McGill Mini-Science 2013
Science, Sex and Gender
Here are short biographies for this year's Mini-Science lecturers:
- Joe Schwarcz (March 14, 2013)
- Ehab Abouheif (March 21, 2013)
- Melanie A. Dirks (March 28, 2013)
- Barbara Sherwin (April 4, 2013)
- Andrew Hendry (April 11, 2013)
Please note change of schedule: Prof. Barbara Sherwin will now give her talk on April 4 (instead of April 11), and Prof. Andrew Hendry will give his on April 11 (instead of April 4).
Joe Schwarcz (Director, Office for Science and Society)
Chemistry, Love and Gender (March 14, 2013)
Joe Schwarcz is Director of McGill University’s Office for Science and Society. He is well known for his informative and entertaining public lectures on topics ranging from the chemistry of love to the science of aging. Professor Schwarcz has received numerous awards for teaching chemistry and for interpreting science for the public, and is the only non-American ever to win the American Chemical Society’s prestigious Grady-Stack Award for demystifying chemistry. He hosts "The Dr. Joe Show" on Montreal's CJAD and has appeared hundreds of times on The Discovery Channel, CTV, CBC, TV Ontario and Global Television. Dr. Schwarcz also writes a newspaper column entitled “The Right Chemistry” and has authored a number of books, “Radar, Hula Hoops and Playful Pigs,” “The Genie in the Bottle,” "That's The Way The Cookie Crumbles," “Dr. Joe And What You Didn’t Know,” “The Fly In The Ointment” “Let Them Eat Flax” “An Apple A Day,” “Brain Fuel,” “Science, Sense and Nonsense,” “Dr. Joe’s Brain Sparks” and “Dr. Joe’s Health Lab,” all of which have made it on to the best seller list. He is also an amateur conjurer and often spices up his presentations with a little magic. Dr. Schwarcz has been awarded the 2010 Montreal Medal, which is the Canadian Chemical Institute’s premier prize recognizing lifetime contributions to chemistry in Canada. In the spring of 2011 he was awarded an honorary doctorate from Cape Breton University. He also holds a previous honorary degree from Athabasca University. In November of 2011 the McGill Office for Science and Society received the largest gift ever in Canadian history ($5.5 million) from philanthropist Lorne Trottier to further its work in promoting scientific education and critical thinking.
For more information about Joe Schwarcz, please visit: www.mcgill.ca/oss/who-we-are/joeschwarcz (This link opens in a new window.)
PHOTO CREDIT: LYON & ROHAN
Ehab Abouheif (Department of Biology)
A Gene Underlying Sexual Conflict in Insects (March 21, 2013)
Ehab Abouheif received his Ph.D. in Evolutionary Developmental Biology from Duke University in the laboratory of Gregory A. Wray, where he studied the evolutionary and developmental basis of the wing polyphenism in ants. He then moved to the laboratory of Nipam H. Patel, in Department of Integrative Biology at the University of California, Berkeley, as a Howard Hughes Medical Institute postdoctoral fellow. There he studied the origin of arthropod limbs. Ehab Abouheif joined the Biology Department at McGill University in September 2004 as a Canada Research Chair in Evolutionary Developmental Biology.
The research efforts in his laboratory focus on genes that control embryonic development and how they have been conserved throughout the animal kingdom. How the same genes have evolved to pattern such diverse animal morphologies largely remains a mystery. The Abouheif lab addresses this fundamental question by studying the expression of these developmental genes both within and between closely related ant species.
He is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biology at McGill and is the Canada Research Chair in Evolutionary Developmental Biology. Montreal born and raised, Ehab Abouheif completed his undergraduate degrees in Science at Concordia University.
For more information about Ehab Abouheif please visit: http://biology.mcgill.ca/faculty/abouheif/ (This link opens in a new window.)
Melanie A. Dirks (Department of Psychology)
"(S)he's Being Mean to Me": How Should Boys and Girls Respond to Aggression by Peers? (March 28, 2013)
Dr. Dirks earned her PhD in Clinical Psychology from Yale University (2007), and completed a clinical internship at the Institute for Juvenile Research, University of Illinois at Chicago. She then spent two years as a post-doctoral fellow at the Offord Centre for Child Studies at McMaster University before joining the Department of Psychology at McGill University in 2009. Dr. Dirks' research examines the interplay between social functioning and psychopathology in children and adolescents, with a current focus on youth anxiety and depression. Her research has been supported by CIHR, SSHRC, FQRSC, and the Ontario Mental Health Foundation, and has been published in outlets including the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, Social Development, and the Journal of Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology.
For more information about Melanie Dirks, please visit: www.psych.mcgill.ca/faculty/dirks.html (This link opens in a new window.)
Barbara Sherwin (Department of Psychology)
Hormones and Memory in Older Women and Men (April 4, 2013)
Dr. Barbara Sherwin is a professor in the Department of Psychology and holds a Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Hormones, Brain and Cognition. Since she came to McGill in 1983, she has been Director of the Laboratory of Human Psychoendocrinology whose mission has been to investigate the possible effects of a variety of hormones on aspects of brain function in humans. Among her awards, Dr. Sherwin was the recipient of the Heinz Lehmann Award for outstanding contributions to neuropsychopharmacology by the Canadian College of Neuropsychopharmacology in 1998 and the D.O. Hebb Award for Distinguished Research Contributions to Psychology as a Science by the Canadian Psychological Association in 2007.
For more information about Barbara Sherwin, please visit: www.psych.mcgill.ca/faculty/sherwin.html (This link opens in a new window.)
Andrew Hendry (Department of Biology)
Sexual and Natural Selection - The Fist-fight in Nature (April 11, 2013)
Dr. Hendry is a Principal Researcher at the Quebec Centre for Biodiversity Science and has worked at the Redpath Museum and the Dept. of Biology at McGill since 2002. He earned his Ph.D. in 1998 at the School of Fisheries, University of Washington, his Master of Science in 1995 at the School of Fisheries, University of Washington and originally hails from British Columbia with a B.Sc from the University of Victoria in 1991. His research focuses on so-called "rapid" or "contemporary" evolution its consequences for ecological dynamics; i.e., changes in populations, communities, and ecosystems. This idea has been incorporated into the developing field of "eco-evolutionary dynamics," broadly considers ongoing interactions between ecology and evolution. Most of the work in this new field has focused on one direction of causality in these dynamics - how ecological changes influence evolutionary dynamics (eco-to-evo). More recently, however, he as started to explore the reciprocal arrow of causality: how evolutionary changes influence ecological dynamics (evo-to-eco). He says that the most interesting news in the global evolution watch concerns what Darwin called "that mystery of mysteries, the origin of species."
For more information about Andrew Hendry, please visit: http://redpath-staff.mcgill.ca/hendry (This link opens in a new window.)