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Biologics and Me: A Career in the Biotech Industry

Title: “Biologics and Me: A Career in the Biotech Industry” with Terry Hermiston Ph.D. of Coagulant Therapeutics and GLAdiator Biosciences 

Date: Wed. February 26th, 2020; 7:30 – 8:30 pm at Terra Linda HS in San Rafael, Room 207

“Biologics” are substances made from a living organism or its products which are used in the prevention, diagnosis, or treatment of cancer and other diseases. Biologic drugs include antibodies, interleukins, replacement factors and vaccines. Dr. Hermiston will discuss his training and career in biologics and the Biotech industry.

Bio: Dr. Hermiston has over 20 years of industrial experience in research and drug development. His experience includes drug development focused on idea conception and concept validation, as well as Scientific Advisory Board and Board of Directors service for biotechnology companies. Dr. Hermiston is currently CEO of Coagulant Therapeutics and GLAdiator Biosciences developing assets acquired from his time working at Bayer. Dr. Hermiston holds a Ph.D. in Medical Microbiology from University of Iowa.

Dr. Terry Hemiston

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Facebook event: RSVP here

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Engineering Rivers and Wetlands for Climate Resiliency

Title: “Engineering Rivers and Wetlands for Climate Resiliency” with Rachel Kamman PE of Kamman Hydrology & Engineering

Date: Wed. February 5th, 2020; 7:30 – 8:30 pm at Terra Linda HS in San Rafael, Room 207

Kamman Hydrology & Engineering’s mission is to provide hydrologic, engineering and geomorphology support in the restoration, enhancement and protection of watershed, river, wetland and coastal systems. Rachel Kamman will demonstrate and discuss how this can be done to help rivers and wetlands adjust to changes brought on by climate change.

Bio: Rachel Z. Kamman PE is a consulting hydrologist whose work focuses on ecological habitat restoration. Her San Rafael based consulting practice focuses on projects that revolve around sensitive wetland, fishery, and/or riparian habitat issues and problems. Rachel specializes in the fields of hydraulic and hydrodynamic analysis and modeling, focusing on the protection and restoration of estuarine and wetland systems. Typically, Rachel Kamman works on multi-disciplined projects, collaborating closely with biologists/botanists, ecologists, planners, engineers, and/or regulatory and resource agency staff. She holds a B.S. in Civil Engineering from Lafayette College and an M. Eng., in Hydraulics, Coastal Engineering, Hydrology & Geomorphology from UC Berkeley.

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Facebook event: RSVP here

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Geoengineering and Terraforming: the manipulation of climate on Earth and other planets

Title: “Geoengineering and Terraforming: the manipulation of climate on Earth and other planets” with Warren Wiscombe Ph.D. of NASA Goddard

Date: Wed. January 29th, 2020; 7:30 – 8:30 pm at Terra Linda HS in San Rafael, Room 207

Warren Wiscombe

In 2010 ‘geoengineering’ entered the Oxford English Dictionary as ‘the modification of the global environment or the climate in order to counter or ameliorate climate change’. Geoengineering must be intentional, not accidental (as in the current global warming). And geoengineering is only a stopgap measure on the way to a renewable energy economy.

The safest and most predictable method of moderating climate change is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. However, geoengineering may be useful to augment emission reductions. While some methods would incur gargantuan costs, notably the space-based ones, others are a relative bargain and technologically easy, notably putting aerosols into the stratosphere. While there are few technical showstoppers, geoengineering technology is nascent, and there are major uncertainties regarding its effectiveness, cost, and environmental impacts.

Terraforming, a much more radical version of geoengineering, is the technology to make an alien planet more suitable for Earth life forms. Edgar Rice Burroughs hypothesized terraforming in his book “Princess of Mars”. Kim Stanley Robinson fleshed out the idea in his trilogy “Red/Green/Blue Mars”. If humanity is to escape extinction, it will have to learn how to do terraforming. Possible methods will be noted, but the field is barely in its infancy.

Bio: Warren Wiscombe got a BS in Physics from MIT and a PhD in Applied Math from Caltech. Starting in 1971, he spent his career working on radiative transfer aspects of climate, notably the interaction of sunlight with clouds and aerosols. From 1983 till retiring in 2013, he worked at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. His core background is in e.m. radiation spanning wavelengths from UV to radio.

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Facebook event: RSVP here

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Adventures of a Plant Ecophysiologist: Studying How Tropical Forests Survive Drought

Marin Science Seminar for Teens & Community presents a free science event:

“Adventures of a Plant Ecophysiologist: Studying How Tropical Forests Survive Drought”
with Roxy Cruz of UC Berkeley

Costa Rican rain forest

Wednesday, November 20th, 2019, 7:30 – 8:30 pm

Terra Linda High School, 320 Nova Albion, San Rafael, CA – ROOM 207

Roxy Cruz in action

Roxy Cruz is a Plant Ecophysiologist, tree climber, and Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Integrative Biology at UC Berkeley. Her research takes her to Costa Rica and Peru where she studies how tropical forests respond to drought. She measures thresholds for plant survival to try and predict the fate of our tropical forests in the face of rapid changing climate.

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“Star Clusters: Many-Body Gravitational Laboratories” with Nicholas Rui of UC Berkeley

Marin Science Seminar for Teens & Community presents a free science event:

“Star Clusters: Many-Body Gravitational Laboratories” with Nicholas Rui of UC Berkeley

Wednesday, November 13th, 2019

7:30 – 8:30 pm

Terra Linda High School, 320 Nova Albion, San Rafael, CA – ROOM 207

Nicholas Rui is fourth-year physics/astrophysics undergraduate and aspiring science person at the University of California, Berkeley. You can find out more about him at his website at https://nicholasrui.com/research/.

Astrophysics at UC Berkeley

R.S.V.P. on Facebook

Join us & learn!

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Let’s Learn About Lysosomes! wth Dr. Gouri Yogalingam of Biomarin

Marin Science Seminar for Teens & Community presents another free science event:

“Let’s Learn About Lysosomes” with Gouri Yogalingam PhD of Biomarin Pharmaceuticals

Wednesday, November 8, 2019, Terra Linda High School, 320 Nova Albion, San Rafael, California, 94903, ROOM 207

Lysosomes were first identified by accident in the 1950’s by Christian de Duve, who described these sub-cellular organelles as “saclike structures surrounded by a membrane and filled with digestive enzymes”. De Duve won a Nobel prize for this discovery and since then a great deal has been learned about lysosomes. I will discuss how lysosomes can communicate with the rest of the cell to act as recycling centers of cellular waste material in good times. I will also talk about how lysosomes can act as overly-filled, toxic trash cans in bad times, contributing to cell death and the onset of disease.

Dr. Gouri Yogalingam

Dr. Yogalingam received her PhD from the University of Adelaide, South Australia, in the field of lysosomal storage diseases. Her work contributed to the successful development of enzyme replacement therapy for the rare genetic disease, mucopolysaccharidosis type VI. She then completed post-doctoral research at Duke University and Stanford University, where she worked on understanding how lysosomes contribute to cancer progression and cardiovascular disease. Dr. Yogalingam is currently a Senior Scientist at Bio Marin Pharmaceutical in Novato working on the development of effective therapies for the treatment of genetically-defined diseases.

Links:

BioMarin

LinkedIn

Previous Marin Science Seminar talk

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How Dangerous are Microwaves? with Warren Wiscombe PhD of NASA Goddard

Title: “How Dangerous are Microwaves? The physics behind non-ionizing radiation and a tale of two books titled Zapped” with Warren Wiscombe Ph.D. of NASA Goddard

Date: Wed. October 16th, 2019; 7:30 – 8:30 pm at Terra Linda HS in San Rafael, Room 207

Warren Wiscombe

Two books titled “Zapped” tell remarkably different stories, although both are about electromagnetic (em) radiation. One book, by a science journalist, tells a story based on 160 years of physics research on em radiation beginning with Faraday and Maxwell. The other cheerily recommends fear and loathing of em radiation based on cherrypicked factoids. In this talk, I wish to present the most basic facts in em radiation: what it is, how the energy of em radiation varies with wavelength, how em radiation interacts with matter, and the one over r-squared law. I also wish to discuss the real nature of science and how the same tactics that have been used to attack global warming science are used to attack a range of topics including nuclear power and em radiation. I will offer facts not fear, and will recommend, as the Greeks did, moderation in all things.

Bio: Warren Wiscombe got a BS in Physics from MIT and a PhD in Applied Math from Caltech. Starting in 1971, he spent his career working on radiative transfer aspects of climate, notably the interaction of sunlight with clouds and aerosols. From 1983 till retiring in 2013, he worked at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. His core background is in e.m. radiation spanning wavelengths from UV to radio.

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Facebook event: RSVP here

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AI, VR, & 3D: Amazing Applications for Understanding Physics – with David Levitt (9/25/19)

VR from Pantomime Corp.

Title: “AI, VR, & 3D: Amazing Applications for Understanding Physics” (plus learn about Swift mobile software development) with David Levitt of Pantomime Corp.

Date: Wed. September 25th, 2019; 7:30 – 8:30 pm at Terra Linda HS in San Rafael, Room 207

Dr. Levitt will present on augmented/virtual reality and Artifical Intelligence, and will show how 3D animation helps us visualize Einstein’s theory of gravity. He will also give a pep talk about becoming a self-taught Swift mobile software developer.

Dr. David Levitt

Dr. David Levitt is a cognitive scientist, artificial intelligence researcher, virtual and augmented reality innovator, mobile software developer, entrepreneur, physicist and writer. He was on the founding team of the MIT Media Laboratory, on the team at VPL Research that created the first commercial virtual reality systems, and he was a co-founder of Atari research laboratories. Levitt’s doctoral thesis ‘A Representation for Musical Dialects’ includes algorithms for classical and jazz composition and improvisation, such as piano arrangements in Fats Waller’s style. Levitt holds patents for inventions in virtual and augmented reality, and intelligent media processing software. He earned his doctorate in Artificial Intelligence at MIT and his BS in Engineering and Applied Science at Yale. Prof. Levitt has taught at MIT, NYU and SRJC.

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Click –> Facebook event for this presentation

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Myths of Astronomy with Thomas Targett PhD

April 3rd, 2019; 7:30 – 8:30 pm at Terra Linda HS in San Rafael, Room 207

Much of what we think we know about space often comes from film and television, but Hollywood’s job is more often to entertain than to educate. In this presentation, Prof. Thomas Targett of Sonoma State university will sort fact from fiction, taking a tour through the worlds of Star Trek, Star Wars, and much more.

Thomas Targett obtained his undergraduate and masters degrees from Cardiff University, with a research focus on 21-cm emission from neutral hydrogen. He obtained his PhD from the University of Edinburgh in the fields of sub-millimeter galaxy evolution and the coupled growth of galaxies and black holes. In 2007 Dr. Targett began a research postdoc at Caltech, followed by similar appointments at the University of Birmingham (UK), the University of British Colombia, and the University of Edinburgh.

As a member of several large international astronomical collaborations, Dr. Targett has contributed to the data reduction, processing, and scientific analysis of astronomical imaging in the field of “Big Data”. These surveys include the Cosmic Assembly Near-infrared Deep Extragalactic Legacy Survey (CANDELS), the Hawk-I UDS and GOODS Survey (HUGS), and the Hubble Ultra Deep Field 2012 (UDF12). His research now focuses on galaxy evolution, sub-millimeter galaxies, and the high-redshift universe.

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Dr. Targett at Sonoma State University

Facebook event

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The Deeper Roots of Climate Skepticism with Warren Wiscombe PhD of NASA Goddard

Title: “Merchants of Doubt: The Deeper Roots of Climate Skepticism ” with Warren Wiscombe of NASA-Goddard

Date, Time, Location: Wednesday, February 13th, 2019; 7:30 – 8:30 pm at Terra Linda HS in San Rafael, Room 207

Description:  Climate skepticism often appears superficial — just lazy people who have anointed themselves “climate scientists” without putting in the work required to earn that title.  But there is more to it.  We dig below the surface to uncover the roots of the phenomenon in the 1980s.  After the fall of the Soviet Union and the turn of China toward capitalism, a group of Cold Warrior scientists with no communists left to fight turned their fire instead on environmentalism (which in their minds equated to “big government and regulations”).  These people were strongly rooted in “free-market fundamentalism”, an economic philosophy going back to Friedrich Hayek in the 1940s.  Their rise coincided with that of Ayn Rand and her dramatizations of the woes inflicted on entrepreneurs by socialism. The movement had the backing of powerful, wealthy interests who founded and funded a dozen or more “institutes” devoted to spreading doubt about any science that might lead to government regulations.

Dr. Warren Wiscombe has done research in climate science since its birth in the early 1970s. He worked 30 years at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, and before that in the Climate Section of the National Center for Atmospheric Research. He taught climate and atmospheric science in several countries and universities. His interest turned to exoplanets in his last few years at NASA.

RSVP on Facebook here.

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