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May 2008
In the Center
May began with a visit from Jen Schopf, the Systems Architect from the Informatics Group at Woods Hole. She met with BioSynC staff for a day and filled us in on the EOL progress and some of the technical aspects of building the EOL website. On the 3rd we were excited to give a tour to some interested members of Barack Obama's local staff. The next week (May 6th) post-doc candidate Jason Weckstein gave a talk on his research on biogeography and coevolution of bird lice and their charismatic toucan hosts, and on the same day we hosted a gathering of twelve possible interns from the BiTmaP program from Chicago Tech Park. (BiTmaP is the only program in the country that certifies people in bioinformatics.) On May 19th we hosted King and Caryn Harris for an evening to celebrate their generous donation to the Synthesis Center.
On a more long term note, there will be three new people in the center very soon: BioSynC has offered post-doc positions to Jason Weckstein and Jim Parham. Another candidate, Josh Drew, was awarded an NSF post-doc to work with Mark here at BioSynC. We are very excited for them to join us and hope they can handle sharing the back offices.
Globe-Trotting
Post-doc Torsten Dikow spent a week (April 28 to May 3) in the field in south-western Arizona and adjacent California to collect true flies (Diptera) of the families Apioceridae (flower-loving flies), Asilidae (robber flies), and Mydidae (mydas flies). Two of these, Apioceridae and Mydidae, are rarely collected because of their short annual activity period, their localized populations, and their flight time at the hottest hours of the day (over 100 degrees!). Overall, the trip was very successful: he collected one Apioceridae species, nine Asilidae species, and three Mydidae species, which have been preserved for morphological and molecular phylogenetic studies and will be analyzed in the coming months at the Field Museum and later incorporated into the EOL.
Other trips by staff included Rick's trip to Vancouver for the CSEE (Canadian Society for Ecology and Evolution) meeting, from the 11-14th where he presented a poster on BioSynC. On the 13-14th Mark went to NESCENT (National Evolutionary Synthesis Center) for the Vertnet Distributed Database Workshop, the goal of which was to develop a plan for the future of existing distributed and database projects for major vertebrate groups (i.e. FishNET, HerpNET etc.) developed with NSF funding. Jim Edwards gave a presentation on the EOL and Mark presented on BioSynC. On May 16th Mark attended the EOL Component Leaders meeting in Washington DC, where the group began assessing our first year of progress and planning for Year 2.
Audrey attended the EOL E & O (Education and Outreach Advisory Board meeting) at Harvard from the 19th-21st, where she presented on how the BioSynC's staff and synthesis meetings can help with E & O objectives in terms of gathering content and mobilizing certain communities. Two synthesis meeting proposals are being developed out of that; one for citizen scientists who want to organize nationally to contribute to the EOL and a second involving undergraduate intro classes who want to use their introductory science literacy and writing components to write text for EOL species pages.
At the end of the month, both Mark and Audrey attended the IDGE
(Integrating Evolution Development and Genetics) conference from the 27th-31st, which was co-sponsored by the BioSynC, NSF and the University of California. The conference brought together people whose work spans these three disciplines to showcase integrative research. Mark presented the EOL and some of his own research on fish development and genomics. There were lots of questions and comments on the EOL, and some good contacts were made with people who might be able or want to contribute. Many ideas for synthesis meetings were also discussed, particularly on network visualization and creating new networks to link species pages.
Alta attended a conference from May 31st-June 1st, called "The Social Life of Forests: New Frameworks for Studying Change" hosted by the Program on the Global Environment at the University of Chicago. The conference brought together almost 30 speakers from diverse disciplines to address forests from ecological, social and global perspectives. The conference was an interesting synthesis addressing the divide between nature and culture as well as some novel conservation models and concerns, it was particularly unique in its focus on empirical research that highlighted examples of re-forestation, a refreshing and positive angle to take when considering the overwhelming negative data about deforestation.
Continue to April 2008 >>
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