Conservation Impacts on the Global Scale

I really enjoyed Jessica Jackley's presentation on her company, Kiva. Her manner of presentation and the subject matter were really great to listen to. I enjoyed that she brought in humor in her speech and discussed some of the troubles she encountered on the way to creating her company. There were a lot of key moments that stuck with me during the talk. I thought her point of view on economics particularly resonated with me, in that she felt that she wanted to help others but saw economics as a selfish industry and not suited to her goals, something that I had felt in the past before. As I'm taking economics, I've been seeing increasingly how economics can be used to help others ethically, which is something Jackley noted in her talk too as she interacted with students at Stanford studying economics. Jackley's presentation reminded me of Masauko Chipembere's talk in that they were both open to talking about their failures they experienced along the way to their ...

I came out with a lot to think about after Joseph Jok and Alepho Deng's visit to Poly during a high school assembly and an afterschool event. Unfortunately, since Judy Bernstein, the co-author of Disturbed in their Nests , was unable to attend these events, Joseph Jok helped Alepho introduce information on Sudanese history that gave an effective description of politics and geography during the events of the Sudanese Civil War. I found this section of the event particularly important for my understanding of the subsequent description that Alepho gave of his experiences in Sudan as well as cementing the events described by Alepho both in the talk and Disturbed in their Nests  in a greater historical context. Before anything, I want to express my admiration for the fortitude of Alepho in talking to us. I am aware that Alepho during the day talked to the middle school, the high school, interested students at lunch, and gave a presentation after school, which must have been extrem...

I just wanted to talk briefly about the Qingjiang Biota and its significance to biological research. I personally think biology is a more global subject than many people might think. It brings researchers to a variety of different places to study living or extinct animals. I've seen this with friends and researchers alike: Diego Blanco's taken his interests in biology to Peru and the postdoctoral researcher I've worked with for research on developmental biology has studied hemichordates, or a type of worm, loosely speaking, in other parts of the United States (since housing on the California coast has destroyed environments that would have suited hemichordates well). In my research at the Bronner Lab, researchers all over the world from South Africa to Japan came to work with lamprey (a rare model for studying evolution). I was able to talk with Tetsuto Miyashita, a researcher studying the evolution of the jawed vertebrates, about paleontology and I got to thinking how ...