Unless noted otherwise, all seminars are held
at 12 noon in Hollings Science Center, room 239.

Monday, September 29
Dr. Gorka Sancho, College of Charleston   Website      Flyer.PPT
Research interest:Behavior and ecology of fishes; fisheries conservation.

Aggregations of Pelagic Fishes Under Floating
Objects in the Equatorial Indian Ocean:
     Who?   What?   Where?   Why?

Monday, October 6
College of Charleston Biology faculty discuss study abroad programs available to CofC students.
            ›› DOWNLOAD  Flyer.PPT
Phil Dustan, Peru
Craig Plante, Panama
Gorka Sancho, Spain
Deb Bidwell, Spain

Study Abroad Opportunities in Biology

Tuesday, October 7       NOTE: 3 p.m., SCIC 218
Sarah M. Sweitzer, PhD, University of South Carolina School of Medicine
Dept of Pharmacology, Physiology, Neuroscience

OUCH! Fetal Alcohol Exposure & Pain

Monday, October 20
Dr. Jim Leebens-Mack, University of Georgia   Website      Flyer.PPT
Research interest: Phylogenomics; evolution of reproductive characters in flowering plants; ecological, genetic & developmental processes that contribute to phenotypic diversification and speciation.

Sex determination and the origin of dioecy in the genus Asparagus

Monday, October 27
Dr. Kefyn Catley, Western Carolina University  Website      Flyer.PPT
Research interest: Science education; teaching evolution; impact on environmental and ecology education; how students perceive phylogenies. Biological research on the systematics and biology of spiders.

Exploring college students' knowledge of macroevolution; textbooks, phylogenies, and deep time.

Monday, November 3
Dr. Bernie Lohr, Northern Kentucky University   Website     Flyer.PPT
Research interest: Bioacoustics and the evolution of animal communication systems; comparative psychoacoustics; sound perception and discrimination; noise and sound perception.

Habitat bioacoustics, noise, and the evolution of signal structure in birds

Monday, November 10
Dr. Cliff Cunningham, Duke University   Website    Flyer.PPT
Research interest: Molecular systematics & biogeography of marine organisms; arthropod phylogenomics; hydrozoan sequencing project; evaluating phylogenetic methods.

Comparing ecological and genetic estimates of dispersal between Amazonian tree communities

Monday, November 17
Dr. Timothy E. Higham, Clemson University   Website    Flyer.PPT
Research interests: integration of biomechanics, muscle physiology and functional morphology to elucidate the mechanisms underlying locomotion and feeding in vertebrates. Including hydrodynamics and biomechanics of suction feeding in fishes, integration of locomotion and prey capture in vertebrates, and effects of exercise-induced fatigue on skeletal muscle mechanics and activation patterns.

Muscles, morphology and movement: Insights into vertebrate locomotion and feeding

Monday, November 24
Dr. Rob Lachlan, Duke University   Website     Flyer.PPT
Research interests: Interaction between cultural and genetic evolution. Theoretical modeling, including models of cultural evolution explicitly incorporating effects of drift on the evolution of song variation, learning, and function; the role of cultural evolution in speciation; multi-player interactions in spatially explicit games to explore song function. Also, combine field work and the development of bioacoustic analysis techniques to address the evolution of song in isolated oceanic island populations and to analyze geographical patterns of song variation to fit to models of cultural evolution.

Evolution and song learning by birds

Monday, December 1
Dr. Rindy Anderson, Duke University   Website     Flyer.PPT
Research interest: Behavioral ecology, animal communication and bioacoustics; perception, discrimination & preference of sexually-selected signals; including field experiments, cardiac response measures, single-neuron responses to bird song features.

Fighting and flirting: Birdsong and the evolution of honest communication