Thursday, October 2, 2014

Tenure Track Plant Evolution Position


The Department of Biological Sciences at California State University, Long Beach (CSULB) is seeking to hire a tenure-track plant evolutionary biologist with research experience in molecular and morphological traits.  We invite broadly-trained scientists committed to excellence in innovative research and teaching at an undergraduate and M.S. degree-awarding university to apply.  CSULB is located three miles from the ocean in the ethnically-diverse greater Southern California area and serves over 35,000 students.

We have a brand new state of the art research facility which includes three new greenhouses and a full-time botany technician.  Major instrumentation supporting faculty research and teaching include confocal, scanning, AFM, and transmission electron microscopes, proteomics facility with MALDI-TOF-TOF mass spectrometer, flow cytometer, quantitative PCR machines, and a Typhoon phosphorimager.

The full job description and application instructions are attached and can also be found at http://www.csulb.edu/divisions/aa/personnel/jobs/posting/2179/index.html  Please distribute this request to talented postdoctoral researchers with an interest in establishing a research lab and teaching program at a dynamic comprehensive university.

CSULB seeks to recruit faculty who enthusiastically support the University’s strong commitment to the academic success of all of our students, including students of color, students with disabilities, first generation to college, veterans, students with diverse socio-economic backgrounds, and diverse sexual orientations and gender expressions.  CSULB seeks to recruit and retain a diverse workforce as a reflection of our commitment to serve the people of California, to maintain the excellence of the University, and to offer our students a rich variety of expertise, perspectives, and ways of knowing and learning.

Kind regards,

Judy Brusslan
Chair, Plant Evolution Search Committee

Mindful USC


In Memoriam | Richard F. Thompson, 84

A world-leading behavioral neuroscientist who spent a half-century on memory research, University Professor Emeritus Richard F. Thompson developed USC Dornsife’s neuroscience research program.

















USC Dornsife’s Richard F. Thompson was the first neuroscientist to identify and map the neural circuits responsible for classical conditioning — a form of learning. Photo by Philip Channing.

Link to article

What is C-DEBI?

The Center for Dark Energy Biosphere Investigations explores life beneath the seafloor, making transformative discoveries that advance science and benefit society.

Link to video 

PhD Fellowships at Oregon State

Attached: position announcement for three Ph.D. fellowships in Systems Biology at Oregon State University.

These fellowships are supported by the USDA National Needs Graduate Fellowship and are available in the Department of Animal and Rangeland Sciences at OSU. Please circulate the announcement with your graduate students. In lieu of circulating the pdf announcement, you are welcome to share the link from our website announcement at http://anrs.oregonstate.edu/content/phd-fellowships-systems-biology-0.

I appreciate your time and effort to help us attract top quality students to Oregon State University. If you have any questions or comments regarding this fellowship announcement or OSU, please let me know.

Thank you again,

Lindsey Hollinger
Department of Animal and Rangeland Sciences
118 Withycombe Hall
Corvallis, OR  97331
(541) 737-5327
lindsey.hollinger@oregonstate.edu

Plants and their Stressors

New research identifies a genetic switch that regulates a plant’s internal clock based on temperature, leading to plants that can better adapt to climate change.

















Dawn Nagel, a postdoctoral researcher at USC Dornsife and lead author on a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, works in Steve Kay’s laboratory. Photo courtesy of Kay Lab.

Link to article

Grand Computational Challenges in the Metagenomics Era | Computational Biology Colloquium

“Grand Computational Challenges in the Metagenomics Era”

Jizhong Zhou
University of Oklahoma
Dept of Microbiology & Plant Biology
Institute for Environmental Genomics

Thursday, October 2, 2014
2:00 pm
RRI 101
Host:  Ting Chen

Abstract:
Microorganisms constitute the most abundant life forms on Earth’s biosphere, and play integral and unique roles in ecosystem functioning, such as biogeochemical cycling of carbon (C), nitrogen (N), sulfur (S), phosphorous (P) and various metals. Understanding the functional diversity, composition, structure, and interactions of microbial communities across different spatial and temporal scales is a critical issue in microbial community ecology. However, analyzing microbial community structure and linking community structure to functions are very difficult. Metagenomics and associated genomics technologies such as high throughput sequencing and functional gene arrays have been demonstrated to be powerful tools for understanding microbial community composition, structure, function, and dynamics and linking microbial communities with environmental factors and ecosystem functioning. With recent advance in metganomics technologies, massive experimental data can be produced, but one of the greatest difficulties is how to handle, analyze and synthesize such massive metagenomics data. In this talk, I will first briefly highlight the current status and most recent development of metagenomics technologies. Then I will describe some great challenges in handling sequencing-based soil metagenomics data. Also, I will describe mathematical prediction of random sampling problems, which results in artifacts in overestimating microbial community diversity across different samples. In addition, I will introduce a new random matrix theory-based mathematical framework to describe ecological network interactions based on metagenomics data, their challenges, and future directions.