Academic
Wednesday, April 11, 2018
“Beyond Editing: Exploring and Engineering a Living Genome Using a Dead Molecule”
Seminar | April 11 | 12-1 p.m. | 106 Stanley Hall
Stanley Qi, Stanford University
Synthetic manipulation of the genome is key to understanding the genetic makeup of living organisms, and holds great promise for curing diseases. Despite significant advances of CRISPR technology development to editing the genome sequence or regulating gene expression, genome engineering, broadly defined, is still in its infancy for studying and engineering diverse features inherent to the... More >
Plant and Microbial Biology Plant Seminar: "Ants, agriculture, and antibiotics"
Seminar | April 11 | 12-1 p.m. | 101 Barker Hall
Cameron Currie, University of Wisconsin - Madison
Department of Plant and Microbial Biology
Our research focuses on the ecology and evolution of symbiotic associations between animals and microbes. We utilize a cross-disciplinary approach incorporating ecological, evolutionary, behavioral, genetic, and microbiological approaches and employ molecular ecology and phylogenetic techniques to examine how microbes shape the biology of higher organisms.
Dirt Matters: Healthy Soil for a Productive and Sustainable California
Seminar | April 11 | 12-1 p.m. | UC Center Sacramento, Room LL3
1130 K Street, Sacramento, CA 95814
Timothy Bowles, Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management at UC Berkeley
Soil “health” is a metaphor that captures an essential parallel between soils and our own health: soils that are poorly-cared for will have shorter lifespans and require increasing levels of intervention to deliver the functions we require. Many agricultural practices common in California and worldwide degrade soil health rather than maintain or improve it, threatening long-term agricultural... More >
Building Segregation: The Role of Housing Characteristics in Racial Segregation between Neighborhoods.: Ann Owens, Department of Sociology, USC
Colloquium | April 11 | 12-1 p.m. | 2232 Piedmont, Seminar Room
Ann Owens, Professor, Department of Sociology, USC
Population Science, Department of Demography
A lunch time talk and discussion session, featuring visiting and local scholars presenting their research on a wide range of topics of interest to demography.
2018 CITRIS Research Exchange talk with Erik Henricson: CITRIS Spring 2018 Research Exchange Series
Seminar | April 11 | 12-1 p.m. | 310 Sutardja Dai Hall
Erik K. Henricson, Associate Director for Clinical Research, UC Davis
CITRIS and the Banatao Institute
Erik K. Henricson’s work is focused on development of assessments for clinical trials, conduct of “bench-to-bedside” translational research, epidemiologic “natural history” studies of neuromuscular disease, and assessment of community mobility.
MVZ LUNCH SEMINAR - Ravinder Sehgal: Avian malaria in a changing world
Seminar | April 11 | 12-1 p.m. | Valley Life Sciences Building, 3101 VLSB, Grinnell-Miller Library
MVZ Lunch is a graduate level seminar series (IB264) based on current and recent vertebrate research. Professors, graduate students, staff, and visiting researchers present on current and past research projects. The seminar meets every Wednesday from 12- 1pm in the Grinnell-Miller Library. Enter through the MVZ's Main Office, 3101 Valley Life Sciences Building, and please let the receptionist... More >
Cultural variation in social judgments of smiles: The role of ideal affect
Colloquium | April 11 | 12:10-1:15 p.m. | 5101 Tolman Hall
Jeanne Tsai, Professor, Stanford University
Institute of Personality and Social Research
In this talk, I will describe a series of studies demonstrating that cultural differences in how people ideally want to feel (their “ideal affect”) shape how they judge and treat others. Consistent with previous findings that European Americans value excitement states more than East Asians do, European Americans judge open toothy "excited" smiles (vs. closed "calm" smiles) as more affiliative... More >
Back Talk: Less Stress on Your Back (BEUHS404)
Workshop | April 11 | 12:10-1:30 p.m. | Tang Center, University Health Services, Class of '42
Mallory Lynch, Campus Ergonomist, Ergonomics@Work
Learn new ways of performing daily activities with less stress to your back. Practice some useful stretching and strengthening exercises. Wear comfortable clothing.
Professional Ethics, Torture and Accountability
Panel Discussion | April 11 | 12:45-2 p.m. | 170 Boalt Hall, School of Law
Berkeley Law Committee Against Torture, Human Rights Center
Is political dissent unprofessional? This panel will reflect upon the ethical obligations of doctors, psychologists, and lawyers who find themselves serving states that engage in torture. Panelists will weigh the relative merits of working to curb abuses from within government and publicly speaking out against odious practices. The panel will also consider the civic duties of professionals in the... More >
Topology Seminar (Introductory Talk): Contact structures in Heegaard Floer theory
Seminar | April 11 | 2-3 p.m. | 740 Evans Hall
Shea Vela-Vick, LSU
Evidence of deep connections between contact geometry and Heegaard Floer theory has steadily mounted since the latter theory first appeared a little over a decade ago. In one direction, Heegaard Floer homology supports an invariant which is capable of distinguishing contact structures and detecting tightness. In the other, much of the algebraic structure Heegaard Floer possesses reflects... More >
A unifying framework for constructing MCMC algorithms from irreversible diffusion processes
Seminar | April 11 | 3:10-4 p.m. | 1011 Evans Hall
Yian Ma, U. C. Berkeley
In this talk, I will first present a general recipe for constructing MCMC algorithms from diffusion processes with the desired stationary distributions. The recipe translates the task of finding valid continuous Markov processes into one of choosing two matrices. Importantly, any diffusion process with the target stationary distribution (given an integrability condition) can be represented in our... More >
Pre-mRNA splicing, chromatin modification, and the coordinated control of gene expression
Seminar | April 11 | 3:30-4:30 p.m. | 100 Genetics & Plant Biology Building
Tracy Johnson, University of California, Los Angeles
Remotely sensed canopy water content as a predictor for tree mortality
Colloquium | April 11 | 3:30-5 p.m. | 575 McCone Hall
Alexandra Konings, Professor, Stanford University
The rate of drought-induced tree mortality has been observed to increase across the world, and is expected to continue to increase dramatically as temperatures (and evaporative demand) rise. Increased drought stress, however, will not lead to mortality everywhere, and in situ monitoring of this heterogeneous process is cumbersome and expensive. Predicting where droughts will lead to tree... More >
Applied Math Seminar: Mesoscale Networks: from Microstructure Evolution to Material Properties
Seminar | April 11 | 4-5 p.m. | 740 Evans Hall
Wei Cai, Stanford University
A major challenge in materials science is to understand and control the properties of materials based on the microstructure evolution at the mesoscale. For a wide range of materials, the relevant microstructures consist of a network of line objects. In this talk, I will use three examples to illustrate how the study of geometric/topological features of line networks can help us understand the... More >
ERG Colloquium: George Roderick: Moorea Island Digital Ecosystem Avatar (IDEA): Modeling a Complex Island Ecosystem to Achieve Sustainability”
Colloquium | April 11 | 4-5:30 p.m. | 126 Barrows Hall
George Roderick, Professor and Chair, Environmental Science, Policy, and Management
Island Digital Ecosystem Avatars (IDEA) Project is to build functioning digital simulations, ‘avatars’, of model islands, as a model to scale up to larger organizational units, with the outcome that communities and countries manage their ecosystem wellness and avoiding the social consequences of ecological collapse.
Microsoft Azure University Tour
Workshop | April 11 | 4-7:15 p.m. | Memorial Stadium, Field Club
Office of the CIO (Chief Information Officer)
Want to know where the cloud can take you? Microsoft can show you.
We’re excited to announce the Azure University Tour is coming and you’re invited! This is a free learning event for student developers, faculty, and staff where you’ll code alongside industry experts, boost your skills, and test new technology.
No matter your career path, the cloud is likely to be central to it, and the... More >
Topology Seminar (Main Talk): Knot Floer homology and fibered knots
Seminar | April 11 | 4-5 p.m. | 3 Evans Hall
Shea Vela-Vick, LSU
We prove that the knot Floer homology of a fibered knot is nontrivial in its next-to-top Alexander grading. Immediate applications include a new proof that L-space knots prime and a classification of knots 3-manifolds with rank 3 knot Floer homology. We will also discuss a numerical refinement of the Ozsvath-Szabo contact invariant. This is joint work with John Baldwin.
Structure and catalytic role of Ga(III) cations exchanged in Ga/H-MFI, during the dehydrogenation and dehydrocylization of light alkanes/The effect of residual lithium carbonate on the outgassing of Li-ion batteries
Colloquium | April 11 | 4-6 p.m. | 180 Tan Hall
Neelay Phadke, Ph.D. student in the Bell Group; Sara Renfrew, Ph.D. student in the McCloskey Group
Torture and Human Rights Since 1945
Seminar | April 11 | 4-6 p.m. | 201 Moses Hall
Barbara Keys, University of Melbourne
Institute of International Studies, Department of History
On Wednesday, April 11, the Berkeley Global History Seminar will host Barbara Keys, one of the discipline’s leading historians of international affairs. Keys received her Ph.D. from Harvard and is now Professor of History at the University of Melbourne. Her research and publications touch on a wide variety of issues, including human rights, the influence of transnational movements and... More >
Using visualisation to understand R theory
Seminar | April 11 | 4-5 p.m. | 10 Evans Hall | Note change in location
Hadley Wickham, RStudio
In this talk, I will introduce the lobstr package which provides tools to visualise R's data structures on the command line. I'll show three R functions ast(), cst(), and ref() and use them to discuss three important components of R's theory:
1. All R code possesses a tree like structure, known as the abstract
syntax tree.
2. R's lazy evaluation introduces a tree-like structure into the... More >
New Roles for Protein Methylation in Cell Signaling and Disease
Seminar | April 11 | 4:10-5 p.m. | 114 Morgan Hall
Or Gozani, Stanford University
Habits of Power: Science Politics in Anti-Science Times, Race Politics in Anti-Racist Times
Colloquium | April 11 | 4:30 p.m. | 2538 Channing (Inst. for the Study of Societal Issues)
Duana Fullwiley, Associate Professor of Anthropology, Stanford University
Berkeley Center for Social Medicine, The Joint Berkeley-UCSF Program in Medical Anthropology
In contemporary race politics, two dynamics characterize the present moment. The first is that the concepts of both race and science are up for fierce debate about the degree to which specific identity politics power them.The second is that the continued edification of race may beget further belief in its immutability and physical reality at the genetic level.
Demystifying the Research Process: Decolonizing Methods in Humanities Research (Hosted by UROC: Underrepresented Researchers of Color)
Workshop | April 11 | 5:30-7 p.m. | 442 Stephens Hall
Istifaa Ahmed (Humanities/Social Science), Alexa Aburto (Humanities)
Office of Undergraduate Research
The Underrepresented Researchers of Color (UROC) and the American Cultures (AC) Center are proud to present Decolonizing Methods in Humanities Research, from our three-part workshop series, Demystifying the Research Process. Humanities research applies to anyone wishing to study human culture and creations – including the arts, literature, policy, and more... More >
