Wednesday, April 3, 2024

 13th Annual QU Sigma Xi Conference (2024)

April 21st Abstract submission deadline https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/SigmaXiQU2024

  • Posters are 4' long by 3' high. You can either :
    • print the poster as a  large document (Staples or Kinkos Fedex North Haven) and clip it (clips provided) to the trifold
    • OR print 8.5x11 inch sheets and bring thumb tacks and come early and tack the sheets to your board.

April 24th -- Distinguished Speaker and Student Poster Public Viewing

  • Poster Hours: 3:00-5:00 pm 
    • Students present posters with public attendance (students will be at their poster either 3:00-4:00 or 4:00-5:00, they can visit other posters during the other hour) 
    • 33 posters
    • View the abstracts here: https://tinyurl.com/SigmaXiQU2024 (live)
  • Poster Session 3:00 – 5:00 PM on Burt Kahn Court in the Recreation and Wellness Center (students assigned first or second hour to attend to their poster).  To help out judging, contact Neil Schultes (Neil.Schultes@ct.gov) or me (james.kirby@quinnipiac.edu).
  • Distinguished Speaker: 5:15pm, followed by Student Awards 
    • Sigma Xi Speaker:  5:15 PM also on Burt Kahn Court:  Dr. David Bader will present Solving Global Grand Challenges with High Performance Data Analytics
    • Dr. Bader’s website: https://davidbader.net/
    • David A. Bader is a Distinguished Professor and founder of the Department of Data Science in the Ying Wu College of Computing and Director of the Institute for Data Science at New Jersey Institute of Technology. Prior to this, he served as founding Professor and Chair of the School of Computational Science and Engineering, College of Computing, at Georgia Institute of Technology. He is a Fellow of the IEEE, ACM, AAAS, and SIAM; a recipient of the IEEE Sidney Fernbach Award; and the 2022 Innovation Hall of Fame inductee of the University of Maryland’s A. James Clark School of Engineering. The Computer History Museum recognizes Bader for developing the first Linux-based supercomputer which became the predominant architecture for all major supercomputers in the world.



Monday, February 26, 2024

Quinnipiac Chapter of Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Honor Society Seminar Series presents Dr. Scott Davies

 Quinnipiac Chapter of Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Honor Society

Seminar Series presents

Dr. Scott Davies

Associate Professor of Biology, Quinnipiac University

“Coping with environmental change:

Reproductive adjustments of songbirds to urban living”

 

Monday, April 1 at 2:00 PM in Student Center 119

Urbanization profoundly alters the environment and forces urban organisms to adjust to the new conditions. Since urban areas are one of the most rapidly expanding habitat types worldwide, the potential impact of urbanization on biodiversity is substantial. There is, therefore, an urgent need to understand the mechanisms responsible for adjustment to these new habitats.

Like most wild animals, birds have distinct seasonal breeding periods that are synchronized with optimal environmental conditions to maximize reproductive success. Hence, it may be advantageous for urban birds to adjust the timing of reproductive activity to local environmental conditions. This presentation will describe how wild songbirds adjust their reproductive activity to live in urban areas and explore the mechanisms responsible for these adjustments.

Dr. Scott Davies is originally from the United Kingdom and got his undergraduate and master’s degrees from the University of Wales, Bangor. He moved to the USA to complete his PhD at Arizona State University studying the reproductive endocrinology of urban birds. He then continued his work on the physiology of urban living as a postdoctoral researcher at Virginia Tech and the University of Nevada, Reno.  He has been at Quinnipiac since 2017.

Wednesday, February 21, 2024

Quinnipiac Chapter of Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Honor Society Seminar Series presents Dr. Neil Schultes

 Quinnipiac Chapter of Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Honor Society

Seminar Series presents

Dr. Neil Schultes

Associate Agricultural Scientist,

The Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station

“Fire blight – a bacterial scourge of apple production”


Tuesday, March 5 at 3:30 PM in Buckman Theater

Fire blight is a devastating disease affecting apple and pear production.  The pathogen is a Gram-negative bacterium called Erwinia amylovora that is native to North America but readily infects apple and pear trees that originated in the old world.  This disease was first described in 1787 and due to modern cultivation practices has become a major problem in apple production.  This talk will give an introduction into the biology of this plant pathogen, describe current control practices and present some current lab based research into future disease management strategies.

 

Dr. Schultes received his Ph.D. in Genetics at Harvard Medical School and did postdoctoral research at Yale University before joining CAES in 1994, where he has advanced from Assistant Scientist to his current position.