<html><head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=Windows-1252"></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-size: 14px; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; "><div><div>Hi all,</div><div><br></div><div>There will be two seminars, one this Friday and the other next Monday. See below. It is a chance to get your seminar requirement for initiation.</div><div><br></div><div>Soichi</div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 15px; "><b>Lecture series speaker to discuss synthetic biology</b><br> <br>“Computing with Bacteria” will be the topic <b>Friday, Nov. 4</b>, when Dr. Laurie J. Heyer, associate professor of mathematics at Davidson (N.C.) College, speaks at Ohio University.<br> <br>Heyer’s talk is part of the Bioinformatics Distinguished Lecture Series, which is coordinated by the Ohio University Bioinformatics Laboratory. This lecture is sponsored by Ohio University’s biomedical engineering program, and will take place<b> at 10:10 a.m. in Stocker Center 103.</b><br> <br>Heyer’s research is in the new field of synthetic biology, in which engineering principles are used to design biological machines for biomedical, energy, environmental, and other application areas. Synthetic biology is an area of collaboration between mathematicians, biologists, computer scientists, and other traditional science and engineering disciplines.<br> <br>She plans to provide an overview of synthetic biology and to describe her team’s research.<br> <br>“We have engineered bacteria to solve the Hamiltonian path problem and attack other interesting mathematical problems,” Heyer said. “This field is ripe with interdisciplinary challenges and opportunities for undergraduate research.”<br> <br>Heyer and A. Malcolm Campbell of the biology department at Davidson are co-authors <i>Discovering Genomics, Proteomics, & Bioinformatics</i>, which she describes as the first undergraduate bioinformatics textbook. She and Campbell, along with ecologist Chris Paradise, are writing a textbook for first-year biology majors.<br> <br>Heyer received her B.S. in mathematics from the University of Texas at Arlington. She began research in bioinformatics for her Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics, which she received from the University of Colorado at Boulder in 1998. She was a postdoctoral fellow with Michael Waterman in the Center for Computational and Experimental Genomics at the University of Southern California. At Davidson, Heyer teaches a cross-listed course in bioinformatics that draws both math and biology majors. She has also developed a two-semester sequence in calculus and modeling that focuses on applications in the life sciences.</span></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-left: 0in; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; font-size: 11pt; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; "><b><span style="font-size: 10.5pt; color: black; ">BIOLOGY AND BIOMEDICAL SCIENCES SEMINAR SERIES</span></b><span style="font-size: 10.5pt; color: black; "><o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-left: 0in; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; font-size: 11pt; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; "><span style="font-size: 10.5pt; color: black; ">Dr. Marty Roop from East Carolina University will be presenting a seminar entitled "Differential Use of Heme and Non-Heme Iron by <i>Brucella abortus</i> in Host Macrophages". <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-left: 0in; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; font-size: 11pt; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; "><span style="font-size: 10.5pt; color: black; "><b>The seminar will be at 4:10pm on November 7th in Irvine 159.</b><o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-left: 0in; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; font-size: 11pt; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; "><span style="font-size: 10.5pt; color: black; "><o:p> </o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-left: 0in; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; font-size: 11pt; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; "><i><span style="font-size: 10.5pt; color: black; ">Brucella abortus </span></i><span style="font-size: 10.5pt; color: black; ">is a pathogenic bacteria that has evolved to survive within a variety of eukaryotic cell types including macrophages and dendritic cells. Dr. Roop's studies focus on how the bacterium survives within these hostile environments.</span></p></div></div></body></html>