The following is an incomplete list of resources available for research purposes outside of
MCDB and
EEMB, both on campus and otherwise in Santa Barbara.
AT UCSB
Anthropology
Anthro has a teaching/reference collection of skeletal material of vertebrates that is largely focused to the interpretation of human habitation sites, but the collection and associated courses can be invaluable to students interested in questions of hard-part anatomy of vertebrates.
- Amy Boddy - evolution, genomics, comparative genomics, human biology, evolutionary medicine, fetal-maternal conflict, life history theory, cancer
- Michelle Brown - primate behavioral ecology, evolution of social systems, competition and cooperation, evolutionary game theory, behavioral endocrinology
- Steven Gaulin – Evolutionary psychology
- Mike Gurven - human social behavior and life history evolution
- Amber Vanderwarker - Ethnobotany and zooarcheology
Biomolecular Science and Engineering (BMSE)
The Interdepartmental Graduate Program in Biomolecular Science and Engineering epitomizes the highly interdisciplinary approach to research and education that is the hallmark of UC Santa Barbara. In this context BMSE offers a unique mix for graduate training and research at the frontiers of Biochemistry, Molecular Biology, Bioengineering and Biomolecular Materials. The BMSE Program may be for graduates, but an examination of Faculty research pages will lead you to some laboratories working on the forefront of materials and nano-technology where you might find a research option. See particularly:
The Bren School of Environmental Sciences and Policy
The Bren School is technically a graduate program. However, there are some good biological folk there, and if you can talk your way in, so much the better:
Environmental Studies
Department of Earth Science
The department has several
mass spectrometric facilities focused upon paleoclimatology recorded by isotopes of Carbon, Oxygen, strontium and others. These isotopes can be used to track other things too. The Paleontological Collections. Ostensibly part of the Museum of Systematics and Ecology, but housed in PSB South. Largely focused upon invertebrate fossils, particularly of the last 60 million years of southern California.
Geography
Extraordinary strengths in remote sensing; both in the use of existing technology and the development of new technologies. Very important for any research involving widespread geographic coverage.
- Susan Cassels - Epidemiology & Mathematical modeling; social network analysis; infectious disease epidemiology.
- Timothy DeVries - Interactions between chemical, biological, and physical processes in the marine carbon cycle, and in feedbacks between these processes and the Earth's climate
- Hugo Loaciaga: Hydrology and Geology
- Ed Keller: Hydrology and Geology
- Keith Clarke: Remote Sensing
- Jennifer King: Biogeochemistry, earth system science, global change,
ecosystem ecology
- David Lopez-Carr: Human dimensions of global environmental change
- Joe McFadden: Land-use and land-cover change, biosphere-atmosphere
interaction
- Dar Roberts: Remote sensing of vegetation, geology, ecology, and
ecophysiology
- David Siegel : Interdisciplinary oceanography investigating physical,
biological, optical and biogeochemical couplings on micro to ocean basin
scales.
- Anna Trugman: Using plant physiology, integrating field measurements with numerical ecosystem models to gain new insight into the biological processes affecting climate-vegetation interactions.
- Kelly Caylor: Ecology and hydrology of dry lands.
The Department of Geography hosts a wonderful resource,
Spatial@UCSB, dedicated to visualizing and analyzing data in a 3D manner. They offer consultation on your data sets at specific hours.
Psychology
The
Evolutionary Psychology program has strong ties to the Neurobiology Research Institute. People include:
Psychology also contains many people who overlap in interests with MCDB:
The sixteen faculty in the
area of Biochemistry center around the common themes of bio-organic and bio-inorganic reaction mechanisms, protein-nucleic acid recognition, nucleic acid structure and dynamics, and membrane transport. They can offer expertise in a number of experimental tools such as Xray diffraction, computer graphics and computational analysis.
The UCSB Library
Beyond standard library resources, UCSB hosts the "
Map and Imagery Library" (MIL) in the first floor of the SEL wing. This is a national repository, and has both digital and paper images of just about any kind of geographic reference you could want. This includes:
- Topographic maps
- Geologic Maps
- Maps & volumes summarizing vegetation, climate, hydrology, cultural and other features;
- Aerial photographs from landsat down to old plane-flown photographs.
- And much more!
The Marine Science Institute
The Marine Science Institute (MSI), established at the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1969, is the focus for marine, coastal zone, and freshwater research; marine policy studies; and educational outreach in marine science. MSI administers and supports research projects involving faculty, professional researchers, technical staff, graduate students, and undergraduate students from 14 disciplines. There are a LARGE number of researchers associated with the MSI who are not faculty in one of the biology departments – and many are very student friendly. Some specific faculty to check out include :
Tom Dudley,
Jenny Dugan,
Mark Page,
Uta Passow,
Dan Reed, and
Milton Love (See especially Milton Love’s web page – it’s cool!). A complete list of MSI associated faculty can be found
here.
PISCO (Partnership for Interdisciplinary Studies of Coastal Oceans) is a large, long-term, ecosystem research and monitoring program that involves Santa Barbara and three other West Coast campuses (Oregon State, Stanford and UCSC).
Center for Bioengineering
The Center for BioEngineering (CBE) is a hub for
research and teaching at the interface of biology,
engineering and physical sciences. It builds on UC
Santa Barbara’s strengths in biophysics,
biomaterials, biomolecular discovery, and
computational and experimental systems biology,
enabling fundamental scientific discoveries to be
transitioned to applications in medicine and
biotechnology.
Cheadle Center for the Study of Biodiversity and Ecosystem Restoration (CCBER)
Located under the south end of the stadium. Used to be the Museum of Systematics and Ecology in EEMB, now independent. Houses the plant and animal collections of the University. Hosts a range of research projects, particularly concerning biodiversity and the reclamation of local ecosystems. Very strong programs in outreach to local school children. Check out their
internships.
National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS)
An outstanding international think tank on anything ecological and a lot evolutionary. It is a cross road of visiting scientists, in house researchers and periodic work groups who have access to a series of immense computerized databases that allow researchers to seek out explanations for gross patterns in Nature. Many UCSB faculty and graduate students participate, and there are frequent opportunities to work as paid data-collectors or enterers. NCEAS is located on State Street, in the center of the Paseo Nuevo. Note that they have a Thursday lunch seminar that hosts internationally known scholars.
The UC Natural Reserve System.
The UC System is unusual (not quite unique) in owning its own set of natural reserves dedicated to instruction and research. Each reserve is selected as representative of an important ecosystem in California. Most are managed by resident scientists. All are available for visitation or research with proper initial approval (signing of waiver forms indicating respect of the property, etc. ). Each Reserve has its own web site, and most list past research conducted on the Reserve. A good way to see who is doing what.
UCSB has one on campus (
Coal Oil Point Note particularly here that Cristina Sandoval (director of Coal Oil Point) is an active researcher who interacts with undergrads) and two nearby (
Sedgwick Reserve &
Carpinteria Salt Marsh). We also manage the
Santa Cruz Island Reserve, the
Kenneth S. Norris Rancho Marino Reserve near Cambria, the
Sierra Nevada Aquatic Research Lab in Bishop, and the
Valentine Camp on the eastern face of the High Sierra.
OFF CAMPUS
Channel Islands National Park (And the Channel Islands National Marine Sanctuary)
The National Park Service manages several of the Channel Islands, and is interested in supporting research on them. Most of their voucher specimens come to Museum of Natural History
Lotusland Botanic Garden
Located in Montecito, Lotusland occupies 38 acres, much planted with exotic plant species in striking array. Lotusland has the world's third largest collection of cycads, and outstanding collections of Agave, Aloe and cool-tolerant palms. The garden is looking to become increasingly involved in research.
Santa Barbara Botanic Garden
Nearly a century old, the garden focuses upon native Californian plants. It has an outstanding living collection arranged by habitats, and a good library and herbarium focused in native flora. The Garden has a long-standing reputation for research into native Californian plants, and the biogeography of the Channel Islands. Research students interested in botany would do well to explore this. The Garden has a long-standing reputation for research into
native Californian plants,
( and https://www.sbbg.org/conservation-research/black-holes-blog) and the
biogeography of the Channel Islands.
Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History and Sea Center.
The Museum of Natural History is likewise nearly a century old, and has an established research reputation. It has internationally-recognized collections of living Mollusca and bird egg shells, and a very strong collection of marine invertebrates of the Santa Barbara Channel. Other collections include an excellent collection of mammals, particularly marine mammals, of southern California, a wide range of fossil whale material, a decent insect collection, and collections of particularly Pleistocene fossil marine and terrestrial organisms. It hosts active researchers working on -
Marine Mammals - Krista A. Fahy, Michelle L. Berman
Marine octopods - F. G. Hochberg
Marine gastropods - Henry Chaney
Marine Mollusca - Paul Valentich Scott
Ethnobotany - Jan Timbrook,
Vertebrate Biology - Paul Collins, Patricia Sadeghian
Vertebrate Paleontology - Jonathan Hoffman
Invertebrate zoology (gastropods) - Daniel Geiger
Santa Barbara Zoological Gardens
The Zoo is mostly dedicated to the culture and reproduction of living, endangered, taxa. However, while they might not take kindly to dissecting a living animal, they certainly offer opportunities to examine behavior, and who knows what else might be worked out.
USC Wrigley Marine Science Center, Catalina Island
For those of you with marine interests, a local (SoCal) resource is the Wrigley Marine Science Center on Catalina island, run by USC. It offers research opportunities and summer courses.
This coming week in the bio colloquium we're reading an article from the primary literature. To provide general background on the elements of a scientific paper we also handed out "guidelines for writing a scientific paper". To help you think about it from the other end (reviewer vs. writer) you may want to see what guidelines the scientific journals provide their reviewers, that is, what helps us decide whether a paper is "publishable" by a given journal. This is useful in writing (and reading) a paper to see what the "critics" are looking for.
I'm reposting this, not just because I like the title, but because it is getting around to that time of year again. The picture to the left is just a very cute opossum, the picture below is the three baby opossums and this was originally posted at the start of April 2008.
If you find injured wildlife during the day, you can take it to the Wildlife Care Network located near the OSH store in the Fairview Center in Goleta. After hours, weekends, and holidays, you can take it to the C.A.R.E. Hospital downtown (Garden & Haley) which is conveniently open 24 hours.
Todays visit to CCBER reminded me to remind me that as CCS students you are also UCSB students (well duh) but you are also UC students. The combined resources of the UC system are tremendous, and are potentially available to you as UC students.
Page from Darwin's notebooks around July 1837 showing his first known sketch of an evolutionary tree.
You can find Erasmus Darwin's work at the Internet Archive Open-Access Text Archive - a wonderful resource with over 200,000 items, most of them out of copyright or otherwise in the public domain.
One of the best pieces of advice to a young scientist is to read, and read widely. The internet has made this whole lot easier and there are numerous sites out there that will direct you to papers worth reading in whatever areas your interest takes you. Over the next few weeks we will be covering a number of topics in evolution. Two blogs that are worth checking out for some clear writing and interesting links on these topics are:
I've never had enough time to investigate it fully but the Interactive Tree of Life looks like an amazing tool that provides a whole suite of ways to represent, manipulate, and display phylogenetic trees. One of my interests is in the graphical representation of data (see Edward Tufte's forum/blog for some superb discussions on this) and the Interactive Tree of Life website combines both this and biology. Presenting such complex data in a way that people can understand is not easy so it's great to be able to see a whole bunch of different attempts at this - you can scroll through several on the right hand side of the webpage. A related way of presenting the complexity of a tree of life is the hyperbolic tree approach at the Deep Green website. Notice how you can pick up nodes and move through the tree.
