Sigma Xi : Sigma-Xi Conference

Keynote Speakers

Adam Williams, Ph.D.,
Advances in Genomic Medicine
Adam Williams received his PhD from the University of London and then undertook his postdoctoral studies at Yale University in the department of Immunobiology. Dr. Williams is currently an assistant professor at the Jackson Laboratory for Genomic Medicine in Farmington Connecticut where he is studying genetic and epigenetic causes of asthma.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Kavita Ramanan, Ph.D.
The Power of Randomness
Kavita Ramanan is a full professor of Applied Mathematics and director of graduate studies at Brown University. She works on probability theory, stochastic processes, and their applications, especially those modeling stochastic networks. She also held positions at Carnegie Mellon University and the Mathematical Sciences Center of Bell Laboratories, Lucent, before joining Brown, and has been a visiting professor at numerous institutions worldwide including U. Washington, Seattle; INRIA, France; and Technion, Israel. She is an elected Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics and a recipient of the Erlang prize for “outstanding contributions to applied probability” by the INFORMS Applied Probability Society. She was also granted a number of patents for applied work that she carried out while at Bell Laboratories and has received several grants-including from NSF. Last, but not least, she has served as associate editor of several journals, including the Annals of Probability, Annals of Applied Probability, Mathematics of Operations Research, Queueing Systems, and Stochastic Analysis and its Applications.

Dr. Ramanan received her B.Tech. in Chemical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai, and a Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from Brown University in 1998

 

Kent Holsinger, Ph.D.
People, proteas, and evolutionary processes: What’s math got to do with it?”

Kent Holsinger is a Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology as well as the Vice Provost for Graduate Education and Dean of the Graduate School at the University of Connecticut.  His research focuses on the evolution and genetics of plants. Specifically, he has explored how basic principles of ecology, evolutionary biology, and systematics should influence conservation decisions and has developed statistical methods for analyzing genetic diversity in spatially structured populations.  His work has been published in over 150 papers in peer-reviewed journals as well as several book chapters.  To fund this work Dr. Holsinger has received several grants from the National Science Foundation.  He has been deeply involved in the leadership of several professional societies, holding positions including: Executive Vice-President of the Society for the Study of Evolution, President of the American Genetics Association, President of the Botanical Society of America, and President of the American Institute of Biological Sciences.

Dr. Holsinger received his BS in biology from The College of Idaho in 1978 and his PhD. in Biological Sciences from Stanford University in 1982.