Old Lectures

2014

January 8 – Professor Stephen A. Krawetz, Wayne State University School of Medicine, OB/Gyn and Molecular Medicine & Genetics: When the Sperm meets the Egg: a structural and genomic perspective

January 15 – Dr. Stephen M. Levin, M.D., Ezekiel Biomechanics Group, McLean, VABiotensegrity: Bioarchitecture & Dynamic Anatomy

January 22 – Assistant Professor Roger Pique-Regi, Molecular Medicine and Genetics, Wayne State University School of Medicine: Experimental and computational methods for identifying genetic variants impact on gene regulation

January 29 – Dr. Matt Wyczalkowski, Genome Institute, Washington University School of Medicine: Mechanisms of Embryonic Wound Healing: Experiment and Modeling

February 12 – Professor Michael Ruse, Florida State University, Department of Philosophy: From organism to mechanism—and halfway back?

February 19 – Dr. Genaro Juarez Martinez, Unconventional Computing Group, University of the West of England: Designing Complex Dynamics with Memory: Elementary Cellular Automata Case

February 26 – Dr. Rui Pires Martins, Queen Mary University of London: Nuclear and chromatin architecture changes accompanying differentiation

March 5 – Assistant Professor Michael L. Smith, Boston University, Department of Biomedical Engineering: Biochemical and mechanical regulation of extracellular matrix signaling: insights from fibronectin

March 12 – Associate Professor Henry Heng, Molecular Medicine and Genetics, Wayne State University School of Medicine, 4D-Genomics: The genome dynamics and constraint in biology

March 19 – Associate Professor Martin Hanczyc, University of Southern Denmark, Department of Physics and Chemistry & Associate Professor Daniel Merkle, University of Southern Denmark, Department of Mathematics and Computer Science: Hydrogen cyanide and the computational origin of life

March 26 – Privatdozentin Dr. Barbara Tzschentke, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Institut für Biologie: Imprinting of body functions during critical developmental periods

April 2 – Dr. Vito Conte, Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia: Traction and stress microscopy for cells: the wound healing case

April 9 – Dr. Zi Chen, Washington University, St. Louis, MO: How the Embryonic Chick Brain Twists

April 16 – Student Presentations

2013

January 9 – Richard Gordon: “Introduction to differentiation waves. Part 1

January 16 – Albert Harris: “Geometric locations of differentiated cells in sponges are totally unrelated to spatial signals to differentiate

January 23 – Albert Harris: “The mistaken Differential Adhesion Hypothesis

January 30 – Ille Gebeshuber: “Nanobioconvergence

February 6 – Melinda Fagan: “Waddington redux: simple abstract models and integrative biological explanations

February 13 – Richard Gordon: “Introduction to differentiation waves. Part 2. The evo-devo of epigenetic landscapes as differentiation trees

February 20 – Albert Harris: “The Physics of Cell Fate Branching: A Swedish Flag Model

February 27 – Eluem Blyden: “The encodon and the parallels between embryogenesis and the making of proteins

March 6 – Kai Lu, “Chromatin and epigenome in relation to embryogenesis and stem cell differentiation

March 13 – Clément Vidal: ” The starivore hypothesis: why the galaxy may be teeming with (post)biology

March 20 – Terrence Deacon: “Autogenesis: From Constraint to Regulation

March 27 – Bradly Alicea: “Multiscale Integration and Heuristics of Complex Physiological Phenomena

April 3 – Evgenii Rudnyi: “Does Entropy Play a Role in Biology?

April 10 – Albert Harris: “A List of Thirteen Unsolved Problems of Embryology

April 17 – Rob Ninowski: “Introduction to cybernetics

April 24 – Alexis Pietak: “Resonance and Plant Morphogenesis

2012

11 January 2012 – Timothy Newman, University of Dundee, Modelling active cell processes in multicellular sheets

18 January 2012 – Ille Gebeshuber, Bionanoconvergence

25 January 2012 – Lisa Willis, Simple physical models of diatom morphogenesis to drive experiment

8 February 2012 – Glauco R. Souza, 3D Cell Culturing by Magnetic Levitation, the Next Generation of Cell Culturing?

15 February 2012 – Spyros Papageorgiou, A biophysical model can explain the multiscale phenomenon of collinearity of clustered HOX genes

29 February 2012 – Michelangelo von Dassow, Biomechanics of development and organism-environment interactions

7 March 2012 – M. Lisa Manning, Emergent mechanical properties in zebrafish embryonic tissues: theory and experiment

14 March 2012 – Alexei Sharov, A Short Course on Biosemiotics: 1. Functional approach to the origin of life: emergence of signs in autocatalytic systems

21 March 2012 – Dick Gordon, Cause and Effect in the Interaction between Embryogenesis and the Genome

28 March 2012 – Marta Linde, New York Medical College, The origin of a curved beak

4 April 2012 – Bradly Alicea, Scenes from a Graphical, Parallel Biological World

11 April 2012 – Evgenii Rudnyi, Review of Consciousness: Creeping up on the Hard Problem by Jeffrey A. Gray

18 April 2012 – Alexei Sharov, A Short Course on Biosemiotics: 2. Evolution of natural agents: preservation, development, and emergence of functional information

25 April 2012 – Alexei Sharov, A Short Course on Biosemiotics: 3. The origin of mind

2 May 2012 – Alexei Sharov, A Short Course on Biosemiotics: 4. Time in living systems

9 May 2012 – Timothy Newman, Life and death in biophysics

2011

19 October 2011 – G. Wayne Brodland, University of Waterloo, Video Force Microscopy: A technique that allows the forces driving morphogenetic movements to be determined from time-lapse images

26 October 2011 – Eva Deinum, The importance of parental guidance: lessons from modeling the self organization of the plant cortical microtubule array

2, 9 November 2011 – Vasily Ogryzko, CNRS UMR-8126, Universite Paris-sud, Can one use the notion of ground state for the description of a living cell?

16 November 2011 – Bruce Damer, The EvoGrid: An Approach to Computational Origins of Life Endeavours

23 November 2011 – Richard Gordon, University of Manitoba & Gulf Specimen Marine Laboratory, Walking the tightrope: The dilemmas of hierarchical instabilities in Turing’s morphogenesis

30 November 2011 – David Holloway, British Columbia Institute of Technology, Chemical pattern formation and plant morphogenesis: controlling branching via reaction-diffusion dynamics

7 December 2011 – Bradley Alicea, Michigan State University, Biocomplexity of Inducible Cells

14 December 2011 – Steve Levin, No matter how much you guys and gals talk about stochastic events, the rules of structure make whatever happens deterministic to a surprising degree

21 December 2011 – Ryan Kerney, The timing of bone formation in frog skulls

2010

January 6, 2010, Richard Gordon, Whence Epigenesis? (Extending “The Hierarchical Genome and Differentiation Waves” §1.02)

January 13, 2010, Stephen A. Krawetz, Systems Analysis Reveals Novel Activities of Male Germ Cells

February 3, 2010, 2010, Clément Vidal, Cosmic Embryogenesis

February 24, 2010, Richard Gordon, Wholeness & Embryogenesis, Part 1 (Extending “The Hierarchical Genome and Differentiation Waves” §1.03, 1.04, 1.05)

March 17, 2010, Genaro Juárez Martínez, Cellular automata as universal computers

March 31, 2010, Rudolf Nico Penninkhof, Evomind: Design of Emergent Systems

April 7, 2010, Chris Chetland, Does Biology Need a New Theory of Explanation?

April 14, 2010, Ramray Bhat, Chicken galectin-1A and -8 constitute a regulatory network that mediates the earliest steps of avian limb skeletal morphogenesis

May 19, 2010, Jose J Muñoz, Stress/Diffusion Dependent Morphogenesis

May 26, 2010, Jose J Muñoz, Natalie K. Björklund, Richard Gordon, Notes from Barcelona

June 16, 2010, Akhlesh Lakhtakia, Sculptured Thin Films: Nanoengineered Metamaterials

June 30, 2010, Richard Gordon, A Tale of Two Papers

July 7, 2010, Gerald H. Pollack, E = H2O: The Secret Life of Water

July 21, 2010, Natalie K. Björklund-Gordon, The Evolution of the Cell State Splitter: Motility to embryogenesis

August 11, 2010, William R. Buckley, Lazy Constructors

August 18, 2010, Ute Deichmann, Experimental biology, evolution, and artificially creating life around 1900: Research and reflections by Jacques Loeb

September 22, 2010, Evgenii Rudnyi, Introduction to Finite Element Simulation

September 29, 2010, Kai Lu, Mechanical control and stem cell fate decision

October 20, 2010, B. Roy Frieden, Introduction to EPI (Extreme Physical Information)

November 10, 2010, Stuart A. Newman, The origin of animal eggs and the ‘embryonic hourglass’: a new (joint) interpretation

November 24, 2010, Martin Hanczyc & Takashi Ikegami, Chemical Basis for Minimal Cognition

2009

January 29, 2009, Stuart A. Newman, A Pattern Language for Animal Form

February 12, 2009, Vincent Fleury, Scaling the Vertebrate Embryo from the Ovocyte Upwards, via Hydrodynamic Flow: Consequence for Evolutionary Constraints

February 26, 2009, Stephen M. Levin, Mechanics of Soft Matter: Application to Evo-Devo

March 5, 2009, Bruce Damer, The Virtual World: A 21st Century Medium for: I. CyberSpace, II. StreetSpace, III. OuterSpace, and IV. BioSpace

April 9, 2009, Richard Gordon, Microtubules and Left/Right Asymmetry of Amphibian Embryos

April 9, 2009, Susan Crawford-Young, Effects of Microgravity on Cell Cytoskeleton and Embryogenesis

May 28, 2009, Vincent Fleury, Embryo Segmentation: a Mechano-Genetical Model

June 11, 2009, William R. Buckley, Self-Replication and Ontogeny in Machines

June 18 and June 25, 2009, Mike Danilchik, Intrinsic Chirality Properties of the Xenopus Egg Cortex and Left-Right Asymmetry

October 7, 2009, Michael V. Danilchik, Potential Long-distance Signaling by Blastocoel-traversing Thin Filopodia

November 11, 2009, William R. Buckley, Machine Ontogeny: Part 2, A Partial Constructor

December 9, 2009, Richard Gordon, Given a Spherical Cow… What Do We Know About the Initial Symmetry of the Fertilized Egg? (Extending “The Hierarchical Genome and Differentiation Waves” 1.01)