© Richard Gilder Graduate School, All Rights Reserved. · Richard Gilder Graduate School · Central Park West at 79th Street, New York, NY 10024
Photography Credits | Design and Development: Wall-to-Wall Studios
Throughout the academic year, the AMNH will present the weekly Museum Seminar Series at which presentations on a variety ofscientific topics will be given by leading scientists, educators and AMNH curators.
During the first year, students will be required to attend each program in the Series and will meet prior to each program for a discussion of the pertinent literature, which they will be expected to have read prior to the lecture, for a total of two hours each week. First year students will earn one credit per semester for a total of two credits. After the first year, students’ participation is not required for credit, but will be strongly encouraged.
Seminars Meet in the Lecture Hall on the following Mondays from 11:00am to noon unless otherwise noted.
RGGS Second- Year Student Symposium (3:00 -5:00 PM)
Dr. Andy Dobson
"The Eye of the Finch: Systems Biology of an Emerging Avian Pathogen"
Dr. Gunther Wagner, Yale University
“Developmental Evolution of Avian and Skink Digit Homology ”
Dr. Thomas Near, Yale University
"Genomic Approaches to Resolving Phylogenies of Antarctic Notothenioid Fishes"
No Seminar – Columbus Day Holiday
Dr. Robert Cox, Dartmouth College
TBA
Dr. Jody Hey, Rutgers University
"On the arbitrary identification of real species"
RGGS Student Symposium, Session 2: S. Kvist and S. Brusatte
Dr. Maureen O’Leary, Stony Brook University
"The origin of whales from land mammals, interpreting new fossil discoveries in the context of molecular and anatomical data"
Dr. Rich Glor, University of Rochester
"The Evolution of Species Richness in Greater Antillean Anolis Lizards"
Dr. Else Fjerdingstad, Queens College- Canceled
Dr. Catherine Graham, Stony Brook University
“Phylogenetic structure in tropical hummingbird communities"
Dr. Jason Munshi-South, Baruch College
"Landscape Genetics of White-footed Mice in NYC"
Dr. Jody Hey, Rutgers University
"On the Arbitrary Identification of Real Species"
Dr. Patrik Nosil, University of Colorado
Ecological Explanations for (Incomplete) Speciation
Dr. Mary Killilea, New York University
"Spatial Ecology of Lyme Disease"
Dr. Doug Futuyma, Stony Brook
TBA
No Seminar – President’s Day Holiday
Dr. Olaf Bininda-Emonds, Carl von Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg
“Making Sense of Mammals: Why Phylogeny Matters”
David Kizirian, AMNH
"The Network Species Model"
Dr. Paul Koch, University of California, Santa Cruz
"Climatically-Driven Changes in the Paleoecology of Elephant Seals and Adélie Penguins from Antarctica"
No seminar- Spring Break
Dr. Apurva Narechania, American Museum of Natural History
"ithink and iam: assessing the strenght of phylogenetic signal in real and random concatentated data sets"
Dr. Kevin DeQueiroz, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institute
"Philosophy of Phylogenetic Inference"
Larry Frank, UCSD
"The Digital Fish Library: Advanced Imaging Methods in Marine Biology Research and Education"
Dr. David Grimaldi, AMNH
"How Time Flies for Flies: An Evolutionary History of the Diptera"
Note: Location- Kauffman Theater
Al Dove, Georgia Aquarium
Title TBA
Jessica Ware, AMNH
Title TBA
The Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at the American Museum of Natural History holds seminars on most Thursdays through the Fall, Winter and Spring. Please refer to the current schedule, and for more details on getting to the seminars, see http://research.amnh.org/eps/seminars.
EPS Seminar Schedule: http://research.amnh.org/eps/seminars/currentschedule
The complex phenomenon that we call life has evolved on an average planet, orbiting an average star, in a very humdrum part of the Milky Way galaxy. Is this an accident? Are there other abodes for life in our galaxy? How has the Earth's history driven the evolution of life? These and related questions will be addressed by the museum's astrophysicists and planetary scientists. The focus will be on processes that constrained and drove evolution on Earth over the past 4.6 Billion years.
All lectures are on Wednesdays, 11:30-12:30 PM
Life as we know it depends on planetary surfaces and energy from stars. But where do these come from? Is it likely that the conditions for life might exist elsewhere? The lecture will cover how stars and planets around them come to be, starting from the homogeneous distribution of gas after the big bang, and proceeding by gravitational collapse to the formation of planetary systems including our own Solar System.
Exoplanetary science, the study of planets exterior to our Solar System, has become a rich sub-field of astronomy. The lecture will review how we know that such planets exist and how we measure the masses and orbital parameters of the most massive exoplanets. These lectures will also cover the state of comparative planetary science and a treatment of the technical problems in conducting the science. This area of research is an attempt to understand what may be the most populous class of objects in the Galaxy, a class that contains the only known natural harbors of what we call life.
Volcanism on Earth and on other bodies in the Solar System exhibits a wide variety of eruption styles and generates a great diversity of resulting landforms, deposit types, and erupted products. This lecture will introduce the essential components common to all forms of volcanic eruptions, the scales of volcanic eruptions that have taken place on Earth and on other bodies, the various hazards to life posed by volcanic eruptions, and the time scales over which volcanism is operative at a given location. The various forms of active volcanism on Earth will also be presented in the broader framework of plate tectonics. Volcanism strongly influences life on Earth. Volcanoes have emitted O, H, C, S, N, and P for billions of years, and volcanic processes destroy biota and simultaneously work to preserve biological materials during fossilization. Moreover, the construction of isolated volcanic islands and their natural biological colonization or recovery following past eruptions provides new ecological niches available for exploitation by surviving or imported biota. Most importantly, perhaps, hydrothermal vent systems associated with ancient analogues of mid-ocean ridge volcanoes may well have been the sites where the precursors to life on Earth were first assembled and the earliest life forms originated.
The nuclides (elements and isotopes) are the most fundamental tracers of cosmochemical, planetary, mineralogical and biological processes. The current understanding of their origin and distribution will be presented, from nucleosynthesis in stars, processing in the interstellar medium, incorporation into our solar system, abundances in meteorites and the sun, and general principles governing the distribution of nuclides on and in planet Earth and her biological systems.
The Earth coalesced in the vicinity of a metal-rich star able to support the complex chemistry needed for life. This benign environment is very different from other parts of the nearby universe, where rogue stars, binary stars, supernova explosions and gamma ray bursts make the development and sustenance of complex life unlikely. These cosmic catastrophes, as well as the violent birth of our massive moon (which may have been essential to the continued existence of animal life on Earth) will be discussed in the context of mass extinctions.
An overview of the rock record (spherules, isotopes, trace elements, geophysics of the crater) of the impact will be presented, as well as the impact process, current understanding of the past impact record and future hazards, and recent efforts to combine chemical, physical, and species survival models to address the detailed field evidence of the K/T impact. Other possible life-affecting impacts will also be discussed.
Among the seminal events to determine surface conditions on the evolving Earth were the development of its crust and the change from an oxygen-poor to oxygen-rich atmosphere. The first crust may date to only two hundred million years from the birth of the planet, as suggested by compositional features of old grains of the mineral zircon, while the oldest known surface rocks are represented by the 3.8 Ga old Isua Supergroup, a sequence of metamorphic rocks of southwest Greenland. The early atmosphere was oxygen-poor and probably contained methane as its dominant greenhouse gas, possibly originating from early methanogens. Beginning about 2.4 Ga ago and over a span of a few hundred million years, the atmosphere oxidized, ultimately leading to a planet with much different surface characteristics. The source of the oxygen was probably photosynthetic organisms, the evidence for which is found in the form of fossil stromatolites dating back to more than 3.4 Ga. The evidence for earliest life, however, is found in the oldest surface rocks at Isua. Evidently early Earth provided a suitable environment for life to begin and haven for its evolution, while life became in intimate player in what we now recognize as the global biogeochemical cycles that determine Earth’s character.
Climate is a dynamic system resulting from the combined interactions of the atmosphere, hydrosphere, cryosphere, biosphere, and lithosphere with one another and with the Sun. The dynamics extend to the chemical and well as physical interactions, as matter flows through the various parts, particularly via the carbon cycle. The critical role of the ocean in the system is emphasized. Climate change occurs over wide scales of time and space and may be due to a variety of external forcing factors, such as buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and changes in orbital parameters, or to internal dynamical phenomena, such as ENSO. The reason for climate change today is reviewed, as are the current and future environmental effects. Distinction is drawn between what is known about climate change and what the future may bring. The latter is unknowable because it depends on scientific uncertainty, economic development, and societal behavior.
A review of the stable isotope characteristics of Earth’s major reservoirs and their evolution through geologic time will be presented. Stable isotope data have routinely been used in paleooceanography and paleoclimatology as proxies for global ice volumes and delineation of glacial interglacial intervals. Over the past 30 years geochemists have recognized through analysis of natural samples and from analysis of the products resulting from controlled experiments on live organisms, that fractionations of isotopes from metabolic activity can account for some of the largest fractionations at low temperatures often resulting in distinct isotopically light compositions. Consequently, an entirely new research subfield in biogeochemistry is related to the search for bio-signatures in ancient geological samples utilizing stable isotope ratio measurements. New experimental and in situ analytical techniques now allow for investigation of stable isotopic compositions at the 10-15 micron scale in both biologic and inorganic materials. The appeal of these in situ measurement techniques is that potentially high resolution records of both temporal and spatial variability in isotopic compositions can now be investigated in natural biologic recorder systems such as calcareous tests, fish otoliths, bone tissue, and biosynthetic minerals.
This lecture will introduce the basic concepts of mineralogy and present an overview of the minerals produced by organisms to make exoskeletons, skeletons, other body parts, stones from soft organs, and excreta, as well as discerning these in the fossil record as opposed to recrystallized copies. Other minerals and substances related to organic systems will be considered, such as amber, coal, shungite, clathrates, admantine, and the potential early substrates for life–clays, manganese oxides, etc.
The American Museum of Natural History will host SCCS-NY, the Student Conference on Conservation Science, in New York City on 3-5 November 2010.
Designed for graduate students and recent post-doctoral fellows, the conference specifically targets those pursuing or considering careers in conservation science. Students will interact with established leaders in science, policy, and management during three days of presentations, posters, workshops, and networking events. For more information, please visit http://symposia.cbc.amnh.org/sccsny/.
Those wishing to apply to attend this conference should have completed, or be conducting a research project. Projects from any conservation-related course of study will be considered, including programs in the natural and social sciences and the humanities. Selection for participation in the conference will be based on the quality of one’s application as well as its relevance to conservation. Applications will be accepted through Monday, 10 May 2010.
To apply, please go to http://symposia.cbc.amnh.org/sccsny/.
A list of plenary speakers and workshop topics will be posted in the coming weeks.
For more information, please contact Fiona Brady, Outreach Program Coordinator for the Center for Biodiversity and Conservation American Museum of Natural History at brady@amnh.org or visit http://cbc.amnh.org/.
© Richard Gilder Graduate School, All Rights Reserved. · Richard Gilder Graduate School · Central Park West at 79th Street, New York, NY 10024
Photography Credits | Design and Development: Wall-to-Wall Studios
