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April 2008
April was a thunderstorm of activity in the BioSynC. Audrey and Alta attended the spring symposium at the AMNH's Center for Biodiversity and Conservation called "Sustaining Cultural and Biological Diversity in a Rapidly Changing World: Lessons for Global Policy" from April 2-5th. They presented a poster on the Biodiversity Synthesis Center and made some exciting contacts. They also took some time on April 4th meet with the MacArthur funded initiative, Global Kids, at their headquarters in New York to discuss a collaboration with the EOL and the Education Department at the Field Museum that would result in a digital learning initiative this summer. They were joined via conference call by Elizabeth Babcock from the Field Museum.
Meanwhile, back in Chicago on April 4th we were pleased to receive Jonathan Fanton, president of the MacArthur Foundation for a tour and lunch with Mark Westneat and John McCarter.
With the new BioSynC facilities being completed we have begun to use them fully; besides our own events, they are now accessible for museum staff to use as well. On April 8th Jim Parham, a BioSynC post-doc candidate gave a lecture in the new large conference room, which was the first lecture ever to be given there! He presented his work on turtles in China. The next day, Mark gave the Watson Armour Lecture in BioSynC, presenting the relationship of museum collections and research to EOL and BioSynC to an assembly of over 60 Field Museum staff. Finally, on April 11 we hosted our first large social event, a happy hour and reception to introduce the FMNH staff to our facilities.
April 14-15 Audrey Aronowsky attended the Biodiversity Informatics Group review meeting in Woods Hole, Massachusetts.
April 16 Mark Westneat presented a progress report on EOL and BioSynC at the President's Address to the whole museum staff.
We also hosted our first synthesis meeting in the new center from April 18th-20th called "MegaTree: Mega-Phylogeny Assembly by Literature-Mining and Grafting." This method-focused meeting, led by Rick Ree was designed to refine approaches for assembling large phylogenies (evolutionary trees) and to train students in their use. The goal was to assemble a "knowledge-based" phylogeny for vascular plants that synthesizes the information from various sources using a method that allows grafting of information from different sources while simultaneously keeping track of the origin of the information. Basically, this crew has found a way to take the large number of smaller evolutionary trees that have been created for plants by different people using different computer programs and graft them all together so that they still make sense. This way they can begin to piece together an extremely detailed and large evolutionary tree (a megatree!) for plants.
Finally, on April 21, post-doc candidate Josh Drew gave a lecture on his work on coral reef fishes.
Continue to March 2008 >>
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