All hands on deck: Science in the time of coronavirus
How do we trace the origins of viral outbreaks? How do viruses change hosts? What can evolution tell us how long a recovered person will be immune before reinfection? And how do a marine biologist and a fungal geneticist end up working together on virus evolution? This week, join Drs. Jeffrey Townsend (Yale University) and Alex Dornburg (Museum and UNC Charlotte) for an informal conversation about how scientists have mobilized to face evolving threats to human health.
Our Speakers
Dr. Alex Dornburg is a self-described “fish nerd,” a former curator of Ichthyology at the NC Museum of Natural Sciences, and just started as an assistant professor of bioinformatics and genomics at UNC Charlotte. He has conducted fieldwork around the globe — from SCUBA-based work in the Caribbean and Japan to living aboard a commercial fishing vessel in Antarctica. He is currently working to unravel the genetic origins of the immune system, reveal why fish brains are so weird, and illuminate how life persists in the cold, dark waters of Antarctica.
Dr. Jeffrey Townsend is a former elementary, middle, and high school teacher who has a PhD studying variation in natural populations of Italian wine yeasts. He had a stint as a Miller Fellow studying “bread mold” in the Department of Plant and Microbial Biology at the University of California, Berkeley, before working as a professor of molecular and cell biology at the University of Connecticut and a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Yale. He now works in biostatistics at the Yale School of Public Health on the evolution of cancer. He has conducted research on what is known, unknown, and unknowable using evolutionary science.
#Science #Coronavirus
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