Sponsored by UCMP, the National Center for Science Education, and the Beacon Center for the Study of Evolution in Action
Think Evolution III: A summer institute for science educators

Calling all middle school, high school, and community college biology teachers and science educators!

Put on your evolution eyeglasses and your nature of science thinking cap and join us for (yet another) fun-filled five days of evolutionary explorations with biologists and educators at the University of California. The Think Evolution Summer Institute, returning for its third year, will combine lectures by prominent evolutionary biologists with sessions focused on hands-on activities for the middle school, high school, and community college classroom. Topics this year to include: Evolution and Climate Change, Island Biogeography, Epigenetics, Ecological and Evolutionary Speciation and Genetics, Sexual Selection, and Primate Evolution.

Monday through Friday, August 1–5, 2011
UC Museum of Paleontology, Valley Life Sciences Building, UC Berkeley
9:00 am to 3:00 pm

$75.00 for five days; includes lots of free resources distributed to participating teachers plus morning and afternoon snacks.

** The program is FULL and REGISTRATION IS CLOSED as of May 31, 2011 **

Institute schedule

About the speakers

Kim Bostwick received her Ph.D. from the University of Kansas in 2002, and since then has worked as the curator of birds and mammals at the Cornell University Museum of Vertebrates. Her research focuses on avian behavior, wing morphology, and evolution of non-vocal acoustic signals in birds. Her research program has allowed Bostwick to travel all over Central and South America, South Africa, and Papua New Guinea to record audio and video of birds producing non-vocal sounds. In 2005 Bostwick was featured in Nature's three-part series, "Deep Jungles," in which she danced like a Red-capped Manakin to the tune of Michael Jackson's "Billy Jean." This video clip was extracted and posted to YouTube where it went viral and has been viewed millions of times, spawned many knock-offs, and brought great fame and fans to an otherwise little known bird.

Rosemary G. Gillespie is a Professor in Environmental Science and Director of the Essig Museum of Entomology. She did her undergraduate degree in Zoology at Edinburgh, Scotland — her country of origin. She came to the U.S. to do her Ph.D. at the University of Tennessee, after which she spent 13 years at the University of Hawaii before coming to Berkeley. She is currently President-elect of the International Biogeography Society and President of the American Arachnological Society. Her research uses islands to assess the combined temporal and spatial dimension of biogeography and determine patterns of species proliferation.

Rick Grosberg is a Professor of Evolution & Ecology in the College of Biological Sciences at UC Davis. He received his PH.D. from Yale University. He primarily studies marine invertebrates — including anemones, hydroids, sea squirts, and snails — and his approach involves field and lab experiments, molecular genetics, population genetics, and phylogenetics, plus a very modest amount of modelling. His research centers on "building an understanding of the behavioral, ecological, cellular, developmental, and genetic mechanisms that limit conflict and promote the evolution of cooperation." He was the recipient of the 2010 UC Davis Prize for Undergraduate Teaching and Scholarly Achievement.

Leslea Hlusko is an Associate Professor in the Department of Integrative Biology at UC Berkeley. She received her Ph.D. from Pennsylvania State University in 2000. Her research investigates how genes influence skeletal variation and how that has evolved through time, with a special interest in understanding our own evolution. She teaches a large undergraduate course on human biological variation and spends a lot of time in East Africa looking for fossils of our ancestors as she co-directs a project at Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania.

Han Lim is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Integrative Biology at UC Berkeley. He received his medical degree from the University of Queensland in Australia and has a Ph.D. from the Department of Pediatrics, University of Cambridge. He was a post-doctoral fellow at MIT in the Department of Physics before joining the faculty at UC Berkeley in 2005. His current research explores the intersection of genetic, epigenetic and environmental factors in pathways that control bacterial cell differentiation to better understand bacterial pathogenesis and to provide tools for the rational construction of synthetic circuits and genomes.

Charles R. Marshall arrived in Berkeley in 2010 to become a Professor in Integrative Biology and the Director of the University of California Museum of Paleontology. A native Australian, Professor Marshall did his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago and an NIH post-doc in evo-devo at Indiana University before serving eight years at UCLA and ten years as a Professor of Biology and Geology at Harvard University. He has pathologically broad interests, from the Cambrian explosion to understanding how biodiversity changes on geologic timescales. Most of his current work is centered on understanding how the fossil record can be used to inform our understanding of ecology and evolution.

Steven Newton is Programs and Policy Director with the National Center for Science Education, Inc., in Oakland, CA, an organization devoted to defending the teaching of evolution in public schools. His day-to-day work at the NCSE involves dealing directly with parents, teachers, and students who are grappling with outbreaks of creationism in public schools. When parents discover that their kid's high school biology teacher is using creationist materials, Newton is one of the people parents can turn to for help.

David Reznick (Ph.D., Biology, University of Pennsylvania, 1980) is a Professor of Biology at the University of California, Riverside. Dr. Reznick was a research associate at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia and the University of Maryland before joining the faculty at UC Riverside in 1984. He began his research career with the primary goal of testing facets of evolutionary theory with experiments performed on natural populations. His primary study organism is guppies and the home of most of his research is the Northern Range Mountains of Trinidad. He is also interested in the evolution of complex traits and has worked on the evolution of placentas in the fish family Poeciliidae (which includes guppies).

Andy Sih is a professor of Environmental Science & Policy at UC Davis. He is a past President and current Fellow of the international Animal Behavior Society, and an active contributor to the interface between ecology, evolution and behavior. His research focuses on the evolution of behaviors that have important effects on ecological interactions that explain why some individuals and some species do well, and others not so well in any given natural or human-altered environment. For the last decade, he has been one of the leaders in studying the ecological and evolutionary implications of "animal personalities" — the fact that even very "simple" organisms exhibit consistent individual differences in behavioral type, e.g., in boldness, aggressiveness or sociability. His latest interest is in working out why some animals "get it" and do well when faced with novel environments associated with humans (with human-induced rapid environmental change, HIREC), while others do not get it, and thus do not do well with us.