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Seminars
May 15, 2024
12:00pm, PST 1100 TLSB and Zoom
Allison Shultz
Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County
" From Tangible time Machines to Microscopic Mechanisms: Leveraging Museum Collections for Understanding Evolution "
Museum collections are repositories of physical specimens that can be used to answer myriad questions about biodiversity. My research leverages specimens with a primary goal of understanding the evolutionary processes that generate biodiversity across a range of biological scales. In this talk, I introduce my integrative research program, which spans an understanding of the evolutionary forces shaping integumentary structures like feathers to the responses of organisms to anthropogenic environmental changes. I highlight past, current, and ongoing projects that demonstrate a broad range of tools, ranging from spectroscopy and microscopy to computational modeling and genomics. Specifically, I highlight genomic studies on introduced songbirds, patterns of pollution (black carbon) accumulation on Southern California bird specimens, mechanisms of color production in feathers, and patterns of infrared reflectance across birds. I end with a discussion of museum collections generally and my ideas for the Dickey collection specifically.
Meeting ID: 947 2352 5273
Host: Felipe Zapata