Speaker series marks 50 years of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

The Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology (EEB) will celebrate its 50th year – and the university’s 150th – with a Sesquicentennial Colloquium series in the fall and spring semesters.

Sesquicentennial Colloquium speakers

Fall speakers in the EEB Sesquicentennial Colloquium include:

Sept. 15: William Schlesinger, Ph.D. ’76. President Emeritus, Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies

Sept. 22: Mark Rausher, Ph.D. ’78, professor of biology, Duke University

Sept. 29: Carla Caceres, Ph.D. ’97, professor of animal biology, director, School of Integrative Biology, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Oct. 6: Michelle McClure, Ph.D. ’98, director of the Fishery Resource Analysis and Monitoring Division at the Northwest Fisheries Science Center

Oct. 20: Betty Smocovitis, Ph.D. ’88, professor of history of science and professor of biology, University of Florida, Gainesville

Oct. 27: Justin Meyer ’04, assistant professor, University of California, San Diego

Nov. 10: Rick Harrison, Ph.D. ’77, professor, ecology and evolutionary biology, Cornell

Nov. 17: Rebecca Safran, Ph.D. ’05, assistant professor, University of Colorado, Boulder

Nov. 24: Tim Wootton ’84, professor, ecology and evolution, University of Chicago.

Dec. 1: Andrea Graham, Ph.D. ’01, assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology, Princeton University

All seminars will take place at 12:30 p.m. on Mondays in the Morison Seminar Room, A106 Corson Hall, and all are welcome to attend. Information: Rick Harrison, rgh4@cornell.edu.

The series will bring to Ithaca a selection of graduate and undergraduate alumni who span a broad range of experience, disciplines, educational institutions, and government and nongovernment organizations.

“Cornell’s program in EEB has a long history of excellence, and the 2014-15 seminar series provides a wonderful opportunity to celebrate that history and to allow our current students to interact with alumni who have made important contributions to basic and applied science and to science policy,” said EEB professor Rick Harrison, Ph.D. ’77.

Speakers will include those who use their knowledge to solve real-world problems and some whose research is for the sake new of knowledge. Students and faculty will have the chance to hear about their research and career paths.

“When I attended Cornell, the field of biogeochemistry or ecosystem science was really coming on strong, and Cornell was clearly the best,” said William Schlesinger, Ph.D. ’76, a speaker in the series; he is president emeritus of the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies, a retired Duke professor and a member of the National Academy of Sciences.

Schlesinger was among the first to quantify the amount of carbon held in soil organic matter globally, providing subsequent estimates of the role of soils and human impacts on forests and soils in climate change. “I received all kinds of encouragement at Cornell to study various things that interested me, including chemical cycling of cypress trees in the Okefenokee Forest and, later on, carbon estimation,” Schlesinger said.

At its founding in 1964, the Section of Ecology and Systematics (later renamed the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology) was created as one of five “sections” of the Division of Biological Sciences. The growing faculty became an integrated group that included members of at least six departments in the College of Arts and Sciences and the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences: botany, zoology, natural resources, entomology, history and anthropology.

Michelle McClure, Ph.D. ’98, another speaker, is director of the Fishery Resource Analysis and Monitoring Division for the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration Northwest Fishery Science Center in Seattle.

"I came to Cornell with an interest in birds and physical anthropology,” McClure said. “But I ended up becoming interested in evolutionary questions and connecting with Amy McCune, who told me that her students study fish. So I studied fish. And it worked out well for me.”

McClure’s division provides science to inform the Pacific Fishery Management Council, which establishes guidelines for management of West Coast marine fisheries.

Kathy Hovis is a writer in the College of Arts and Sciences.

 

Media Contact

Melissa Osgood