Citizen Science Program Presents
Paul Turner, Ph. D.
Thursday, January 12, 2017
Stevenson Athletic Center, Main Gym
7:00 pm EST/GMT-5
7:00 pm EST/GMT-5
"Microbes: A natural products pipeline"
Earth’s biodiversity is vast, but most of these species are microbes that are generally invisible to the eye. Despite their small size, microbes hold immense potential for addressing unanswered questions in biology, and for solving vital problems faced by humans today and in our near future. Because microbes evolved billions of years before other organisms, microbiology research can reveal how life first arose on our planet and can provide clues for signatures of life as we search for it elsewhere in the universe. Also, studying microbes is crucial for understanding how biological communities assemble and how ecosystems function, especially when these activities can be perturbed by planet-wide changes such as global warming. Last, diseases affecting humans, domesticated animals and plants, and endangered species are increasing concerns as we strive to live longer, to maintain ample and safe food for a hungry world, and to preserve biodiversity. Although some microbes cause disease, Earth’s teeming microbial diversity provides a vast ‘natural product discovery’ pipeline for finding solutions to combat pathogens and chronic diseases such as cancers. This talk presents data from microbiology studies that address these many crucial problems faced by humans, and which suggest that the solutions may be largely invisible but within our reach. Dr. Paul Turner received his Ph.D. in 1995 from the Center for Microbial Ecology, at Michigan State University. He did postdoctoral work at the National Institutes of Health, University of Valencia in Spain, and University of Maryland, College Park. Dr. Turner is currently Professor and Departmental Chair of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Yale University, and a faculty member in the Microbiology Graduate Program at Yale School of Medicine. Dr. Turner was elected Councilor for Division R (Evolutionary and Genomic Microbiology) of the American Society for Microbiology, and Councilor for the American Genetic Association, and currently serves on the Biological Sciences Advisory Committee of the National Science Foundation. Dr. Turner was elected chair of several international meetings, including the 2013 Gordon Research Conference on Microbial Population Biology, and the 2018 Jacques Monod Conference on Viral Emergence. He has authored nearly 100 scholarly journal articles, reviews and book chapters, and has served as Associate Editor for journals such as Evolution, and Evolution, Medicine and Public Health. Dr. Turner served on the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) Committees on Biological Confinement of Genetically Engineered Organisms, and NAS Committee on Gene Drive Research in Non-Human Organisms: Recommendations for Responsible Conduct. Dr. Turner’s work involves basic research in microbial evolution and the evolution of infectious diseases, often harnessing laboratory populations of viruses as model systems to study mechanisms of evolutionary change. He also conducts applied research on novel approaches to treat infectious diseases of humans and other organisms. Dr. Turner heads a research group with diverse interests; current members are using microbes to address questions relating to the evolution of genetic exchange (sex), host-parasite interactions, pathogen emergence, virus biogeography, the ecology and evolution of infectious disease, and development of novel antimicrobials. His research program is highly inter-disciplinary, employing techniques from microbiology, population genetics, genomics, molecular biology and mathematical modeling. Dr. Turner’s lab website is: http://turnerlab.yale.edu/
For more information, call 845-758-6822.
Time: 7:00 pm EST/GMT-5
Location: Stevenson Athletic Center, Main Gym