Media contact: Noelle Lemoine, communications assistant; tele: (413) 597-4277; email: [email protected]
WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass., April 15, 2014—Claire Ting, associate professor of biology at Williams College, will present the Sigma Xi lecture on Thursday, April 24, at Williams College. She will speak on “The Alphabet of Revelations: (Meta)Genomics as a Means to Understand Microbes and their Complex Ecosystems.” The lecture will take place in Wege Auditorium at 4:15 p.m. and is free and open to the public. A reception will follow in Schow atrium.
Microorganisms are the keystone of life in diverse ecosystems. To understand their impacts, it is critical to have knowledge at the level of individual cells, as well as dynamic communities. Advances in genomics and metagenomics have transformed our understanding of the biology, ecology, and evolution of microorganisms. In her talk, Ting will focus on cyanobacteria, which have evolved to dominate vast regions of the open oceans and play a pivotal role in global energy cycles. She will address how genomics and metagenomics research has contributed to an integrative understanding of microorganism biology and how diversity at the molecular level impacts ocean ecosystems.
Ting’s research has involved more than 40 students, who have participated both in her laboratory research at Williams and her field work in the Sargasso Sea. She served as chief scientist for a National Science Foundation-funded project aboard the R/V Atlantic Explorer in the Sargasso Sea and was recently invited to participate in the NSF Ocean Acidification panel, the NSF Climate Change panel, and the NSF-BBSCR Ideas Lab on Surpassing Evolution: Transformative Approaches to Enhance the Efficiency of Photosynthesis. Her work has been published in journals including Journal of Bacteriology, Photosynthesis Research, Plant Physiology, and Genome Research.
She was awarded a Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation Career Enhancement Fellowship for Junior Faculty in 2006. She also received major research grants from the NSF in 2006 and 2009, and in collaboration with colleagues from the chemistry and physics departments, was awarded another NSF grant in 2009 for the purchase of two atomic force microscopes for Williams.
Ting received her B.A. from Yale University and her Ph.D. in plant physiology, microbiology, and biochemistry from Cornell University. She was twice awarded Cornell’s Outstanding Graduate Teaching Assistant Award. She received an NSF/NATO postdoctoral fellowship to conduct research at the IBPC in Paris, France, and worked at MIT as an NSF postdoctoral fellow in biosciences related to the environment. She joined the faculty of Williams in 2003 and has taught courses on Integrative Plant Biology, Life at Extremes, the Organism, and Genome Sciences.
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Published April 15, 2014
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