Environmental Researcher Jesse Ausubel to Discuss the Environment of the 21st Century at MBL Friday Evening Lecture, July 13

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Monday, July 09, 2012
Contact: Gina Hebert, Senior Publicist/Development Communications, Marine Biological Laboratory
Phone: (508) 289-7725, E-Mail: ghebert@mbl.edu

MBL, Woods Hole, MA – Well-known environmental researcher Jesse Ausubel will present the July 13th MBL (Marine Biological Laboratory) Friday Evening Lecture, titled "Earth at Seven Billion," a radical modernist tour of the environment of the 21st century where populations explode and implode, people starve and fatten, resources collapse and abound, forests shrink and spread, air clears and allergies rise.  The lecture will begin at 8:00 PM in the MBL's Lillie Auditorium, 7 MBL Street, Woods Hole. It is free and open to the public.

Mr. Ausubel is the Director of the Program for the Human Environment at The Rockefeller University and a Vice President of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.  He spent the first decade of his career working for the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) and National Academy of Engineering and was one of the main organizers of the 1979 UN World Climate Conference in Geneva, which substantially elevated the global warming issue on scientific and political agendas.

Since 1989 Mr. Ausubel has served on the faculty of The Rockefeller University, where he leads a research program that aims to elaborate the vision of a large, prosperous society that emits little or nothing harmful and spares large amounts of land and sea for nature. Since 1994 he has concurrently served as a program manager in basic research for the Sloan Foundation.

In 2000, Mr. Ausubel helped initiate the Census of Marine Life, an international observational program to assess and explain the diversity, distribution, and abundance of life in the oceans. Beginning in 2006, Mr. Ausubel led the formulation of the Encyclopedia of Life, a monumental, unprecedented effort to create a web page for all species of animals, plants, and other forms of life on Earth. The Encyclopedia now offers more than one million species pages.

A graduate of Harvard and Columbia universities, Mr. Ausubel is an adjunct scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution where he has worked each summer since 1990.  He has been awarded honorary doctorates from Dalhousie University and the University of St. Andrews (Scotland) and received the Blue Frontier/Peter Benchley prize for ocean science (2010).  In 2011, Mr. Ausubel was elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, and, as a member of the leadership of the Census of Marine Life, shared the 2011 International Cosmos Prize.

The Friday Evening Lecture Series will continue throughout the summer at the MBL.  The remaining lectures in the series are below.  For more information, visit mbl.edu/FEL

July 20, 2012
Forbes Lecture
"Using Deadly Cone Snails to Understand Nervous Systems"
Baldomero M. Olivera, University of Utah; Howard Hughes Medical Institute

July 27, 2012
"Is Science Revolutionary? Thomas Kuhn and the Structure of Science"
Jed Z. Buchwald, California Institute of Technology and Paul Hoyningen-Huene, University of Hannover, Germany

August 3, 2012
Glassman Lecture
"Protein Folding in the Cell: The final Step of Information Transfer" - Arthur L. Horwich, Yale University, Howard Hughes Medical Institute

August 10, 2012
Joshua Lederberg Lecture
"Food and Sex: The Neurogenetics of Innate Behavior"
Leslie B. Vosshall, The Rockefeller University; Howard Hughes Medical Institute

August 17, 2012
Sager Lecture
"How Bacteria Talk To Each Other"
Bonnie L. Bassler, Princeton University; Howard Hughes Medical Institute

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The Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) is dedicated to scientific discovery and improving the human condition through research and education in biology, biomedicine, and environmental science.  Founded in 1888 in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, the MBL is an independent, nonprofit corporation.