Psyched for Upcoming Departmental Seminars

I am housed in a biology department. Wow, that came out a lot more impersonal than I intended. Let me try that again: My advisor's appointment is to the Biology Department at my university (not much better...eh). Being in a biology department means the faculty interests are very diverse (compared to, say, a biochemistry department, ecology and evolution department, or a neurobiology and behavior department), and so are the departmental seminars. This may seem like a bonus at first, but, in reality, it means that any given seminar will be fairly inaccessible to most people in the department. How much can an ecologist get out of listening to 45 minute long talk on lipid rafts? Conversely, how productive is it for a molecular geneticist to sit through a seminar on an invasive plant? Ideally, it would be great to hear about interesting research in a field to which you rarely pay any attention, but departmental seminars only spend about 10 minutes on material to which the uninitiated can connect.

The diversity of our departmental seminars means you're lucky if there are a couple of speakers you have any interest in seeing in an entire semester. One of those few may even be slightly relevant to your research area. That's why I was so surprised when I checked the tentative (and still incomplete) list of invited speakers for this upcoming semester. I clicked the linked to the seminar page on a whim while looking for something else on our departmental website -- the first talk isn't for another month and a half, so I don't need to think about planning quite yet. I'm glad I did because three of the seven schedule speakers are evolutionary geneticists (and there are still multiple open dates). Granted, my department is loaded with faculty that study molecular evolution, but they make up less that a quarter of the entire department.

Who do I get to see speak this fall? Mike Lynch, who has written some cool stuff on the evolution of eukaryotic genomes, is scheduled to give a seminar in September. Lynch has also thrown his hat into the ring in the intelligent design "debate". Later in the semester, Dan Hartl will be presenting a series of talks. For those of you who don't know, Hartl is the co-author (along with Andy Clark) of one of the most popular population genetics textbooks. His research interests are far too diverse to list here. The third invited speaker (Bryant McAllister) comes from Tara's neck of the woods. He's not quite as high profile as the other two dudes, but his research is pretty cool. He's currently doing some neat work on an X-autosome fusion event in his favorite Drosophila species. Of particular interest are the different selective pressures genes encounter on sex chromosomes and autosomes.

I'm pretty psyched to see these guys present their research and meet with the two I haven't spoken with previously (Hartl and Lynch). I gotta get some new data generated so that I could look somewhat competent when I talk about my research.