Emergence talk at Haverford

Dr. Ursula Goodenough (Professor of Biology, Washington University, St. Louis, MO, author of The Sacred Depths of Nature): "EMERGENCE: NATURE'S MODE OF CREATIVITY" She'll be speaking as part of a larger forum on Saturday, April 8th from 1PM-5PM in Sharpless Auditorium Ursula Goodenough is currently Professor of Biology at Washington University in St. Louis MO. She was educated at Radcliffe and Barnard Colleges (B.A. Zoology, 1963), Columbia University (M.A. Zoology, 1965) and Harvard University (Ph.D. Biology, 1969), did 2 years of postdoctoral at Harvard, and was Assistant and Associate Professor of Biology at Harvard from 1971-1978 before moving to Washington University. Her primary teaching has been a cell biology course for undergraduate biology majors; she also co-teaches a course, The Epic of Evolution, with a physicist and a geologist, for non-science students. Her research has focused on the cell biology and (molecular) genetics of the sexual phase of the life cycle of the unicellular eukaryotic green alga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii and, more recently, on the evolution of the genes governing mating-related traits. She has also studied the molecular basis for flagellar motility, the assembly of the Chlamydomonas cell wall, and the inheritance of chloroplast DNA. Her laboratory is currently supported by grants from the NIH, NSF, and USDA. She wrote 3 editions of a widely adopted textbook, Genetics, and has served in numerous capacities in national biomedical arenas, including service on NIH and NSF review panels, membership on committees of the NRC, editorial boards for several professional journals, and many positions in the American Society for Cell Biology, including the presidency. She serves on the editorial board of Zygon, and wrote a book on this subject, The Sacred Depths of Nature (Oxford University Press, 1998), which offers religious perspectives on our scientific understandings of Nature, particularly biology at a molecular level.