Title TBA



To inquire about an invite, please email nathanael.caskey@uga.edu.

Title TBA



To inquire about an invite, please email nathanael.caskey@uga.edu.

"Gene-Diet Interactions in Human Health and Diseases"



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"Parental Conflict, Parent-of-Origin Effects, and the Evolution of Reproductive Isolation in Mimulus"



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"Genetic Counseling: Overview of Career, Clinical Case Examples, and Information for Prospective Students"



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Finding Your Inner Fish: From Expeditions to Enhancers

Abstract 



Studies of fossils, embryos and genes can tell us surprising new things about the great transformations in the history of life.  Here we will show how we designed expeditions to search for fish with arms, legs, and wrists.  Using those discoveries, we can make hypotheses about the relationship between limbs and fins.  Analyses of fin and limb development reveals that many of the genes involved in patterning the wrists and digits of tetrapods are not only present in fish, they are active in specifying the pattern of the distal segment of fins.  Together, analyses of fossils, embryos and genes reveal the deep antecedents of tetrapod novelties in fish.

Biography



Trained at Columbia University, Harvard University, and The University of California at Berkeley  Neil Shubin is currently Robert R. Bensley Distinguished Service Professor of Anatomy at The University of Chicago and Senior Advisor to the President of the University on the affiliation with the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole.  He both leads fossil expeditions around the world and a molecular biology laboratory studying the great transitions in the history of life.  His team is widely known for the discovery of Tiktaalik roseae, an ancient fish right at the cusp of the transition to land 375 million years ago.



He is the author of three books, Your Inner Fish (Vintage 2009), The Universe Within (Vintage, 2011) and most recently Some Assembly Required (Pantheon, 2020). He served as presenter and scientific advisor for the Emmy Award Winning three part PBS miniseries Your Inner Fish derived from his book of the same title.  



Among his awards,  he has received the Distinguished Service Award from the National Association of Biology Teachers and the Science Communication Award from the National Academy of Sciences.



He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the California Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Fellow of the American Philosophical Society and Member of the National Academy of Sciences, to which he was elected in 2011.

"Parental regulation of zygotic development: a small RNA view from seeds"



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"The Evo-Devo-Eco of Reproductive Capacity"



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University of Georgia geneticist Jessica Kissinger has been elected a 2020 American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene Fellow. Kissinger’s research focuses on parasite genomics and the biology of genome evolution. Her research group is trying to answer big questions such as how genomes evolve, what is the fate of horizontally transferred genes, which genes are phylogenetically restricted, and how do organellar genomes evolve?

A new project by University of Georgia researchers, led by Dr. Jeff Bennetzen, will explore the largely unknown relationship between plants and soil microbes, generating new information that’s expected to be a game changer for plant science. The five-year project, funded by an $11.7 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy, will deliver findings ranging from basic information about plants and microbes to applied knowledge that can be used by plant breeders to improve agricultural crops.