Dr. Jeffrey Barrick, a molecular biosciences professor from The University of Texas at Austin, will be the featured speaker for two public science lectures set Thursday and Friday, Feb. 15 and 16.
The lectures will be held on the TJC and UT Tyler central campuses. They are free and open to the public.
Barrick is an associate professor and the Lorene Morrow Kelley Professor in Microbiology at UT Austin. He has a Bachelor of Science from California Institute of Technology, a Ph.D. from Yale University, and was a postdoctoral fellow at Michigan State University.
He has taken over the Long-Term E. coli Evolution Project (LTEE) that started in the laboratory of Dr. Richard Lenski in 1988. He has been publishing on the LTEE since 2006; however, these are just a portion of his over 100 publications.
Barrick’s work encompasses bacterial evolution, microbiome-insect interactions, synthetic biology and directed evolution of viruses for phage therapy.
The first lecture, entitled “The Long-Term Evolution Experiment: Watching Bacteria Evolve for More Than Three Decades,” will be held 6 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 15, in the Apache Rooms of Rogers Student Center on the TJC central campus. A welcome reception will be held at 5 p.m. before the lecture.
In his second lecture, set for 6 p.m. Friday, Feb. 16, in the UT Tyler University Theatre, Barrick will discuss “How Bacteria Evolve to More Rapidly Evolve: Implications for Medicine and Biotechnology.” A reception with free food and beverages will be held from 5 to 6 p.m.
The lectures are part of annual Darwin Day activities and sponsored by TJC, UT Tyler, The Earth and Space Science Center at TJC, Discovery Science Place, the National Science Foundation, and Alpha Chi National College Honor Society.
For more information, go to darwindaytyler.org.