Tag Archives: human biology

Café Scientifique Vancouver (Canada) talk on August 28th 2018: Getting the message: What is gene expression and why does it matter?

Here’s more about the latest Café Scientifique talk from an August  22, 2018 announcement received via email,

Our next café will happen on TUESDAY, AUGUST 28TH at 7:30PM in the back
room at YAGGER'S DOWNTOWN (433 W Pender [St., Vancouver]). Our speaker for the
evening will be DR. KATIE MARSHALL from the Department of Zoology at
UBC [University of British Columbia]. Her topic will be:

GETTING THE MESSAGE: WHAT IS GENE EXPRESSION AND WHY DOES IT MATTER?

Many of us think that DNA is like a light switch; you have a particular
sequence of base pairs or a particular chromosome, and these directly
cause a large change in biological functioning. But the truth is that
any given gene can be up or downregulated through a dizzying array of
biochemical “dimmer switches” that finely control how much that
particular gene is expressed. Understanding how this works is key to
answering questions like “How does a sequence of base pairs in DNA
become a whole organism?” and “Why is it that every cell has the
same DNA sequence but different function?”. We’ll chat about the
advances in computing needed to answer these questions, the importance
of gene expression in disease, and how this science can help us
understand social issues better too.

I wasn’t able to find out too much more about Dr. Katie but there is this profile page on the UBC Zoology Department website,

The long-term goal of my research is to understand how abiotic stress filters through physiology to shape species abundance and distribution. While abiotic stressors such as temperature have been used very successfully to predict population growth, distribution, and diversity of insect species, integration of the mechanisms of how these stressors are experienced by individuals from alteration of physiology through to fitness impacts has lagged. Inclusion of these mechanisms is crucial for accurate modelling predictions of individual (and therefore population-level) responses. My research to date has focused on how the impact of frequency of stress (rather than the duration or intensity of stress) is a superior predictor of both survival and reproductive success , and used insect cold tolerance as a model system.

At UBC I’ll be focusing on the cold tolerance and cryobiology of invertebrates in the intertidal. These organisms face freezing stress through the winter, yet remarkably little is known about how they do so. I’ll also be investigating plasticity in cold tolerance by looking for interactive effects of ocean acidification and community composition on thermal tolerance.

Enjoy!

Café Scientifique Vancouver (Canada) talk on July 31st. 2018: Test Tubes to Teaching: How Anti-Vaxxers and a Global Financial Crisis Shaped my Career

I received (via email) this Café Scientifique July 15, 2018 notice ,

Our next café will happen on TUESDAY, JULY 31ST at 7:30PM in the back
room at YAGGER’S DOWNTOWN (433 W Pender). Our speaker for the
evening will be DR. NIENKE VAN HOUTEN from THE FACULTY OF HEALTH
SCIENCES AT SFU. Her topic will be:

TEST TUBES TO TEACHING: HOW ANTI-VAXXERS AND A GLOBAL FINANCIAL CRISIS
SHAPED MY CAREER

Part research talk, and part memoir, Dr. van Houten will describe her
career progression from vaccine design scientist to education
researcher. From early childhood, Dr. van Houten developed an
unrelenting interest in human biology and infectious diseases and made
it her goal to become a scientist. Her passion for vaccines came about,
in part, due to the publicity surrounding the infamous retracted paper
in _The Lancet_ that erroneously connected measles vaccination with
autism. Her Ph.D. and postdoctoral research focused on how vaccines
work, and she engineered anti-viral vaccines to produce focused antibody
responses. However, her plan of working in the pharmaceutical industry
was sidelined by the financial crash of 2008, and she was offered a full
time teaching faculty position. This created an opportunity to study how
students think critically about science and apply those findings to
train students to recognize bad science such as that promoted by
anti-vaxxers and other garbage “science” that pervades our society.

We hope to see you there!

I wasn’t able to find out much more about Dr. van Houten and her work but her SFU profile page is here.