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Studying Quantitative Genomics in Italy I returned this past weekend from a conference and workshop called Quantitative Laws of Genome Evolution in Lake Como, Italy. An Italian physicist named Marco Lagomarsino created the conference, which brought together an interdisciplinary group of statistical physicists, biophysicists, chemists and biologists to talk about...

The newly constructed structure in the National Botanical Gardens in Ireland, meant to symbolize the flow of information from DNA to RNA and proteins, contains a representation of the DNA double helix, a ribosome, and thehammerhead ribozyme. Sculptures of the DNA helix have been constructed all over the world ;...

At my last mentoring committee meeting, after discussing the tug-of-war that the Environmental Studies and IQ Biology programs have been playing with my schedule, Dr. Brett Melbourne paused and quietly commented that my life is “interdisciplinarity on steroids!” We all laughed, but sometimes I lose sight of how many worlds...

The kickoff for the 72 nd Annual Meeting for the Society for Vertebrate Paleontology was the night of October 17 th —that’s right, the meeting began on National Fossil Day. To be honest, I didn’t know that there was such a thing as National Fossil Day before attending SVP (as...

Recently I was lucky enough to present a poster at the Ecological Society of America (ESA) conference in Portland, Oregon. This is the largest conference of ecologists and evolutionary biologists in the US with over 4,000 attendees this year. With so many researchers attending a single conference, the diversity of...

This past May, the inaugural class of IQ Biology, including myself, finished its first year of graduate study. It was an interesting year that saw different people from very different backgrounds coexist in an interdisciplinary environment where sometimes we didn’t know what each other was saying. Not a language barrier,...

Dan Knights is a humble guy, with very little reason to be humble. A short list of his titles includes high school math teacher, computer scientist and the 2003 Rubik’s Cube World Champion. He has appeared on the Today Show, The Discovery Channel and as an expert on National Public...

This past January, I had an amazing opportunity to be an instructor at the Workshop on Genomics , and the associated advanced topic sessions, in the Czech Republic. The workshop was hosted in Cesky Krumlov, a UNESCO World Heritage site considered the best preserved medieval town in Europe. The workshop...

Liz Bradley is a great professor because she loved being a student. The computer science professor graduated from MIT with three degrees, a B.S., M.S., and Ph.D., in electrical engineering and computer science. And, while earning these degrees would be more than enough to earn bragging rights, Bradley earned her...

On November 11, the Butcher Symposium brought together many of CU’s top researchers to share their current science and to build new scientific collaborations that span disciplines and campuses. The Butcher Symposium began in 2002 as a grassroots effort to bring together scientists from across the CU system to create...