Berkeley Lab is working with the Felidae Conservation Fund to determine and assess mountain lion activity at the main Lab location. A lecture on Wednesday, May 29, in the Building 50 Auditorium from noon to 1 p.m. addresses whether mountain lions exist in the neighborhood and what role they play in our local ecosystem. The lecturer from Felidae will discuss other local wildlife as well as the efforts of the Bay Area Puma Project.
The Physical Biosciences Division presents its next “Science & Tech Talk” tomorrow with a lecture by UC Berkeley Professor Ming Hammond. She’ll discuss “Privileged RNA Scaffold for In Vivo Function” at noon in the Building 66 Auditorium. Hammond’s research aims to provide new insights into the regulation of gene expression in bacteria and plants, which has applications toward engineering bacteria and plants for biofuel production and other biotechnology projects.
The fourth Annual Patricia Durbin Memorial Lecture will be held on Wednesday, May 29, at 4 p.m. in the Building 66 Auditorium. The lecture honors the late Patricia Durbin, best known for her seminal work in medical aspects of radiation protection. The Glenn T. Seaborg Center of the Chemical Sciences Division will host refreshments at 3:30 p.m., followed by the Memorial Lecture on “Environmental Biogeochemistry of 99Technetium: Implications for Subsurface Transport at the Hanford Site” presented by James Fredrickson of the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.
The Lab is hosting “Eight Big Ideas” at the Berkeley Repertory Theater tonight, which features eight scientists giving eight-minute talks on their research. The event is sold out, but those who don’t have a free ticket can watch a livestream of the event, which runs from 7 to 9 p.m. Learn more and watch the event live here.
Employees are encouraged to invite their high-school aged children to attend the next Nano-High lecture on “Bad Sugars: Addictive and Hazardous to Your Health.” The talk, presented by UC San Francisco professor Robert Lustig, takes place tomorrow at 9:30 a.m. in 1 Pimentel Hall on the UC Berkeley campus. Lustig is a world leader in the study of nutrition-based metabolic disease and in particular the role of excess sugar in the disruption of normal metabolism. He says the “wrong” kinds of foods can lead to premature aging, debilitating diseases, and shortened lifespan. More>
Merna Hurd, associate deputy director at Livermore Lab, will speak at the Women Scientists and Engineers Council luncheon on Monday, May 13, in Building 15-253 from 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m., followed by a half-hour networking session. Merna will discuss her career in the public and private sectors and how she overcame obstacles to thrive in a male dominated field. She will also touch on how her career has evolved over the years, and how she manages work/life balance. Lunch will be provided. RSVP required. More>
As part of the recent American Chemical Society (ACS) conference on the “Chemistry of Energy and Food,” a talk was given at the Lab by Sorin Rosca (right), chair of the Romanian Chemical Society, on the chromatographic and spectroscopic authentication of Romanian wine. The event was sponsored by the San Francisco section of the Electrochemical Society, which is chaired by EETD postdoc Jaroslaw Syzdek (left), and the California section of ACS. In attendance was ACS chair Marinda Wu.
The event was co-hosted by the Center of Science and Engineering Education (Public Affairs) and Energy Storage and Distributed Resources Department (Environmental Energy Technologies Division). After the talk, Dr. Robert Kostecki, deputy director of EETD presented the history and mission of LBNL and then the guests had a chance to tour several battery laboratories as well as the Advanced Light Source. Meeting was organized by EETD (Jaroslaw Syzdek, Venkat Srinivassan, Robert Kostecki, Hui Zhao, Cheon Jung Kim, Kyu Taek Cho) in collaboration with CSEE (Joseph Crippen, Susan Brady) and ALS (Douglas Taube).
The next ALS Science Café will be held at noon in Building 15-253 on Wednesday, May 8. Featured topics and speakers are “Flipping Out over Topological Insulators” by Chris Jozwiak, “Playing ‘Chase the Electron’ With Oxides from Chromium to Plutonium” by Stefan Minasian, “Imaging the Chemistry of (Microbial) Life” by Hoi-Ying Holman. ALS Director Roger Falcone will moderate. Light refreshments will be provided.
A roster of stellar physicists kicks off BrunoFest today in honor of Berkeley Lab and UC Berkeley theorist Bruno Zumino’s 90th birthday. Part of the celebration is a public lecture by Fabiola Gianotti, former spokesperson (leader) of the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider, who announced last July 4th, along with her colleague from the CMS experiment, the discovery of a new particle that looks very like the long-sought Higgs boson. Gianotti will talk about ‘The Higgs Boson and Our Life’ starting at 5 p.m. Friday in the International House’s Chevron Auditorium.
