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Special Events

Dinner & A Movie: ‘The Making of the Fittest: Evolving Switches, Evolving Bodies’

Friday 5:45 PM, Courtyard
Movie Summary

Following dinner, join HHMI Scientist-Educator, Laura Bonetta, Ph.D., for a special screening of the short film “The Making of the Fittest: Evolving Switches, Evolving Bodies,” one in a series crafted to engage students with memorable examples of the evolutionary process in action.

After the end of the last ice age, 10,000 years ago, populations of marine stickleback fish became stranded in freshwater lakes dotted throughout the northern Hemisphere, in places of natural beauty like Alaska and British Columbia. These remarkable little fish have adapted and thrive, living permanently in a freshwater environment drastically different than the ocean. This film tells the story of the dramatic transformation of stickleback living in lakes, with fish in some populations completely losing long projecting body spines that defend them from large predators. Various scientists, including David Kingsley and Michael Bell, have studied populations of freshwater threespine sticklebacks and identified key genes and genetic switches involved in the evolution of body transformation. They have even documented the evolutionary change over thousands of years by studying a remarkable fossil record from the site of an ancient lake. Watch the film and learn about complementary classroom materials. Dr. Bonetta will take your questions.

Speaker Description

Laura Bonetta obtained her PhD from the University of Toronto in 1992. After a postdoctoral fellowship at the Imperial Cancer Research Fund in London, UK, she left bench research in molecular biology to become an editor for the scientific journal Nature. That experience led to editorial positions at Molecular Medicine, Nature Medicine and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI). From 2000-2012, Dr. Bonetta was a freelance writer and editor and a regular contributor to Nature, Science, Cell and several National Institutes of Health (NIH) publications. In February 2012, she joined the Educational Resources Group at HHMI where she develops multimedia science education resources for the classroom.

Saturday Morning Conversation:
Making Data Discoverable and Accessible for Inquiry

Saturday 7:45 AM – 8:15 AM, Room 155

Please join Dr. Tanya Dewey for coffee and conversation about an upcoming Research Coordination Network Incubator meeting organized by the Animal Diversity Web (animaldiversity.org) and recently funded by NSF. Coffee and Continental breakfast will be available in the lobby near the registration desk. This upcoming meeting will focus on strategies for enhancing data discovery and ways to make those data more usable in inquiry-based biology teaching. It will bring together two communities critical in expanding student access to authentic science experiences: managers of data repositories and education specialists. Representatives from at least 15 organizations will participate in a two-day workshop to discuss strategies for enhancing data discovery and usability and how best to incorporate authentic data in inquiry-based teaching in biology.

The meeting will tackle the following questions:

  1. What are the challenges associated with data sharing across biological databases?
  2. What are potential and practical solutions to enable data sharing?
  3. How can datasets be enhanced to facilitate their discovery and usability in educational contexts?
  4. How can education organizations best share practices and experiences to enable authentic inquiry and enhance their effectiveness.

We look forward to feedback and recommendations from the community.

The information gathered during this Coffee Conversation will be used in further conversation that are part of a recently awarded NSF Research Coordination Network Incubator project which will bring together two communities critical in expanding student access to authentic science experiences: managers of data repositories and education specialists. Representatives from at least 15 organizations will participate in a two-day workshop to discuss strategies for enhancing data discovery and usability and how best to incorporate authentic data in inquiry-based teaching in biology.

Additional information on this project, including the full project description, information on participating organizations, and the meeting agenda and goals as they are developed, are available on the project website: Data in Inquiry (https://sites.google.com/a/umich.edu/dataininquiry/). The NSF award abstract is available here: http://nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1247821.