Monday 12th and Tuesday 13th of November 2007.
Organised by Dr Derek Bendall, Professor Christopher Howe, Dr Ellen Nisbet and Professor Euan Nisbet.
To view this event click here
Professor James Barber FRS (Speaker)
James Barber is the Ernst Chain Professor Biochemistry at Imperial College London, working on the molecular processes of photosynthesis. After graduating from the University of Wales in Chemistry he gained a MSc and PhD in Biophysics from the University of East Anglia. After a postdoctoral year in Holland he joined the academic staff at Imperial College London as a Lecturer in 1968. He was promoted to Professor in 1979. In 1988-89 he was Dean of the Royal College of Science, and from 1989 to 1999 was Head of the Biochemistry Department at Imperial College. Much of his research has focused on the reactions and proteins involved in the photochemically driven splitting of water and has contributed greatly to this subject by elucidating the structure of the catalytic centre for this reaction. He was elected to the European Academy (Academia Europaea) in 1988 and awarded an Honory Doctors degree of Stockholm University in 1992. In 2002 he was awarded the Flintoff Medal of the Royal Society of Chemistry and in 2003, was elected as a Foreign Member of the Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences. Two years later he was elected to a Fellowship of the Royal Society and awarded the 2005 Italgas Prize for energy and the environment. He was the winner of the 2006 Novartis Medal and Prize of the Biochemical Society and this year has been awarded the Wheland Medal and Prize by the University of Chicago. He has published over 500 research and review articles and produced 16 books covering various aspects of photosynthesis research.
Professor Michael J Behrenfeld (Speaker)
Michael Behrenfeld is a Professor of Botany at Oregon State University. He received his doctorate in bio-optical oceanography in 1993 and then worked for 5 years at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York. In 1998, he briefly held a research faculty position at the Institute of Marine and Coastal Sciences, Rutgers University, before moving to NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. He accepted his current position at Oregon State University in 2005. His research covers topics ranging from alternative pathways of electron flow in photosynthetic membranes, to physiological acclimation strategies to light and nutrient stress, optical approaches for studying the ecology and physiology of natural plankton assemblages, assessment of biospheric primary production and plant biomass, satellite instrument technology development, and responses of ocean phytoplankton to climate variability.
Professor Roger Buick (Speaker)
Roger Buick is interested in the origin and earliest evolution of life on Earth and how that can be used as an analogue for life elsewhere in the Universe. His research techniques lie at the intersection of geology, biology and chemistry, examining the oldest and best-preserved rocks available. This involves fieldwork in the Australian outback, on the Greenland ice-cap and in the Canadian woods, amongst other places.
Professional Training :
1986: PhD (with distinction), Geology & Geophysics, University of Western Australia
1976: BSc (Honours 1st class), Zoology & Geology, University of Western Australia
Positions Held :
2005-07: Professor, Earth & Space Sciences and Astrobiology, University of Washington, Seattle
2001-04: Associate Professor, Earth & Space Sciences, University of Washington, Seattle
1995-01: Lecturer (tenured); School of Geosciences, University of Sydney
1994-95: Research Fellow; Dept. Geology & Geophysics, University of Western Australia
1991-94: Exploration geologist; Sipa, BHP, Pasminco, Lynas
1986-91: Postdoctoral Fellow; Dept. Organismic & Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University
Professor Paul G Falkowski (Speaker)
Paul G. Falkowski is Board of Governors' Professor in the Institute of Marine and Coastal Sciences and the Department of Geology at Rutgers University. His research interests include evolution, paleoecology, photosynthesis, biophysics, biogeochemical cycles, and symbiosis. Born in 1951 and raised in New York City, Falkowski earned his B.S. and M.Sc. degrees from the City College of the City University of New York and his Ph.D. from the University of British Columbia. After a Post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Rhode Island, he joined Brookhaven National Laboratory 1976 as a scientist in the newly formed Oceanographic Sciences Division. He received tenure in 1984 and served as head of the division from 1986 to 1991. From 1991 to 1995 he was Deputy Chair in the Department of Applied Science, responsible for the development and oversight of all environmental science programs. In 1998 he moved to Rutgers University. His research efforts are directed towards understanding the co-evolution of biological and physical systems. In 1992 he received a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship. In 1996 he was appointed as the Cecil and Ida Green Distinguished Professor at the University of British Columbia. In 1998 he was awarded the Huntsman Medal. In 2000 he was awarded the Hutchinson Prize. In 2001 he was elected as a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union. In 2002 he was elected as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2005 he received the Vernadsky medal from the European Geosciences Union. In 2007 he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. He has authored or coauthored over 250 papers in peer-reviewed journals and books. Together with John Raven, he is co-author of Aquatic Photosynthesis (Princeton University Press), and has co-invented and patented a fluorosensing system which is capable of measuring phytoplankton photosynthetic rates nondestructively and in real time. He is an advisor to the National Science Foundation and NASA and serves on the Mars Architecture Mission team, the Earth System Science and Applications Advisory Committee, the Astrobiology Oversight Committee, is co-chair of the IGBP Carbon Cycle Working Group, and a member of the Carbon Cycle Science Steering Committee. He is on the Board of Reviewing Editors for Science and an associate editor of 5 other journals. Falkowski lives in Princeton, New Jersey, with his wife and two daughters.
Professor Howard Griffiths (Speaker)
Professor of Plant Ecology, Physiological Ecology Group, Department of Plant Sciences and
Fellow of Clare College, University of Cambridge
Howard Griffiths joined the University of Cambridge in 2000, having previously been at Dundee and then Newcastle upon Tyne. The Plant Physiological Ecology Group was established in the Department of Plant Sciences at Cambridge to measure the physiological determinants of plant distribution, from tropical forest epiphytes to crop water use and biomass allocation. We are intrigued by the photosynthetic physiology of the organismal awkward squad, and how diffusional and carboxylation co-limitations interact across epidermis and mesophyll by day or night. Such processes have engendered a variety of carbon dioxide concentrating mechanisms (CCM), which enhance the operating efficiency of Rubisco, including the biochemical C4 pathway (in maize, miscanthus and sugar cane), crassulacean acid metabolism, (CAM, in succulents such as Agave, Orchids and Bromeliads), or the biophysical CCM (in algae, cyanobacteria and hornworts). Using stable isotopes (13C and 18O) as markers of photosynthetic gas exchanges, both in real time and in organic material, we seek to evaluate the biophysical and biochemical constraints which may have shaped the evolution of photosynthesis in terrestrial and aquatic plants. We are currently working on the structure, function and origins of the chloroplast pyrenoid, so often associated with the activity of a biophysical CCM in aquatic organisms and hornworts. We also use the isotope signatures to characterise water use and exchange by plants (and now insects!), and to infer niche differentiation and habitat preference. Having led several expeditions to Trinidad, Venezuela and Panama to study forest canopies and epiphytes, the Physiological Ecology Group will continue to "put plants in their place" - sustaining diversity, responding to a changing climate and providing fascinating molecular and ecological insights.
Academic History
" 2000- present University of Cambridge
" 1983- 2000 Dept Agricultural and Environmental Science, University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne
" 1972-1983 BSc, PhD and Post Doc at Dept of Biological Sciences, University of Dundee
Specialist Areas
" Plant physiological ecology
" Photosynthesis and water use by plants
" Photosynthetic physiology of bryophytes and lichens
" Stable isotopes and mass spectrometry
Professor Chris Howe (Speaker)
Christopher Howe is Professor of Plant and Microbial Biochemistry in the Biochemistry Department, University of Cambridge. He studied for his PhD in the Department of Plant Sciences, Cambridge, and in the Plant Breeding Institute at Trumpington. He moved to the Cambridge Biochemistry Department, and became a Reader in 2000, and Professor in 2005. His main interests are in the biochemistry and evolution of photosynthetic electron transfer and chloroplasts. He is also involved in novel applications of phylogenetic techniques, for example to the copying history of medieval manuscripts such as The Canterbury Tales.
Professor Joe Kirschvink (Speaker)
Joe was born and raised in the Southwest United States, which does not necessarily explain his infatuation with geology and biology, but it helps. Rather than attending an undergraduate university on the East Coast, where all of the rocks are covered with green goo, Joe chose to pursue his undergraduate education in Pasadena, California, where the atmosphere itself in the early 1970s was capable of cleaning the rock surfaces to show the beautiful geology underneath. However, upon the advice of two mentors (one with his magnetic mind in the stars, and the other more mindful of the magnetic minerals made by microbes), he reluctantly agreed to serve time in the East among the Ivy leaves at Princeton for his Ph.D. Joe did this, however, by traveling through Australia for a year (he recently went back, and is shown here standing on the Hamersly banded iron formation), and by spending about 50% of this time as a graduate student somewhere "in the field". He abandoned his experiment with the East Coast in 1981, and has been on the faculty back at Caltech ever since.
Joe has a lot of fun creating "nutty" ideas like the snowball Earth, and confusing paleontologists by trying to convince them that the Cambrian explosion was caused by a series of interchange events in the orthonormal Eigenvectors of Earth's Moment of Inertia Tensor. (A good number of paleontologists actually know what a tensor is, and realize that a moment of inertia is not just what keeps them in bed in the morning). Joe even pretends that animals can predict earthquakes, just to keep his seismological colleagues on their toes. His major claim to being a paleontologist is his prediction and discovery of magnetofossils, which are not very useful for biostratigraphy but are wonderful as a Martian biomarker and for increasing the NASA Astrobiology budget.
Joe likes to swim and ski, and to explore the hot mineral waters produced by Mother Earth. He is married to a neurobiological electron microscopist, Atsuko Kobayashi, and they have two children (Jiseki and Koseki), whose names mean "magnetite" and "gemstone" respectively in Japanese. As a result, the children will probably grow up to be bloodsucking lawyers. And his family still doesn't know if home is in Pasadena or Osaka.
Professor William Martin (Speaker)
Bill comes from Texas and moved to Germany in 1980. He majored in Botany at the University of Hannover, graduated in 1985 and finished his Ph.D. thesis in 1988 at the Max-Planck-Institute in Cologne under Heinz Saedler on molecular genetics and plant evolution. In 1989 he moved to Rüdiger Cerff's group at the Institute of Genetics of the University of Braunschweig to work on molecular evolution and endosymbiosis. In 1999 he received an appointment as professor of Botany at the University of Düsseldorf. His main scientific interests are endosymbiosis and biochemical evolution.
Professor John Raven FRS (Speaker)
John Raven gained his BA (1963) and PhD (1967) in Botany from Cambridge University, and moved to Dundee in 1971. He has been Boyd Baxter Professor of Biology at Dundee since 1995. John has wide biological interests embracing bioenergetics, ecophysiology, palaeoecology, astrobiology and biogeochemistry, but a coninuing topic of research over four decades is how photosynthetic organisms acquire and assimilate carbon dioxide and other forms of inorganic carbon.
Professor Lynn Rothschild (Speaker)
Dr. Lynn J. Rothschild, is an evolutionary biologist at NASA's Ames Research Center, and faculty at Stanford University. At NASA her research has focused on how life, particularly microbes, has evolved in the context of the physical environment, both here and potentially elsewhere. She has co-edited a book on the subject entitled, "Evolution on Planet Earth: The Impact of the Physical Environment" (Academic Press, 2003). Rothschild has studied carbon metabolism and DNA damage and repair in the laboratory setting and on algal mats, work that has taken her to field sites in such locations as thermal areas in Yellowstone National Park, New Zealand, Australia, Kenya hypersaline environments in the San Francisco Bay, Baja California and the Bolivian Andes. Courtesy of the Galathea 3, she has also had experiments on a Danish oceanographic cruise from South America to Boston. In conjunction with the Aeronautics Department at Stanford, she has begun to fly experiments up to 100,000 feet on high altitude balloons. She lectures frequently worldwide, and has appeared on radio and television programs, including the Discovery Channel, ABC World News Tonight, and CNN.
Professor Norm Sleep (Speaker)
ACADEMIC HISTORY
1967 B.S. Mathematics, Michigan State University
1969 M.S. Geophysics, Massachusetts Institute of Technolody
1973 Ph.D. Geophysics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE
1973 Postdoctoral Research Associate, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
1973-79 Assistant Professor of Geophysics, Northwestern University
1979-84 Associate Professor of Geophysics and Geology, Stanford University
1984-93 Professor of Geophysics and Geology, Stanford University
1993-present Professor of Geophysics, Stanford University
HONORS AND AWARDS :
1980 James B. Macelwane Award, American Geophysical Union
1980 Fellow, American Geophysical Union
1984 Fellow, Geological Society of America
1991 George P. Woollard Award, Geological Society of America
1993 Fellow, American Association for the Advancement of Science
1997 Wegener Medal, European Union of Geosciences
1998 Walter H. Bucher Medal, American Geophysical Union
1999 Member, National Academy of Sciences
Author of Principles of Geophysics published by Blackwell Science Ltd.
Instructor of nonmajor class Planetary Habitability Geophysics 25
Instructor of Geophysics 150
1985 Atlantis II cruise to the Galapagos propagating rift.
1983. Roots of exhumed oceanic island arc. Nelchina glacier, Alaska.
Professor F Robert Tabita (Speaker)
For several years, F. Robert (Bob) Tabita has studied the molecular regulation, biochemistry, and enzymology of carbon dioxide assimilation and the mechanisms by which microbes catalyze the production of various biofuels. Tabita began his independent professional career at the University of Texas at Austin, where he rose through the ranks to Professor. In 1989, Tabita moved to The Ohio State University, where he is currently the Ohio Eminent Scholar and Professor of Microbiology and the Director of the interdisciplinary Plant Molecular Biology/Biotechnology Program and the Plant Biotechnology Center. Pertinent to this discussion meeting is Tabita's work on the structure, function, and evolution of ribulose 1, 5-bisphosphate carboxylase/oxygenase (RubisCO), the enzyme that catalyzes the removal and fixation of the bulk of CO2 on this planet. Tabita discovered that there are several distinct molecular forms of RubisCO found in nature, each of which provides a different perspective as to how the active site and other regions of RubisCO may become adapted to influence catalysis. A key question is the specificity and differential effect of molecular oxygen on RubisCO catalysis. Using a combination of bioselection, structural analyses, and biochemical studies, Tabita's lab has recently shown that various residues distil to the active site specifically influence how RubisCO interacts with oxygen. Moreover, Tabita's group discovered the RubisCO homolog, or RubisCO-Like Protein (RLP), which catalyzes a similar reaction to RubisCO, but for completely different physiological purposes. The large numbers of diverse RubisCO and RLP molecules now in the data base, along with RubisCO from methanogenic archaea, has allowed Tabita and his group to provide a new paradigm to explain the most likely evolutionary path to modern day RubisCO.
Professor Andrew Watson FRS (Chair)
Research Interests
Global biogeochemical cycles, climate, and the interactions between them. In particular, processes influencing atmospheric carbon dioxide, (both natural variations in the past and the sinks for anthropogenic CO2) and atmospheric oxygen. Transport and ventilation of the modern and paleo-oceans.
Biography
For my early career, I studied the evolution of Earth's and other planets' atmospheres before moving to the marine laboratories at Plymouth and becoming more ocean-oriented. I worked there from 1981-1996 before moving to UEA. I developed tracer techniques that can be used to perform a new class of large-scale experiments in the ocean, and in collaborative experiments through the 1990s I used these techniques directly to observe the slow rates of mixing in the open ocean, and to show by release experiments that iron is a critical limiting nutrient for plankton. My group at UEA works on observations of the ocean carbon system and ocean physics using tracers, funded by EU and NERC grants. We also use a variety of models to investigate the processes affecting atmospheric carbon dioxide and oxygen concentrations through time. I was elected FRS in 2003 and awarded the EGU's Nansen Medal for "fundamental contributions to the understanding of the integrated oceanic system" in 2004.
Professor Ian Woodward (Speaker)
Ian Woodward research interests are concerned with the impacts of climate and changing carbon dioxide concentrations on plant development, growth and productivity, at scales from the individual plant to the globe.
He is Professor of Plant Ecology in the Department of Animal & Plant Sciences, at the University of Sheffield.
Professor Kevin Zahnle (Chair)
Title and Role
Co-Investigator - An authority on the physics and consequences of large impacts as well as planet and planetary atmosphere evolution, Dr. Zahnle will be responsible for the studies involving whether impacts created the Martian valley river networks, and the runaway greenhouse studies for Mars and Venus-like planets.
Related Experience Summary
Photochemical modelling; geochemical modelling of atmophiles; impact processes (both ab initio modelling and data-driven modelling); impact frequencies; atmospheric escape processes; planetary accretion.
Employment History
NASA Ames Research Center 1988-present
Stanford University 1987-1988 (postdoc)
NRC (postdoc) at NASA Ames 1985-1987
Education
PhD University of Michigan 1985 (Prof. James C. G. Walker)
Awards and Honors
1996: NASA Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal.
2001: Ames Associate Fellow