Showing posts with label UCDavis. Show all posts
Showing posts with label UCDavis. Show all posts

Thursday, January 15, 2015

UC Davis MARS Symposium Wrap Up #globalfood #UCDavisMARS

Yesterday I went to a symposium at UC Davis that was the launching of a new partnership between UC Davis and the Mars Corporation. I note - I have been collaborating with some people at Mars on multiple microbiome related projects and generally have had great interactions with the people there. I am not directly involved in the planning for this new partnership between UC Davis and Mars and thus I was interested in hearing more about it at the symposium.

The symposium was at the Mondavi Center on UC Davis campus and I zipped in on my bike through the cold (for Davis) air and got there just before they opened the doors to the main theater. I saw a few folks I knew milling around in the lobby and said hello and then went inside with some people from my lab for the "show".

 I will try to write more about this later but just one note - I found some of the big picture discussions about the importance of the nexus between food, agriculture and health to be pretty inspiring. For now - I hope the Storify I made and embedded below will give some idea as to the goings on of the symposium.

Monday, October 13, 2014

Talk for UC Davis Pre-Health Meeting (#UCDPHSA): Opening up to Diversity

Sunday I gave a talk at the "12th National UC Davis Pre-Health Student Alliance Pre-Medical and Pre-Health Professions Conference".  I normally try to not give talks on weekends (to spend time with my family) but I made an exception here since this meeting has a strong commitment to issues relating to diversity in health and STEM fields.  This mission statement for the meeting reads:
The UC Davis Pre-Health Student Alliance’s objective is to introduce and support academic, admission, and preparatory opportunities for all students interested in health professions with a focus on those underrepresented in healthcare (with regard to gender, economic, social, educational, linguistic, cultural, racial, and ethnic background). We target universities, community colleges and high schools throughout the United States. The UC Davis Pre-Health Student Alliance aims to impact health education, increase diversity amongst the healthcare workforce, and inspire future leaders of healthcare through hosting the largest national pre-health professions conference.
It was that mission statement that got me to ditch my wife and kids Sunday AM (and also much of Saturday PM for a dinner and to work on my talk).  I went to a dinner Saturday for some of the speakers with the new Dean of the UC Davis School of Medicine Julie Freischlag.  The dinner had about 20 or so people and I met some quite interesting folks there working on various aspects of human and animal health.

And then Sunday AM I got up early, decided to use slides (was not sure) and finished off the slide set I had worked on the night before.  I decided that, in the spirit of the meeting, I would talk about two main things - diversity and access.  And I planned to tell three stories about my work in this area.  I wove in some personal stories since, at the dinner the night before Barbara Ross-Lee (who I sat next to) helped remind me of the importance of making talks personal.  So in the end I talked about myself, diabetes, diversity of microbes, antibiotics, diversity in STEM, and open science.  I came up with a title I was OK with: Opening up to Diversity.

My talk went well, I think.  I am pretty sure it was vbideotaped but not sure where that recording will end up. I did however post my slides to slideshare.  See below:



Opening up to Diversity talk by @phylogenomics at #UCDPHSA from Jonathan Eisen

And I also recorded the talk using Camtasia (basically, it allows recording of the screen, the video camera on my computer, and the audio).  I posted the recording (without the video feed which shows mostly my neck) to Youtube.  See below:




Tuesday, August 27, 2013

#UCDavis Department of Evolution & Ecology Faculty Search for an "Ecologist"


ECOLOGIST, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, DAVIS -- The College of Biological Sciences, University of California, Davis invites applications and nominations for a tenure-track position in the Department of Evolution and Ecology at the ASSISTANT PROFESSOR level. Candidates must have a Ph.D. (or equivalent) in the biological sciences or related fields. We seek a terrestrial or freshwater ecologist with research interests that will complement and build upon existing faculty strengths to address important ecological questions. We welcome applicants who address important ecological questions at any spatial or temporal scale.   We seek a colleague who is committed to participating in the departmental community through collaborative teaching, research, service and graduate mentoring. Letters of recommendation should specifically address this aspect of the application. The successful candidate will be expected to teach in undergraduate and graduate programs, and should be committed to mentoring and fostering diversity. Applicants should submit materials online at


which contains additional information about the position. These should include: cover letter, curriculum vitae, description of current and projected research, summary of teaching interests and experience, and three publications. Applicants should also provide the information requested for three referees (fourth referee optional). Once entered, applicants will electronically request letters from referees who will then be prompted by email with upload instructions for their letters. Closing Date: Open until filled, but all application materials, including letters of recommendation, must be received by October 15th, 2013 to assure full consideration. Administrative contact: Carla Munoz (camunoz@ucdavis.edu). Faculty contacts: Jay Stachowicz (jjstachowicz@ucdavis.edu), Sharon Strauss (systrauss@ucdavis.edu). The University of California is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action Employer with a strong institutional commitment to the development of a climate that supports equality of opportunity and respect for differences.

Saturday, May 18, 2013

Thanks to Software Carpentry (@swcarpentry) for coming to #UCDavis

Quick post here.  Jenna Lang in my lab has a post at microBEnet about the recent workshop that the Software Carpentry folks ran at UC Davis: Software Carpentry comes to UC Davis! | microBEnet: The microbiology of the Built Environment network.  It was a major success.  For those who don't know Software Carpentry's mission is is to build basic computing skills among researchers.  From their web site:
Software Carpentry helps researchers be more productive by teaching them basic computing skills. We run boot camps at dozens of sites around the world, and also provide open access material online for self-paced instruction. The benefits are more reliable results and higher productivity: a day a week is common, and a ten-fold improvement isn't rare.
A great idea and done really well.  Others out there should consider hosting or attending one of their Boot Camps and checking out their materials on their web site.  See for example their videos and their reading list and their lessons.  They really do great things ...

Wednesday, January 09, 2013

Notes from talk by Stephen J. O'Brien at #UCDavis

Stephen O' Brien talked at UC Davis a few days ago. I met with him in the afternoon before his talk. It was one of the more interesting discussions I have had in a long time. He has done some very interesting and important work (e.g., comparative genomics, HIV, feline evolution) though most of what we talked about was not work per se (e.g., we talked a lot about baseball and big cats since my kids are obsessed with big cats).

Anyway, below is a "Storification" of tweets from his talk. Best part - he signed a copy of his Tears of the Cheetah: The Genetic Secrets of Our Animal Ancestors book with a dedication to my kids.

Wednesday, April 04, 2012

PLOTS (publiclaboratory.org) is coming to #DavisCA

DIY Science & Citizen Science & Open Science all rolled into one -PLOTS is coming to Davis, CA & UC Davis.  See  Davis - publiclaboratory.org for more information.

Saturday, March 24, 2012

12 hours of me: Slideshows w/ audio from "BIS2C: Biodiversity & the Tree of Life" at #UCDavis

Well, it has taken a few months of processing but I have finally gotten my lectures from the introductory biology course I teach uploaded in some way to share.  The course is "BIS2C: Biodiversity and the Tree of Life" and it is the third quarter of a three quarter introductory biology series at UC Davis.  Each year some 2300 or so students take this series which means that we at UC Davis have to offer each of the courses (BIS2A, BIS2B, and BIS2C) each quarter.   Every fall I co-teach BIS2C.  Alas we do not have a lecture hall big enough for 700 students, so we do the course in two sections.  The way we teach it each of the faculty double up and teach their part of the course to each section.  The course also has a weekly lab.  It is a machine of sorts.

This fall I taught 13 lectures for the course.  I covered basically phylogenetic methods, the big picture of the tree of life, and microbial diversity.  I used the Apple presentation program Keynote for slides for my lectures and I used the "Record Slideshow" option to record audio in synch with the slides.  After a bit of pain, I managed to convert these recordings into video and then posted them to Youtube.  And today I am sharing them with you.  There are imperfections of course.  But I thought some might find them useful.  Plus I have made a YouTube playlist for all the lectures if you want to just sit down and enjoy 12 hours or so of me.  Now if only Youtube would allow me to change the thumbnail image for each lecture ...  Plus I note - next year I will be doing much more interactive learning in class so this may be the last record of some of these lectures ...

Lecture 1: Introduction to Course and the Tree of Life


Lecture 2: Trees, Taxa and Groups




Friday, February 17, 2012

Results of #UCDavis Faculty Resolutions released re: Katehi, Pepper Spray, #OccupyUCDavis

Just received the three emails below regarding results of three UC Davis Faculty Senate Resolutions regarding the pepper spray incident from November and thought they might be of some interest.  See this post for a little background.  

REPORT OF THE DAVIS DIVISION OF THE ACADEMIC SENATE COMMITTEE ON ELECTIONS, RULES AND JURISDICTION

On December 20, 2011, a petition bearing the signatures of at least 50 members of the Davis Division of the Academic Senate of the University of California was submitted asking that the following Motion Concerning Police Actions be voted on by the membership of the Davis Division (tenure/tenure-track faculty of the UC Davis Campus):

Thursday, February 09, 2012

Wanted - input on voting for resolutions for the #UCDavis Academic Senate #OccupyUCDavis

Well today I am finally getting around to voting on some UC Davis Academic Senate resolutions relating to the Occupy UC Davis pepper spray incident.  For those not familiar with this - first - I offer you my undying love - second - here are some of my previous posts on the theme:

I wrote a lot about the pepper spray incident here and on twitter - I felt in many ways like I had to report on what was going on for the outside world.  Here are some of my key posts:
And then Winter break happened and things calmed down a bit at UC Davis.  Plus, I got busy and needed to go back to running my lab and doing some work.  Not that nothing happened during this time.  Lots did in fact.  The best place to find out about what happened is the Davis Enterprise which continued coverage of everything going on (see list on the right side of this page).

Catching up to today - now the issue (for me and other faculty/members of the Academic Senate) is that we have to vote on some resolutions regarding the pepper spray incident.

Below are the three for which I am supposed to vote.  I am asking anyone out there for input on these.  All of them seem pretty, well, lame to me and I am inclined to vote no on all of them.  But I am reserving judgement and looking for feedback from others out there.  Any comments / suggestions welcome.

Sunday, February 05, 2012

Fun visit to the #UCDavis Bohart Entomology Museum w/ my daughter's Daisy Troop (led by my wife)

Kudos to the UC Davis Bohart Museum of Entomology for the tour they gave to the Daisy Troop my daughter is in (which is run by my wife and a friend of hers). I got there a little late and embarrassed myself by thinking one of the dads was one of the museum workers and introducing myself (even though I know the dad pretty well).  Oh well, live and let learn.  The visit went great - the kids got to play with bugs, got to open the stacks and even pull out drawers of various bugs (note - the general term, not the Homoptera).  The museum staff were wonderful and the museum itself is very nice.  A great kids activity in Davis and good for adults too.  Always great to see passionate science education and outreach.


Thursday, January 19, 2012

Draft post cleanup #21: Tracking progress on the vertebrate tree of life

Yet another post in my "draft blog post cleanup" series. Here is #21; from March 2010:

A very interesting paper came out recently from colleagues of mine at UC Davis:  Rapid progress on the vertebrate tree of life.  I did not know they were working on this but perhaps should have.  It has some fun/interesting analysis of the accumulation of phylogenetic knowledge over time.  For example see Figure 1

Cumulative phylogenetic information amassed for the last 16 years. The accumulation of sequences for vertebrates in GenBank (a), papers using the term 'phylogeny' or 'phylogenetics' in the Web of Science database (b) and phylogenetic resolution (measured as the proportion of nodes with at least 50% bootstrap support) in the vertebrate tree of life resulting from these research efforts (c). In all cases, the data are cumulative from the start of each analysis. Phylogenetic resolution is calculated as in Table 1. Trend lines are exponential in (a), and second order polynomial in (b) and (c).

Thursday, January 12, 2012

Storification of Tweets from talk by Jane Lubchenco at #UCDavis

Jane Lubchenco, head of NOAA, gave a talk at UC Dav is yesterday and I made a "Storify" version of some tweets from it. I am putting it below the "fold" here since it takes up a lot of space and I cannot figure out how to put the "click here for more" feature in the middle of a storify embed.

Letter from Chancellor Katehi to #UCDavis Community


Posting this email I received for those interested.  Not sure what will happen this quarter in terms of Occupy UC Davis actions and related issues ... but will post as things develop.

Dear UC Davis Community,


Happy New Year! I am writing to welcome everyone back to campus and to share my thoughts about the coming year at UC Davis.

Sunday, January 08, 2012

Draft post cleanup #10: trip to LA artificially sweetened by Carolyn de la Peña

Yet another post in my "draft blog post cleanup" series.  Here is #10:

Went on a mini trip to UCLA for a mini meeting in November. It seemed appropriate that I brought with me to Los Angeles, land of empty pleasures - the new book from UC Davis Professor Carolyn de la Peña - "Empty Pleasures" on the history of artificial sweeteners. So I took a picture of the book overlooking part of LA from my hotel room:



The book is great read by the way ...

Thursday, December 29, 2011

UC Davis Chancellor putting increased emphasis on communications

Just got this email announcement and I thought I would share.  As many know, in the aftermath of the pepper spray incident, whether you support the UC Davis Chancellor or not, it was pretty clear that communications regarding the incident were, well, poor at best.  Hopefully this will improve things.  Of course, action is more important than communication --- but I am glad to see the Chancellor responding to communication issues ---

Dear Colleagues, 
  
I write to inform you about additional actions that I am taking immediately to strengthen Strategic Communications. These steps will help us address needs and challenges facing UC Davis today while preparing us to take advantage of opportunities that lie ahead. 

Friday, December 23, 2011

Thursday, December 22, 2011

Email regarding UC Davis Academic Senate Special Committee re: Pepper Spray


Posting for anyone interested (email from Linda Bisson - Chair of UC Davis Academic Senate)


Dear Colleagues:

There was an issue with the set up of the email address for the Special Committee that has now been corrected by IT. If you sent an email to the committee prior to Wednesday December 21st,  we request that you send it again. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Linda

Friday, December 16, 2011

Two #UCDavis Academic Senate Ballot Initiatives related to #OccupyUCDavis Pepper Spray Incident

Just got this email and thought it would be of interest to some

Colleagues,

This message provides notice of two impending ballots, as required by Davis Division Bylaw 17:  http://academicsenate.ucdavis.edu/cerj/manual/dd_bylaws.cfm#17-.  You have received this notice as a voting member of the Davis Division of the Academic Senate.  The Davis Division received at least 50 valid signatures with each petition, requiring initiation of a formal notice and electronic ballot.  More information, including the method for gathering pro and con statements and the voting period, will be distributed on January 9, 2012.  The petitions are summarized below:

1) Petition received on December 6, 2011, requests a vote regarding a lack of confidence in the leadership of Chancellor Katehi, with the result of the vote to be communicated to the Board of Regents and UC President.

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