Overview
Title: Genetics: back to the future
Abstract: It may seem unfathomable now that the young science of genetics was initially viewed with suspicion by the Darwinists. Their key criticism was that mutants were laboratory artifacts irrelevant for understanding natural selection. In the 1920s, a Russian biologist Sergei Chetverikov and his students put this objection to rest by demonstrating that natural populations are rich with mutant gene variants. This seminar will examine the lasting impact of this brilliant though largely forgotten work with a focus on the still unsolved “genotype-to-phenotype” problem.
Stanislav Shvartsman joined the Flatiron Institute Center for Computational Biology in 2019 as the Group Leader of Developmental Dynamics. He is a professor of molecular biology at Princeton University. He was born in Odessa, Ukraine, and studied physical chemistry and chemical engineering at Moscow State University, the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, and Princeton University. After postdoctoral work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he founded his own lab at Princeton that focuses on quantitative biology of developing tissues. His lab investigates how genomically encoded and self-organizing processes control development. The main themes of current research are 1) dynamics of signaling networks, 2) small cell clusters, and 3) quantitative biology of developmental abnormalities.
The NSF-Simons National Institute for Theory and Mathematics in Biology Seminar Series aims to bring together a mix of mathematicians and biologists to foster discussion and collaboration between the two fields. The seminar series will take place on Fridays from 10am – 11am at the NITMB in the John Hancock Center in downtown Chicago. There will be both an in-person and virtual component.