Keynote Speakers
Dr. Eric Haag, UMD
10:00am - 11:00am
Going It Alone: The Causes and Consequences of Self-fertility
Multicellular organisms vary in how they package their male and female functions. Like vertebrates and insects, nematodes generally have separate male and female sexes that are distinguished by sex chromosomes. However, during evolution some species (including The Worm, C. elegans) added sperm production to their females. This allows them to reproduce in the absence of males by self-fertilization. Prof. Haag will discuss the causes and consequences of selfing from the perspectives of developmental genetics, genomics, ecology, and population genetics. The work demonstrates that sexual reproduction has a large and often cryptic influence on the size and content of the genome, and that changes in how it occurs can rapidly modify long-standing organismal attributes.
Dr. Jeff Diamond, NIH/NINDS
1:00pm - 2:00pm
Diverse synaptic mechanisms underlie visual signaling in the retina
Our laboratory seeks to understand how neural circuits receive, compute, encode and transmit information. More specifically, we’d like to learn what biophysical and morphological features equip synapses, neurons and networks to perform these tasks. The retina is a model system for the study of neuronal information processing: We can deliver precisely defined physiological stimuli and record responses from many different cell types at various points within the network; in addition, retinal circuitry is particularly well understood, enabling us to interpret more directly the impact of synaptic and cellular mechanisms on circuit function. I will present recent experiments in the lab that exploit these advantages to examine how synapses and neurons within retinal amacrine cell circuits perform specific visual computations.