A GUIDED TOUR IN SCIENCE

Freshman Seminars
Semester 2,   Jan - Apr 2008

Professor Derek CHAN

Visiting Professor
Department of Mathematics

[Last update: 8 Jan 2008]

This Freshman Seminar stream: A GUIDED TOUR IN SCIENCE is intended to provide participants with a perspective of a broad range of scientific disciplines, their historical context and development and the personalities involved. Through discussion and negotiation with the instructor, students can select from a range of available topics with guided reading lists to commence their research or to develop their own areas of interest to undertake research. Participants are expected to share their findings with the class through research proposals, oral presentations and written reports. There will be opportunities for collaborative group work. Students are encouraged to experiment and undertake projects outside their major areas with the aim of broadening their understanding and appreciation of other scientific disciplines.

A unique feature of Freshman Seminar: A GUIDED TOUR IN SCIENCE will be a set of special presentations given by local and international guest scientists who have been specially invited to speak to students in the Freshman Seminar program. While the topics are very much current active areas of research, the presentations will nonetheless be made accessible to first year science students. To maximize the benefits from these special seminars students will have to be prepared to undertake some background research about each topic.

Due to the personal schedule of individual guest speakers, these special guest seminars will be held at special times indicated below.

Recommended background reading:

1   A mini-guide to scientific thinking: Scientific Thinking
    Students should complete reading this during the first 2 weeks of the semester.

2   Useful hints in preparing visual aids for presentations: Death by Powerpoint
    This gives valuable hints when it comes to preparing for class presentations.

    Seminars by Invited Speakers

    [ Click on the seminar titles for more details. ]

    Abstracts

A Tour of Bioinformatics

Mr Maurice Ling
Department of Zoology
The University of Melbourne, Australia

Bioinformatics is an emerging field in today's "omics" era. We frequently use the suffix "-ome" and "-omics" to objectify "the collection of" and "the study of the collection of" respectively. As such, we hear terms like "genomics" and "proteomics" regularly in press. Bioinformatics is essentially a merger of biology, computer science and information management, and statistics to "tame" the omics. Being a meeting of fields, the skillset and background training of a bioinformaticist or bioinformatician can be very diverse, for example a biologist-turned-bioinformaticist and a statistician-turned-bioinformaticist can be quite different in thinking and skills.

In this talk, I will use the 2 main omices of my interest, transcriptomics (the study of actively expressed genes) and bibliomics (the study of human-written literature), with some examples from my work to illustrate how biology, computing, and statistics mingles. Bootstrapping on this, I will expand the talk to discuss how the approach to biology and medical research has changed from the last decade with emergence of bioinformatics.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Maurice holds a BSc (Hons) in Molecular and Cell Biology from the University of Melbourne, a BSc in Computing from the University of Portsmouth as well as Diplomas in Biotechnology and in Computer Studies. He is completing his Doctorate (PhD) at the University of Melbourne where he works on text mining and genomic analysis of microarrays.

Discovering the discoveries of Joseph Priestley (1733-1804): Phlogiston Revisited

Prof Les Woodcock
Chemical Engineering, University of Manchester, UK
Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering, NUS

Why have historians of science not been so kind to Joseph Priestley?

Is it because he mixed science, politics and religion?

What were his major discoveries in his research on the propertes of gases? Was he the first "biochemist" when he made obserservations on the connection between respiration and blood? Was he the first to describe biochemical reactions using chemical equations?

His rivals called him 'stupide' but was he really a scientist ahead of his times in his stuborn belief in the phlogistic theory which actually has a modern interpretation? Would history have been kinder to Joseph Priestley, one wonders, if historians of science themselves had an understanding of Gibbs chemical potential and why reactions occur?

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Les is one of the earliest pioneers in the use computer simulations to study the properties of liquids and chemical reactions. He is currently a NUS Visiting Professor in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering. He is a self-confessed Priestly fan being actively involved in the Priestley Society in the UK and is also a keen farmer who owns a prized herd of a very rare breed of cattle. He has recently taken tennis and softball.

His research interests are detailed in his homepage.

The Evolution of Deceptive Signaling in Insects .. and .. Field Trip around Kent Vale

Dr David Lohman
The Conservation Ecology Laboratory
Department of Biological Sciences, NUS

The transfer of information from one entity to another spans many levels of biological organization. Cells within a nerve fiber exchange signals, one endocrine gland may control other glands and tissues within the same organism, mating pheromones attract one organism to another individual of the same species, and a bird in a mixed-species flock may make alarm calls that alert other species to the presence of a predator.

One of the major refinements made in the 20th century to the concept of Darwinian natural selection asserts that natural selection acts on individual genes - and not necessarily the organisms that contain them - to maximize their ability to replicate. Using this 'selfish gene' paradigm as a theoretical backdrop, we will review how the selfish interests of signalers and receivers affect signaling and communication. In particular, we will focus on the evolution of 'deceptive signaling' in which one organism deceives another for its own selfish interests, drawing on examples including slave-making ants, lasso-throwing spiders, and firefly femme fatales.

One week prior to his lecture, David will lead a short nature walk around some of the wooded areas of campus. In addition to explaining how an evolutionary ecologist translates field observations into hypotheses, he will talk about the biology of the organisms (mostly insects) encountered on the walk.

Note:
  1   Wear long pants and sturdy shoes for the 1-hr field trip.
  2   If it rains on the 13th, the field trip will take place on the 15th.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

David's research interests are in the area of ecology and evolution of interactions between species, the natural history of ants and the ecology of the Asian tropics. His PhD research at Harvard University was on the study of chemical communication between butterflies and ants. He has undertaken extensive field work in South East Asia and Australia and is also a fluent Thai speaker.

More details of his current research can be found in his homepage.

Learning from Nature, Working with Nature

Dr Liew Oi Wah
Centre for Biomedical and Life Sciences
Singapore Polytechnic

Our biological world provides such a wellspring of ideas that everyday devices and materials could well benefit from nature-inspired improvements. This presentation introduces the growing interest in the field of biomimetics, a scientific pursuit attributable to our increasing awareness and appreciation of the superiority of nature's structures, materials, methods, mechanisms and processes. In essence, biomimetics, which originates from the Greek word bi`os meaning "life" and mi`me.sis meaning "imitation", aims to extract design principles and concepts from nature and apply these to improve our technology in a sustainable way. The first half of this lecture provides an overview of biomimetic successes inspired by creatures big and small. This is followed by a brief presentation of an ongoing research project undertaken at Singapore Polytechnic showing how some natural mechanisms and processes has been adapted to breakdown the “language barrier” between plants and humans for application in the field of precision agriculture.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Oi Wah received a Bachelor of Horticultural Science degree (Hons) in 1990 and a Ph.D in Biochemistry in 1995 from Lincoln University, New Zealand. She was an National Science and Technology Board (NTSB) Postdoctoral Fellow with the Department of Biochemistry, Faculty of Medicine, National University of Singapore, from 1995 -1997. Dr Liew joined the Singapore Polytechnic in 1998 as a lecturer with the School of Chemical and Life Sciences. She is currently seconded as a full-time scientist at the Centre for Biomedical and Life Sciences. She specializes in recombinant protein expression in plants and bacteria, development of plant and optical sensors applied in precision agriculture as well as drug discovery and development targeted primarily towards dengue fever and SARS.

Stem Cells in Regenerative Therapy and Tissue Engineering

Dr Michelle de Silva
Particulate Fluids Processing Centre
The University of Melbourne, Australia

Embryonic stem (ES) cells, which are derived from the inner cell mass of blastocyst embryos, are pluripotent and therefore capable of generating all embryonic tissues including the germline. The availability of ES cells presents an unprecedented opportunity for the development of cell therapies for disorders based on the replacement of defective tissue with functional tissue generated in vitro from the directed differentiation of ES cells. The therapeutic use of embryonic stem cells raises many ethical and medical issues which researchers are trying to address by the use and development of stem cells derived from adult tissues. These new advances in the field of stem cell research will be discussed and regenerative therapies for hearing loss will provide a real example of the use of stem cells in tissue engineering.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Prior to assuming the role of Centre Manager of the Particulate Fluids Processing Centre at the University of Melbourne, Michelle was involved in stem cell research applied to alleviating hearing loss at the Murdoch Childrens Research Institute in Melbourne. Her recent interest has extended to the use of stem cells in tissue engineering.

More details of her research can be found in her homepage.