#UCDavis Ecology & Evolution Seminar 1/24: Dawn Sumner #Awesome

Forwarding this:

Dear Colleagues,

The Ecology and Evolution Seminar speaker this week will be our own Dawn Sumner from Geology. Her talk on Thursday January 24th is entitled

The Modern Ecology of Ice-Covered Lakes in Antarctica: A Journey Back to Precambrian Time

and takes place at 4:10pm in 1003 Giedt Hall.

Dawn is one of the principle scientists on Curiosity, NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory. You can read about this work on her blog at

http://dawnonmars.blogspot.com/

which links to some marvelous footage/photos of their Mars explorations.

Dawn has done also extensive work on the (nearly) other-wordly ecology of microbial communities in Antarctic lakes to "develop a predictive understanding of how microbial communities produce complex microbialite morphologies." You can find out more about this at

http://mygeologypage.ucdavis.edu/sumner/Dawns_Research/Antarctica.html

and her Antarctic blog http://dawninantarctica.blogspot.com/

Author: Jonathan Eisen

I am an evolutionary biologist and a Professor at U. C. Davis. (see my lab site here). My research focuses on the origin of novelty (how new processes and functions originate). To study this I focus on sequencing and analyzing genomes of organisms, especially microbes and using phylogenomic analysis View all posts by Jonathan Eisen