Farhan Chowdhury
Dr. Farhan Chowdhury is an Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Interim Associate Dean for Research and Administration in the College of Engineering, Computing, Technology, and Mathematics at SIU Carbondale. He also holds a joint appointment in the School of Electrical, Computer, and Biomedical Engineering. Dr. Chowdhury received his doctoral degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2011. His dissertation was focused on the understanding of cell fate decisions of pluripotent stem cells by mechanical cues. In 2012, he received the prestigious IGB postdoctoral fellowship from the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign to investigate the underlying molecular mechanism of cell fate decisions in cancer using single-molecule approaches. His primary research utilizes mechano-genomics approaches from state-of-the-art physical sciences tools, high-resolution live cell imaging, and next-generation sequencing technologies to obtain a highly integrative picture of biomechanical, biomolecular, and gene regulatory features in disease and development.
Jonathan Losos
Jonathan Losos is an evolutionary biologist known for his research on how lizards rapidly evolve to adapt to changing environments. He graduated from Harvard University and received his PhD from the University of California. After a postdoctoral stint at the University of California Davis, Jonathan moved to Washington University for his first faculty position, before leaving to become a professor of biology at Harvard and Curator in Herpetology at the university’s Museum of Comparative Zoology. He then returned to Washington University in 2018 to become the founding Director of the Living Earth Collaborative, a partnership between Washington University, the Saint Louis Zoo and the Missouri Botanical Garden. This new biodiversity center, nearly unique in partnering a leading university, zoo, and garden, has as its mission to advance knowledge and conservation of biodiversity. Losos has written more than 250 scientific papers and three books, most recently The Cat’s Meow: How Cats Evolved from the Savanna to Your Sofa (Penguin Random House, 2017), and is an author of a leading college biology textbook (Raven et al., Biology). Losos has been elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and is the recipient of the Daniel Giraud Elliot Medal from the National Academy of Sciences, the Theodosius Dobzhansky Prize from the Society for the Study of Evolution, the Edward O. Wilson Naturalist Award from the American Society of Naturalists, and the David Starr Jordan Prize.