Pilar Vergeli & Dylan Gagler, both graduate students, attended the 8th Annual Earth-Life Space Institute Symposium in Tokyo, Japan last week! Pilar presented a poster on models of biospheres on both terrestrial and aquatic worlds - she is developing a new approach using metagenomic data to generate planetary scale models of ecosystems. Dylan presented a poster on classifying enzymes across environmental conditions. 

Graduate student John Malloy attended the Biology & Information Coding Theory workshop in Alexandria, Virginia and presented his work on the emergence of chirality within biochemical networks. The workshop was also organized by his undergraduate academic advisor, Dr. Ivan Erill of University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

Congratulations to lab member Jake Hanson for recently submitting the preprint titled "Integrated Information Theory and Isomorphic Feed-Forward Philosophical Zombies"! The paper is currently available on ArXiv here. 

Huge congrats to Dr. Harrsion Smith, Dr. Hyunju Kim, and Prof. Sara Walker for earning the "best paper" award at the 2019 Conference on Artificial Life, for work presented by Harrison titled "Biochemical Networks Display Universal Structure Across Projections and Levels of Organization". The abstract is available here.

​Postdoctoral fellow Dr. Douglas Moore is headed to the 2019 Conference on Artificial Life (ALife 2019), held in Newcastle,  to present a paper titled "Inferring a Graph's Topology from the Games Played on It", co-authored with Prof. Sara Walker. The full paper is available in the conference proceedings here. 

Lab alumni Dr. Harrison Smith is also presenting at ALife a paper titled "Biochemical Networks Display Universal Structure Across Projections and Levels of Organization", co-authored with Dr. Hyunju Kim and Prof. Sara Walker. The abstract is available here. 

Both Doug Moore and Harrison Smith, along with lab alumni Cole Mathis, were selected for lightning talks at the meeting. The full program for the conference can be found here.

Graduate student John Malloy will travel to Salt Lake City Utah, to deliver a talk titled "The Evolution of Chirality" at the Astrobiology Graduate Student Conference 2019. More details here.

Sara Walker will participate in Science Foo Camp ("SciFoo" for short) at GoogleX July 12-14th. More about SciFoo here. 

... or at least that is what Prof Walker and SFI's Michael Lachmann argue in a new essay appearing in ​Aeon.  Read the essay here.