Research in the News
UO to host international Symposium on Evolution, Development, and Genomics.
We are pleased to announce the symposium "From Patterns to Process: Bridging Micro- and Marco-Evolutionary Concepts through Evo-Devo" will be held at Eugene's Valley River Inn, April 4-6, 2008. A distinguished panel of invited scientists will present their work at the interface of evolutionary and developmental biology in an atmosphere that fosters informal discussion and interaction. Speakers include Jerry Coyne, Greg Wray, Detlev Arendt, Bill Cresko, Bernie Degnan, Hopi Hoekstra, Mark Martindale, Daniel Meuelemans, Leonie Moyle, Fred Nijhout, Kevin Peterson, Stephan Schenider, Mike Wade, and Deneen Wellik. This is the fifth in the series of evo-devo symposia organized by graduate students in the UO/Indiana University joint NSF-funded IGERT program in Evolution, Development, and Genomics.
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We are pleased to announce the symposium "From Patterns to Process: Bridging Micro- and Marco-Evolutionary Concepts through Evo-Devo" will be held at Eugene's Valley River Inn, April 4-6, 2008. A distinguished panel of invited scientists will present their work at the interface of evolutionary and developmental biology in an atmosphere that fosters informal discussion and interaction. Speakers include Jerry Coyne, Greg Wray, Detlev Arendt, Bill Cresko, Bernie Degnan, Hopi Hoekstra, Mark Martindale, Daniel Meuelemans, Leonie Moyle, Fred Nijhout, Kevin Peterson, Stephan Schenider, Mike Wade, and Deneen Wellik. This is the fifth in the series of evo-devo symposia organized by graduate students in the UO/Indiana University joint NSF-funded IGERT program in Evolution, Development, and Genomics.
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CEEB's Joe Thornton honored at White House.
Associate Professor Joe Thornton was recently awarded the U.S. Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, the nation's highest honor for young scientists, in a White House Ceremony. More information
CEEB's Jessica Green receives Moore Foundation grant for metagenomics.
If you were part of an organization that was generating huge amounts of genomic data, what would you do about recovering the most important biological information from it? The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, which has funded ambitious research in marine microbiology and environmental genomics, is faced with exactly that problem. "Metagenomic" techniques involve simultaneously characterizing the genomes of whole communities of organisms in an environment. This approach promises great progress in our understanding of the abundance and distribution of microorganisms in the environment, but methods are not well-developed for analyzing the huge quantities of mixed data it generates. To meet this challenge, the Moore foundation recently awarded CEEB's Jessica Green and her collaborators Jonathan Eisen and Katherine Pollard (both at University of California, Davis) a three-year, $1.8 million research grant, "Integrating Evolutionary, Ecological, and Statistical Approaches to Metagenomics". The team will develop computational and theoretical strategies to efficiently extract information about microbial diversity, evolution, and function from environmental metagenomic data.
Dick Castenholz and Liz Perry receive awards for microbiology research.
Richard W. Castenholz, CEEB Professor Emeritus, was recently recognized for "seminal contributions to research in the geothermal systems of Yellowstone National Park" by the NSF-funded Research Coordination Network for Geothermal Biology and Geochemistry in Yellowstone National Park. At the RCN's January 2008 conference at Montana State University, Liz Perry, a CEEB first-year graduate student, received the runner-up prize for best oral presentation by a graduate student. Liz's talk, "The Diversity of the thermo-acidophilic Cyanidiales in Yellowstone, Japan, New Zealand, Iceland, and the Philippines," was based on her fall rotation project in the Castenholz lab.
June Keay receives award from the Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution.
June Keay, a graduate student in Joe Thornton's lab, received the award for best student poster at the Society's June 2007 meeting in Halifax, Canada. The conference -- the premier international meeting in molecular evolution each year -- featured some 700 participants from more than 25 countries. June's poster, "Estrogen receptor evolution by loss of function mutations," was one of six winners, out of more than 350 poster presentations. The Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution
Crystal Structure of an Ancient Protein: Evolution by Conformational Epistasis
Eric A. Ortlund, Jamie T. Bridgham, Matthew R. Redinbo, Joseph W. Thornton
Science, 14 September 2007: 1544-1548
See related articles at the Science Magazine, The New York Times, and UO University News
Evolutionary Responses to Rapid Climate Change
Bill Bradshaw and Chris Holzapfel
Science 9 June 2006: 1477-1478
See related articles in Inside Oregon and in the Portland Oregonian
2007 Guggenheim Fellows
Patrick Phillips is one of three University of Oregon researchers receiving Guggenheim Fellowships, one of higher education’s top honors.
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