Join us with Joseph Parker, PhD on Thursday, May 26 at 5:00pm (PDT) to explore how interactions between species emerge during evolution.
What allows a freeloading outsider to don a disguise and infiltrate a tight-knit society? Extreme evolution. By means of rapid and dramatic behavioral, anatomical, and chemical adaptations, a group of insects named rove beetles can assimilate into ant colonies -- normally fiercely xenophobic -- and exploit their social hosts undetected. This remarkable group of beetles, the most species-rich family in the animal kingdom, provides a paradigm for studying how interactions between species emerge during evolution.
Joseph Parker, PhD
Joe Parker is an Assistant Professor of Biology and Biological Engineering at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. He obtained a BSc in Zoology from Imperial College London and a PhD from the University of Cambridge/Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology. Following this, he pursued his postdoctoral research at Columbia University in New York. At Caltech, his lab studies rove beetles and their interactions with social insects to understand how relationships between species emerge during evolution. His work is highly integrative, spanning genomics and cell biology to behavioral neuroscience, and has been recognized with numerous awards. He is a Rita Allen Foundation scholar, a Klingenstein Fund/Simons Foundation fellow, an Alfred P. Sloan fellow, a Pew Biomedical Scholar, and a recipient of the National Science Foundation's CAREER Award.
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