[pccgrads] Naomi Levine's Hedges Visiting Scholar Seminar Wed 4/16 at 2pm in OSB 425

[Stevie Walker via pccgrads]

Hello all,

The chemical oceanography graduate students are pleased to invite you all
for *Naomi Levine's Hedges Visiting Scholar Seminar* on *Wednesday, April
16th at 2pm* in *Ocean Sciences Building 425 *(1492 NE Boat St, Seattle, WA
98105). This seminar is open to the entire UW community.

About the seminar and the Hedges Visiting Scholar Program:

*Title:* Breaking open the microbial black-box to improve our understanding
of biogeochemical cycling

*Abstract:* Marine microbes are the engines that drive biogeochemical
cycling in the oceans thus playing a critical role in the climate.
Specifically, both the production and the consumption rates of organic
carbon are set by the interaction between diverse microbial communities and
the chemical and physical environments in which they reside. Modeling these
dynamics requires reducing the complexity of microbial communities and
linking directly with biogeochemical functions. Microbial metabolic
functional guilds provide one approach for reducing microbial complexity
and incorporating microbial biogeochemical functions into models. However,
defining these guilds can be challenging especially for heterotrophic
microbes. We have been using a range of cellular-scale models to both
assist in defining metabolic functional guilds from annotated genomes and
to help understand the mechanistic basis behind trait trade-offs. These
models can relate directly to 'omic measurements for validation and
hypothesis generation. They also provide a means for coarse-graining
microbial dynamics for incorporation into larger-scale biogeochemical
models. The use of pipelines that leverage multiple modeling approaches
provides a path forward for bridging from the cellular to ecosystem scale
and thus provide new insight into the role that microbial communities play
in setting rates of carbon cycling.

*About our scholar:*
Naomi M. Levine is a Professor at the University of Southern California
where she holds joint appointments in Marine and Environmental Biology,
Quantitative and Computational Biology, and Earth Sciences. She received
her BA in Geosciences from Princeton University and her PhD in Chemical
Oceanography from the MIT-WHOI Joint Program. Naomi’s research focuses on
understanding the interactions between climate and marine microbial
ecosystem composition and function. The Levine Lab is developing
innovative, interdisciplinary numerical models that allow them to
understand how dynamics occurring at the scale of individual microbes
impact large-scale ecosystem processes such as rates of global carbon
cycling. Naomi is an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow, Simons Foundation
Early Career Investigator, and NSF CAREER recipient.

*About the Hedges Visiting Scholar Program:*
John Hedges was one of the world’s leading marine organic geochemists and
was a member of the Chemical Oceanography faculty at the University of
Washington from 1976 to 2002. The Hedges Visiting Scholar fund was created
in his memory to allow chemical oceanography graduate students to invite
prominent scientists to the UW campus.

Warmly,
The Chemical Oceanography Graduate Students
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