Talk Description:  The mysteries of the biological world are alive with music in this presentation that will take you from the songs of frogs to the dynamic code embedded in the DNA. With original music by Marine Snow and featuring a selection of faculty from the Biological Sciences, you will learn about environmental issues, obscure marine organisms, the microorganisms living inside you, carnivorous plants, epigenetics, and more! No issue is too strange to marvel about our living world, recognize we still have a lot to learn and sing along to catchy tunes. 

Speaker Bio: Catalina Cuellar-Gempeler grew up in Colombia, in between Bogotá (big big city) and my grandpa’s farm in the town of Sasaima. She studied Biology and microbiology at the Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, Both working in the Lab and the Field. Catalina completed her honors thesis in a little Marine Station in the north of Yucatán (Mexico), This was her first crab-bacteria project. She spent years working in environmental education and sustainability projects, mostly around Colombia, gathering important professional skills and a love for teaching outdoors. Catalina moved to the  US in 2010 to pursue her  PhD at the University of Texas in Austin, where she fully developed her ideas on host associated microbial ecology, focusing on crabs and other crustaceans and their associated bacteria. She completed a postdoc at Florida State University, where she switched to work on carnivorous plant -associated microbial communities and started considering the functional consequences of community assembly. With her research group at Cal Poly Humboldt, we combine these experiences to explore ecological processes of community assembly and function in aquatic environments, marine invertebrates and carnivorous plants.