Angela Garcia will be talking about her research at this CEMinar. Her research focuses on how social adversity impacts health disparities and disease risk. She uses life history framework and a multilevel systems biology approach to explore interactions between genetics, transcriptomics, cortisol, immune markers, perceptions, and behavior in order to understand the physiology of disparities in health within and between populations.

As a group, the 80-odd autoimmune diseases exhibit marked bias in incidence, prevalence and disease course in men and women. We do not understand this disparity, which has changed over time and which is largely ignored. In this talk, I will review what data currently exist in humans, and outline a strategy based on human genetics, genomics, and immunology to uncover the biology underlying this dramatic difference between men and women.

This lecture is a progress report on my effort to analyze the possible reasons for the persistence of genes that increase disease vulnerability.  The obvious important ones are the inevitability of mutations and environmental variation. If those could be eliminated, would most disease vulnerability be eliminated?  I argue that much would remain for two reasons. First,  maximizing gene transmission can increase disease vulnerability via several routes.

Manfred Laubichler will be talking about his research at this CEMinar. He is President's Professor of theoretical biology and history of biology and director of the Global Biosocial Complexity Initiative at Arizona State University. His work focuses on evolutionary novelties from genomes to knowledge systems, the structure of evolutionary theory and the evolution of knowledge. His undergraduate training was in zoology, philosophy and mathematics at the University of Vienna (Austria) and his graduate training was in biology at Yale and in History/History of Science at Princeton.

David Enard will be talking about his research at this CEMinar. He studies ancient epidemics through the lens of host genomic adaptation, and develops new methods to better quantify genomic adaptation in general. He is currently focusing on adaptation in human populations and on bats.

Michael Boots will be talking about his research at this CEMinar. His research focuses on the ecology/epidemiology and evolution of infectious disease. Parasites and pathogens continue to cause a major burden to human health, cause significant damage in agriculture, and are ubiquitous in nature. The overall aim is to understand the evolution of parasites, of host defense and how infectious organisms spread, persist and affect their host populations.

Athena Aktipis will be talking about her research and her podcast, "Zombified," at this CEMinar. She is an assistant professor in the Psychology Department at Arizona State University, co-director of the Human Generosity Project, director of human and social evolution and co-founder of the Center for Evolution and Cancer at the University of California, San Francisco. Aktipis completed her BA at Reed College (psychology), her PhD at University of Pennsylvania (psychology) and post-doctoral work at University of Arizona (ecology and evolutionary biology).

Melissa Wilson will be talking about her recently published paper about "Women caught in a pickle by their own immune systems." She is a computational evolutionary biologist whose main research interests include sex-biased biology. She studies the evolution of sex chromosomes (X and Y in mammals), why mutation rates differ between males and females, and how changes in population history affect the sex chromosomes differently than the non-sex chromosomes. Generally she studies mammals, but is also curious about the sex-biased biology of flies, worms and plants.