2023 GradFest Program
The ESPM Graduate Research Symposium was streamed LIVE on our department Youtube Channel, and video recordings are available now! Click below to view the schedule of the day.
Student Speakers
Keynote Speaker
Ignacio Chapela
Faculty, Dept. of Environmental Sciences, Policy, and Management
Ignacio Chapela is a microbial ecologist and mycologist at the University of California, Berkeley. He is best known for a 2001 paper in Nature on the flow of transgenes into wild maize populations, as an outspoken critic of the University of California’s ties to the biotechnology industry, as well as a later dispute with the University over denial of tenure that Chapela argued was politically motivated. Chapela is also notable for his work with natural resources and indigenous rights.
“Visibility is such a great obsession with us, humans! But the world knows little about that. Think about it: how long has the eye–as a biological structure– been around? And what does it really help with, for all its beautiful and mysterious construction? For organisms like us, who move in the curiously-ordered universe of meter-scale, specific shapes mean much, often the difference between life and death (think of our acuteness in detecting minor shape changes in someone’s face); but for most of life, who operate at time- and space-scales very different to ours? Do they care about the visibility of things?”
Read more on The Laboratory of Microbial Ecology website.