Grand Challenges Symposium

Scaling up Science: designing research that ranges from genes to ecosystems

Beginn: 05.10.2020 14:45
Ende: 09.10.2020 18:30
Ort: Virtual Symposium
Raum: Where ever you are!
Gastgeber: IMPRS for Organismal Biology
Kontakt: imprs@uni-konstanz.de

Our annual Grand Challenges Symposia focus each year on a specific area of interest in the wide range of topics from animal behavior, ecology, and evolution to physiology and neurobiology, suggested by the doctoral candidates of our IMPRS. The symposia consist of a series of talks by guest speakers, faculty and students of our program and represent the inaugural event for the latest student cohort.

This year, our Grand Challenges Symposium focuses on "Scaling up Science: designing research that ranges from genes to ecosystems"

Over the last 160 years, the natural sciences have plunged into the depths of genetics, evolution, behavior, and ecology to explain the diversity of life, the interactions of different species, and how life persists over time. This crusade for knowledge produces endless information on a verity of topics but also results in natural scientists limiting their investigations to a single scale. With so much information available on each subtopic of biology, it has become increasingly difficult to be a jack-of-all-trades researcher. Researchers become masters of their craft at one scale without considering the implications of their work at a higher scale. Thus, a Grand Challenge of the natural sciences is how to design research that uses studies at multiple scales to answer a central question. In short, this symposium is meant to examine how scientists design research that ranges from genes to ecosystems.

We are very pleased and honoured to announce the following keynote speakers:
- Alison Bell (University of Illinois, USA)
- Elena Gracheva (Yale School of Medicine, USA)
- Walter Jetz (Yale University, USA)
- Catherine Peichel (University of Bern, Switzerland)
- Dustin Rubenstein (Columbia University, USA)