Evolution and Sharks! Celebrate Darwin’s Birthday!

We’ll be joining the Baltimore Coalition of Reason again this year in celebrating Darwin Day. Join us for pizza and a lecture on evolution of the immune system by Dr. Helen Dooley of the University of Maryland. The talk description is below.

We will order pizza for dinner at a suggested cost of $6 per person. Please RSVP if you would like to eat so we can order enough pizza.

Childcare will be provided on request. Please let us know by February 5 if you will be bringing children and we will arrange for a childcare provider. The lecture will be done by roughly 8:00 pm so reasonable weeknight bedtime is still possible.

What sharks are teaching us about the evolution of the immune system

The aim of my work is to understand how the highly complex immune system found in humans came into being. Essential to this understanding are our studies on the immune system of sharks and their relatives, the skates, rays, and chimera. As the most evolutionary distant species to have a ‘human-like’ immune system, these provide important comparators. In this talk I’ll describe our work and what we are learning about the evolution of immune protection.

Dr. Helen Dooley is an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Marine and Environmental Technology (IMET) and serves on the faculty of the University of Maryland School of Medicine. She earned her Ph.D. in Antibody Engineering at the University of Aberdeen (UK) in 2001. She is an immunologist and educator, heading a research team studying immune evolution.

Dr. Helen Dooley’s pages:
http://www.medschool.umaryland.edu/profiles/Dooley-Helen/
https://imet.usmd.edu/directory/helen-dooley

Baltimore Coalition of Reason
http://BaltimoreCoR.org/