The Lawrence Hall of Science
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While we might be most familiar with rattlesnakes, black widows, and poison frogs (oh my!), toxins are produced or acquired by organisms in nearly every major group of life. This means that animals must avoid toxins or adapt to them. In this talk, Dr. Rebecca (Becca) Tarvin of UC Berkeley’s Department of Integrative Biology and Museum of Vertebrate Zoology will discuss why and how animals evolve to be both toxic and toxin resistant, including her research on how some poison frogs avoid poisoning themselves. In addition, she will discuss how studying toxins in organisms under pressure to survive their natural enemies also sheds light in fields across human biology, including the genetics of diseases, drug resistance, drug development, coevolution, and protein evolution.
About our speaker:Rebecca D. Tarvin obtained her BA in Biology from Boston University in 2010, worked abroad conducting fieldwork in Ecuador and then obtained a PhD in Biological Sciences from the Department of Integrative Biology at the University of Texas at Austin in 2017. After a year-long postdoctoral research position at UT Austin, she conducted another abbreviated postdoctoral scholar position as a Miller Fellow from 2018 to 2019. Rebecca’s PhD and postdoctoral work focused on the ecology, evolution, and molecular biology of poison frogs from Ecuador and Colombia. Currently, Rebecca is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Integrative Biology and an Assistant Curator of Herpetology at the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at the University of California, Berkeley. Her lab studies evolutionary mechanisms underlying adaptation and diversification with a focus on animals that acquire chemical defenses from their environment.
Registration is required.Doors open at 10:45 AM8 minute walk from Downtown Berkeley BART
Dr. Rebecca (Becca) D. Tarvin
Assistant Professor, Department of Integrative Biology; Assistant Curator, Museum of Vertebrate Zoology
scienceatcal@berkeley.edu
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