March 30th: A Brief History of Life's Diversity

Prof. Mindell will discuss the question: "What is Life?" He will also give an illustrated overview of life's diversity together with a discussion of the history of evolutionary thought, and the computational challenges involved in discovering the patterns of life's diversification over the past 3.8 billion years.

David Mindell is a Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Michigan. He received his Ph.D. degree from Brigham Young University in 1986. He was a post-doctoral fellow at Tel Aviv University in 1986 and at Harvard University in 1987-1988. He was a member of the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Cincinnati during 1989-1994.