Events Detail

Speaker:
Bernd Schierwater, Hannover; and Guy Blanchard, University of Cambridge

Collective Behaviour at the Microscopic Scale

On Friday May 24th we will have talks by two leading researchers, Guy Blanchard and Bernd Schierwater, on the theme of collective behaviour at the very small scale: placazoa and embryogenesis. Bernd Schierwater will start his talk at 1:30pm, Guy Blanchard around 2:15pm.

Bernd Schierwater is Professor of Zoology in Hannover and Research Associate at both Yale University and the American Museum of Natural History New York. He has a broad background from biochemistry and ecological genetics to evolutionary theory and systematics, and has dedicated himself to the study of Placozoa. His current projects include the phylogeny, biodiversity, morphology, development, and functional genomics of Placozoa. His talk will be on "How to Build the Simplest Animal on Earth and in Space: Lessons from the Placula"

Guy Blanchard did his PhD in the lab of Nigel Franks, where he studied the relationship between individual behaviour and colony-level behaviour in ants (and advised Iain during his PhD). Now he is in Cambridge, where he is using automated cell tracking to understand the cellular mechanics of embryogenesis. His talk will be on “Quantifying cell behaviours and their contribution to tissue deformation in the embryo”.