The Book of Life:
Adventures in Evolution
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BQM
Leonhardstrasse 34, 8092 Zürich
WEDNESDAY 22nd MAY 2019
DOORS OPEN 6.00PM, EVENT 6.30PM-9.30PM
Nicole Ackermans
PhD Student UZH
Convergent evolution: Made for the environment or by the environment?
Nicole Ackermans studies the evolution of teeth by looking into the mouths of sheep at the Tierspital, University of Zurich.
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Have you ever wondered why bats, birds and bugs all have wings even though they are not closely related? It is because of convergent evolution! This talk will try to explain how similar looking animals originated from very different places and why they look so similar!
This talk will be in English.
Yagmur Erten
PhD Student UZH
What can dinosaurs, birds, and elephants teach us about cancer?
Yagmur is a PhD candidate in the UZH. She is mainly interested in using mathematical and computational models to study evolutionary questions, I'm currently working on modelling life history evolution under cancer risk. Previously, Yagmur has worked on cultural evolution and evolutionary epidemiology, also using theoretical approaches.
Cancer is widespread across the tree of life. To start, she will talk about about what we know about cancer in other species and how looking at cancer in different organisms can improve our understanding of cancer. Then, she will discuss why we need to take cancer risk into account when studying ecology and evolution of species.
This talk will be in English.
Stefan Milosavljevic
PhD Student UZH
Mega-reproduction: trying to understand why 1 + 1 = 1
Stefan is a PhD candidate in the department of Plant Evolution and Bioinformatics at UZH. He is studying how different plant species can cross to generate new species very easily.
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Plants are weird. When a mom plant and a dad plant meet, sometimes they're from different species, sometimes they give all their chromosomes to their child and sometimes both. Stefan is trying to understand how this works.
This talk will be in English.
Andrew Durso
University of Geneva
Activity: snakebite scenarios – how would you react?
Team up to decide how best to treat several snakebite scenarios from around the world. After, snake expert Andrew Durso from the University of Geneva will guide us through the answers & tell us a bit about the snakes of Switzerland.
