Dr. Caroline Williams is an Assistant Professor at the University of California at Berkeley, USA. She received multiples awards including the George Bartholemew award by the Society of Integrative and Comparative Biology (2017) and the Outstanding Faculty Advising Award by the Berkeley Advising Council, UC Berkeley (2016). Her research aims to uncoverdrivers, mechanisms and consequences of adaptive evolutionary change in pathways of energy metabolism, in response to environmental variability. It focuses on four inter-related themes: 1) Evolutionary impacts of seasonality; 2) Mechanisms and consequences of stress responses; and 3) Mechanisms of life history evolution; and 4) Methods development in metabolic physiology and biochemistry. She works with a diverse array of small ectotherms in her research, mostly insects. The title of her talk is: “Evolutionary impacts of seasonality”.
Dr. John Lighton was the last Ph.D. student from the renowned physiologist George A. Bartholomew at the University of California Los Angeles, USA. Dr. Lighton is a pioneer in respirometry and insect ecophysiology. He was fellow of the David and Lucile Packard Foundation (1993) and founder of Sable Systems International, a company that designs and manufacture world-wide known integrated, field-tested metabolic measurement systems. He has authored papers in Science, Nature, PNAS, among others, as well as the book “Measuring Metabolic Rates – A Manual for Scientists”, which today ranks as the most widely-read and referenced work on metabolic measurement.
Dr. Hervé Colinet is a Permanent CNRS researcher (CR1) at the University of Rennes, France. His research focuses on adaptive responses of ectotherms to environmental and anthropic constraints. To do so, he applies various approaches ranging from ecophysiology to evolutionary and molecular biology with aims of reaching an integrated understanding of stress adaptations at different organization levels, from genes to individual responses. Currently, he is leading a research line about the cold tolerance of the spotted wing Drosophila fly, Drosophila suzukii, a destructive fruit crop pest native from Southeast Asia, which recently invaded Europe, North America and South America. The title of his talk is: “Cold tolerance of insects: a complex and multifaceted flexible trait”.
Dr. Carlos A. Navas holds a Ph.D. in Ecology, with emphasis in Evolutionary Biology and Ecophysiology from the University of Connecticut (USA). He is currently a Full Professor at the Institute of Biosciences at the University of São Paulo, Brazil, researcher at CNPq, and head of the Ecophysiology and Evolutionary Physiology Laboratory. His research line involves Comparative Physiology, Evolutionary Physiology, Ecophysiology and Thermal Biology, investigating the evolution of physiology and physiological plasticity in the context of adaptation or adjustment along ecological gradients, with emphasis on the specific case of amphibians, reptiles and terrestrial arthropods. The title of his talk is: “The natural history of high-elevation tropical anurans: A life of extremes”.
Dr. Francisco Bozinovic, Ph.D. – Full Professor of the Faculty of Biological Sciences at the Catholic University of Chile and Deputy Director of the UC Down Syndrome Center. Researcher of the Center of Applied Ecology & Sustainability. He is a key investigator in the ecological and evolutionary physiology community in South America, investigating physiological constraints on biodiversity, with the aim of improving the ability to predict the responses of organisms to natural environmental cahnges as well as human induced perturbations such as climate change. Author of approximately 300 ISI indexed articles and four books. He has directed the theses 21 Ph.D’s and guided 17 post-doctoral researchers. Belongs to the Chilean Academy of Sciences, received scholarships from Andes Foundation, The Carnegie Institution and J. S. Guggenheim. In addition, he won the Scopus-Elsevier awards, the Medal of Scientific and Cultural Merit of the Croatian community and the award for excellence by the Ecological Society of Chile. The title of his talk is: “The performance of ectotherms in variable thermal landscapes. Inside the
mechanisms, processes and patterns in a warming world”.
