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June 2008
 This June the BioSynC had some very exciting visitors! On the 4th, we were honored to give a tour to Dr. Ashok Khosla, the former director of the United Nations Environmental Program. On the 12th staff from the offices of Illinois Senator Dick Durbin and Congresswoman Melissa Bean came by for a tour.
On the 9th our five new summer interns started. Three of them are from the BitMap program, which means they are trained in bioinformatics, (Krista Larson, Scott Bradley and Pratima Maiti) and two others hail from the University of Chicago (Kate Harney) and Princeton (Nicholas Lilly). They are all working on many different projects including researching coral reefs for a virtual learning initiative we are embarking on, learning Drupal programming to help positively change our website and working with Rick Ree on an application for grafting and editing phylogenetic trees. For more info about the interns check out our blog: blog.eol.org.
Outside of the Field Museum, Rick attended the Consortium for the Barcode of Life meeting in San Diego the week of June 23rd, specifically to go to a session on data visualization, presenting BioSynC's efforts to develop interactive tools with Adobe.
Mark, Audrey, Darolyn and Alta hosted an informational booth on the BioSynC and EOL at the Joint Annual Meeting on Evolution from June 20-24rd in Minneapolis, MN. Mark gave a 15 minute talk at the meeting titled: "Phylogenetic visualization tools and phyloinformatics in the Encyclopedia of Life". We made some great contacts and several promising synthesis meeting proposals are likely to come out of it. (We also went to the Mall of America!)
Mark and Darolyn left Minneapolis on the 23rd to travel to Keelung, Taiwan for an organism-focused synthesis meeting on Decapods (shrimps, crabs, and lobsters ) from the 25th to the 29th. The meeting, hosted by Professor Tin Yam Chan, developed ties between the US decapod crustacean biologists working on the Decapod Tree of Life project with counterparts in Australasia. These groups have exceptionally complementary talents and resources, and combining their efforts proved productive in making a quick and effective leap forward in our fundamental understanding of decapod diversity. The meeting involved around 24 specialists and six students from 9 countries with the goal of among other things, creating the first comprehensive species list for Decapod crustaceans, no small feat given that there are over 15,000 known species. This meeting was an exceptional example of the power of organism-focused meetings to bringing together key scientists focused on a megadiverse group to develop great taxonomic, phylogenetic, and conservation resources for the broader community on a scale not previously seen.
We are also happy to be joined by our second post-doc, Jim Parham, who has arrived from California. Jim is a broadly trained herpetologist and he recently completed a postdoc in molecular systematics at the Joint Genome Institute following his PhD work in paleontology at U.C. Berkeley. Before that he studied geology at the University of Rhode Island. He is primarily interested in how human activities impact our ability to reconstruct natural patterns of reptile diversity (through extinction), distribution (through extirpation and exotic introduction), and phylogenetic relationships (through genetic pollution). He also studies the evolution of major turtle lineages by integrating paleontology with molecular systematics.
Continue to May 2008 >>
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