Upcoming Seminars
Friday seminars during the 2025-26 academic year will be located in Gilmer Hall Auditorium 390 and begin at 12:00 pm unless otherwise noted.
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Fall 2025
October 31, 2025
Tera Levin, PhD
Assistant Professor, Department of Biological Sciences
University of Pittsburgh
The evolution of immunity and pathogenesis within environmental microbial battlegrounds
New infectious diseases routinely emerge from natural reservoirs, with sometimes devastating consequences. How does this happen? Specifically, what events within natural environments allow proto-pathogens to evolve virulence and eventually jump to humans? Using the bacterium Legionella pneumophila, we study the evolution of microbial virulence in response to natural microbial predators such as amoebae. I will present experiments showing the significant impacts of these invisible host-microbe interactions on bacterial evolution, as well as our studies of the “immune” defenses of amoebae and the evolutionary origins of our own innate immune pathways. Together, we expect these studies will help to uncover the process of new pathogen emergence. They will also reveal what aspects of immunity pathogens encounter (and adapt to overcome) in the wild, long before these microbes ever meet their first human.
12:00 PM - 1:00 PM | Gilmer Hall Auditorium 390 | Add to Calendar
November 7, 2025
TBD
12:00 PM - 1:00 PM | Gilmer Hall Auditorium 390
November 14, 2025
Thomas Maresca, PhD
Department of Biology | University of Massachusetts – Amherst
Hosted by: Keith Kozminski, PhD
12:00 PM - 1:00 PM | Gilmer Hall Auditorium 390
November 21, 2025
Sebastian Stockmaier, PhD
Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology | University of Tennessee
Hosted by: Mandy Gibson
12:00 PM - 1:00 PM | Gilmer Hall Auditorium 390
December 5, 2025
J. Andrew Hardaway, PhD
Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Neurobiology | University of Alabama at Birmingham
Hosted by: Ali Guler, Phd
12:00 PM - 1:00 PM | Gilmer Hall Auditorium 390
Spring 2026
February 6, 2026
Ken Poss, PhD
Morgridge Institute for Research | University of Wisconsin
Hosted by: David Parichy, PhD
February 27, 2026
Joshua Weitz, PhD
Professor of Biology | University of Maryland, College Park, MD
Hosted by: Nicholas Landry, PhD
12:00 PM - 1:00 PM | Gilmer Hall Auditorium 390
March 13, 2026
Aaron Quinlan, PhD
Professor and Chair of Human Genetics | University of Utah
Hosted by: Jenny Guler, PhD
12:00 PM - 1:00 PM | Gilmer Hall Auditorium 390
March 20, 2026
Bernard Kim, PhD
Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology | Princeton University
Hosted by: Alan Bergland, PhD
12:00 PM - 1:00 PM | Gilmer Hall Auditorium 390
March 27, 2026
Elena Gracheva, PhD
School of Medicine - Cellular and Molecular Physiology | Yale University
Hosted by: Tracy Larson, PhD
12:00 PM - 1:00 PM | Gilmer Hall Auditorium 390
April 3, 2026
Graduate Research Symposium
12:00 PM - 1:00 PM | Gilmer Hall Auditorium 390
April 10, 2026
Cathryn Cadwell, MD, PhD
University of California - San Francisco
Hosted by: John Campbell, PhD
12:00 PM - 1:00 PM | Gilmer Hall Auditorium 390
April 17, 2026
Molly Schumer, PhD
Department of Biology | Stanford
Hosted by: Katja Kasimatis, Phd
12:00 PM - 1:00 PM | Gilmer Hall Auditorium 390
April 24, 2026
Austin Keeler
Department of Biological Sciences | University of Delaware
Hosted by: Christopher Deppmann
12:00 PM - 1:00 PM | Gilmer Hall Auditorium 390
May 1, 2026
Nikhil Sharma, PhD
Department of Molecular Pharmacology and Therapeutics, Department of Systems Biology | Columbia University
Hosted by: Christopher Deppmann, Phd
12:00 PM - 1:00 PM | Gilmer Hall Auditorium 390