Marker Lectures in Evolutionary Biology Scheduled for 6 and 7 October
Credit: Paddy Muir
1 October 2008 — W. Ford Doolittle, professor emeritus in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at Dalhousie University in Canada, will present the Russell Marker Lectures in Evolutionary Biology on 6 and 7 October 2008 at the Penn State University Park campus. The free public lectures are sponsored by the Penn State Eberly College of Science.
The series includes a lecture intended for a general audience titled "The Tree of Life: What Does it Really Mean?" at 5:30 p.m. on Monday, 6 October, in 112 Borland Building. Doolittle also will give a more specialized lecture, titled "Entry-Level Metagenomics," at 4:00 p.m. on Tuesday, 7 October in the Berg Auditorium, 100 Life Sciences Building.
In his research, Doolittle has contributed to our understanding of the genetics of an ancient group of bacteria, known as the Archaea, and to the evolutionary relationships among different types of cells. He also has contributed to the proof of the endosymbiont hypothesis, which states that the self-replicating cell components, the mitochondria and the chloroplast, are descendents of once free-living bacterial cells. In addition, he has contributed to the "introns-early" and "selfish-DNA" theories. His laboratory currently uses genomic and metagenomic methods to study recombination and lateral-gene transfer in natural populations. Doolittle combines these microevolutionary studies with phylogenomic-bioinformatics approaches to assess the role of lateral-gene transfer in microbial macroevolution and its implications for phylogenetic reconstruction and classification.
Doolittle received a bachelor's degree from Harvard College and a Ph.D. from Stanford University. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Illinois and at the National Jewish Hospital and Research Center in Denver, Colorado. Doolittle joined the Department of Biochemistry at Dalhousie University in 1971. He was the director of the evolutionary biology program of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research from 1986 to 2007, and he was the holder of the Canada Research Chair in Comparative Microbial Genomics from 2001 to 2008.
The Marker Lectures were established in 1984 through a gift from Russell Earl Marker, professor emeritus of chemistry at Penn State, whose pioneering synthetic methods revolutionized the steroid-hormone industry and opened the door to the current era of hormone therapies, including the birth-control pill. The Marker endowment allows the Penn State Eberly College of Science to present annual Marker Lectures in astronomy and astrophysics, the chemical sciences, evolutionary biology, genetic engineering, the mathematical sciences, and physics.
For more information about the lecture or for access assistance, contact the Department of Biology at 814-865-4562.
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