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.

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.

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.

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.  

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.

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.

Isabella Farhy-Tselnicker, Ph.D
Molecular Neurobiology Laboratory
Salk Institute for Biological Studies

ABSTRACT
Correct establishment of neuronal synapses during development is crucial for proper brain function. Synaptic deficits have been linked to neurological disorders such as autism and schizophrenia, however, the underlying cellular mechanisms are still poorly understood. Astrocytes, a major type of glial cells, play a key role in synaptogenesis by secreting factors that regulate multiple aspects of synapse formation and function. To find novel treatment avenues, it is critical to identify the mechanisms of astrocyte-neuron communication that regulate synapse formation under normal and pathological conditions.

In this talk I describe my recently published findings, identifying the mechanism by which the astrocyte secreted factor, Glypican 4, induces formation of active synapses. I further describe my ongoing work investigating the regulation of astrocyte derived synapse-promoting genes expression by neuronal and astrocyte activity. My findings provide important insights into the complex interaction between astrocytes and neurons in the developing brain, and establish a framework for future studies of astrocyte roles at the synapse.

Host: Matthew Torres, Ph.D.

Joshua Plotkin, Ph.D.
Department of Biology
University of Pennsylvania