert and novice thinking, which is grounded in theories and methodologies from both science education and cognitive psychology. Attendees will participate in a card sorting exercise to explore the many ways that knowledge within a discipline can be organized. Additionally, participants will then have the opportunity to make predictions about potential organizational frameworks that might be used by novices and experts within their own disciplines. Finally, participants will make predictions about and evaluate primary research data on the influence of undergraduate education on novice-to-expert transitions in the field of biological science, as an example.
Event Details
David M. Hudson, Ph.D.
Research Scientist
The Maritime Aquarium at Norwalk, Norwalk CT
ABSTRACT
Biological conservation in the Neotropics has many challenges. Direct anthropogenic alterations of environmental conditions compounded with climate change may be catastrophic to species survival and maintenance of biodiversity. The top human-mediated threats are habitat loss/degradation, pollution, and exploitation along with climate change’s effects on Andean freshwater systems. Colombia has the highest freshwater crab diversity in South America, but they remain understudied. We produced a case study demonstrates the influence of continued human impacts, including industrial extraction sites for mining and petroleum on the area available for survival of a crustacean species that will be affected by climate change. Species extinctions are likely to occur from the multiple stressors affecting these populations, meaning that those stressors should be a part of determining IUCN Red List species assessments. From this analysis, it is evident that differences exist for how widely distributed species and range restricted species will respond to these interacting stressors as climate changes.
Host: Marc Weissburg, Ph.D.
Event Details
CANCELLED: The School of Biological Sciences regrets to announce that Jonathan Gershenzon is unable to host this seminar.
Jonathan Gershenzon, Ph.D.
Director and Scientific Member
Department of Biochemistry
Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology
SPEAKER BIO
After studying biology as an undergraduate at the University of California in Santa Cruz, Gershenzon received his PhD in botany from the University of Texas in 1984. From 1985 until 1997 he worked as a scientist at the Institute for Biological Chemistry, Washington State University in Pullman. Since 1997 he is a Director and Scientific Member at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Jena, Germany, where he heads the Department of Biochemistry. He was appointed Honorary Professor at Friedrich Schiller University Jena in 1999.
Gershenzon studies the biochemistry of secondary plant metabolites, their mode of action on herbivores, the regulation of secondary metabolisms in plants and the evolution of pathways. Most of the work in his department focuses on two major groups of plant defenses: glucosinolates and terpenoids.
Host: Julia Kubanek, Ph.D.
Event Details
Jonathan Levine
Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology
Princeton University
ABSTRACT
In the talk, I will illustrate the importance of basic population and community ecology for understanding and predicting how changing species interactions influence ecosystem responses to climate change. First, I will present field experiments showing how the novel competitive interactions that emerge when species shift their ranges to track warming climate, but do at different rates, strongly determine the fate of alpine plant populations in the Swiss Alps. I will then discuss how we can predict the identity of species engaging in these novel competitive interactions in the future. To this end, I will present experiments with a model plant species suggesting that rapid evolutionary changes can influence the rate at which plant populations spread, complicating efforts to forecast species range dynamics based on their current demography. Finally, I will explore if we can predict the outcome of novel competitive interactions under climate change without having to conduct countless experiments. To do, I will use plant functional traits to predict the drivers of competition between annual plant species in California grasslands. I will conclude by arguing for the interconnected nature of basic ecological research and that motivated by the need to solve pressing environmental challenges.
Host: Lin Jiang, Ph.D.
Event Details
The School of Biological Sciences Seminar with Saad Bhamla orginally scheduled for April 16, has been postponed. Please visit biosci.gatech.edu for further updates.
Saad Bhamla, Ph.D.
School of Chemical & Biomedical Engineering
Georgia Institute of Technology
ABSTRACT
In this talk I will share two stories about how interesting dynamics emerge when living systems aggregate and form a collective. The first story revolves around gigantic single cells protists (~5mm in length) that can contract their bodies rapidly (<5ms). I will describe our discovery of how these cells harness these ultrafast contractions to send ‘hydrodynamic trigger waves’ for communicating over long distances in cellular communities. The second story is about aquatic worm blobs that knot with their neighbours to form living entangled masses or blobs. I will describe how these soft squishy three dimensional blobs can rapidly morph their shape, move across terrains, and even solve mazes.
Event Details
A Frontiers in Science Lecture by Joshua Plotkin, University of Pennsylvania
Many Americans receive their news and form political opinions through social media. But social media platforms are not shaping up to be the utopian spaces for human connection their founders once hoped. Instead, the Internet has introduced phenomena that can influence national elections and even threaten democracy. This talk will describe recent findings on "information gerrymandering” — how the structure of a social network can profoundly bias collective decisions. Evidence of these effects is found in large-scale human experiments, real-world social-media networks, and networks of legislative actions in the US Congress. These results motivate questions about policy.
About Joshua Plotkin
Joshua Plotkin is the Walter H. and Leonore C. Annenberg Professor of Natural Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania, where he co-directs the Penn Center for Mathematical Biology. Professor Plotkin is an applied mathematician with appointments in the Departments of Biology, Mathematics, and Computer and Information Sciences. His work leverages mathematical models of populations as a framework for understanding broad patterns of biological, cultural, and social evolution.
About Frontiers in Science Lectures
Lectures in this series are intended to inform, engage, and inspire students, faculty, staff, and the public on developments, breakthroughs, and topics of general interest in the sciences and mathematics. Lecturers tailor their talks for nonexpert audiences.
Event Details
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