2016 Friday Evening Lecture Series Announced

The Marine Biological Laboratory is pleased to announce the 2016 Friday Evening Lecture schedule. The series kicks off June 17 and will run each Friday through August 19. All lectures will be held at 8:00 PM in the MBL’s Lillie Auditorium, 7 MBL Street, Woods Hole and live-streamed at videocenter.mbl.edu.

The hour-long lectures are geared for a diverse and engaged audience and appeal to scientists and non-scientists alike. The 2016 lineup will cover topics including evolutionary biology, genetics, and ocean exploration.

Friday Evening Lectures are a long-standing tradition at the MBL, dating back to 1890 and given each year since then. Among the early lecturers were the outstanding founding scientists of the MBL such as Jacques Loeb, E.B. Wilson, Thomas Hunt Morgan, and Charles O. Whitman. The tradition of excellence has continued to the present day with the roster of lecturers including more than 30 Nobel Prize winners since 1970, including this summer's speaker Carol Greider, winner of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

The schedule is below. Stay tuned to mbl.edu/FEL for lecture abstracts and speaker bios.

   June 17 E.B. Wilson History and Philosophy of Science Lecture “Ernst Haeckel’s Romantic Biology” Robert J. Richards, The University of Chicago

June 24 "Fishing for the Secrets of Stickleback and Human Evolution" David M. Kingsley, Stanford University; Howard Hughes Medical Institute

July 1 Glassman Lecture "From Bacterial Adaptive Immunity to the Future of Genome Engineering" Jennifer A. Doudna, University of California, Berkeley; Howard Hughes Medical Institute

July 8 "Digging for Genes that Affect Behavior" Hopi E. Hoekstra, Harvard University; Howard Hughes Medical Institute

July 15 "Bacteria as Master Regulators and Aphrodisiacs" Nicole King, University of California, Berkeley; Howard Hughes Medical Institute

July 22 Forbes Lecture "The Remarkable Neuron: Building Long-lasting Memories from Short-Lived Elements" Erin M. Schuman, Max Planck Institute for Brain Research

July 29 Director's Lecture “Down to the Sea in Ships (and Satellites and Robots…)” Mark Abbott, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

August 5 "Wild Things in the Age of Humans" Sarah Zielinski, Science Writer and Editor

August 12 “How to Clone a Mammoth: The Science of De-extinction" Beth A. Shapiro, University of California, Santa Cruz

August 19 Porter Lecture “Telomeres and Telomerase: From Curiosity Driven Research to Human Disease” Carol W. Greider, Johns Hopkins University; Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (2009)