Kendra's seminar at QUB Biological Sciences

I was invited to give a talk to the School of Biological Sciences (http://www.qub.ac.uk/schools/SchoolofBiologicalSciences/) at Queen's this week. This seminar was part of the Ecology, Evolution, Behaviour and Environmental Economics Seminar Series (http://www.qub.ac.uk/schools/SchoolofBiologicalSciences/OurResearch/EcologyEvolutionBehaviourandEnvironmentalEconomics/), which is attended by mainly students and some faculty. During the past 6 months, I've gone to two of the other seminars in this series (Drs. Catherine McGavigan and Dmitry Kishkiniev speaking about aquatic plants and migrating birds, respectively) and it seems like a good group of people. These seminars are held in a really large lecture hall and often start a bit late, so I went over to the building early to get set up. Of course, at 5 minutes before the start, someone came and got me because the room had been changed...best laid plans!

My talk, titled "Landscape Limnology: Understanding multi-scaled cause-effect relationships between terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems" was in the Medical Biology Center, about a block from the building my office is in. My talk was sparsely attended (only ~20 people probably), probably for 3 reasons: the room change, they haven't updated the seminar schedule online for this semester, and they were having a special evening seminar that night (many people, including me, wouldn't have time to go to 2 seminars in 1 day). Oh well, the people who did attend, asked me interesting questions afterwards and seemed to enjoy my talk.

It is interesting to experience the differences in culture across schools. For example, the seminars are not preceded or followed by food and drink (like those in GAP). Instead, the group gathers every Thursday morning for coffee and cake. I think that I will probably attend one of the coffee hours soon to see about continued interactions with people from this cluster.

Special thanks to Dr. Christine Maggs for hosting me - she seems to be a very nice person, 
as well as being a productive scientist and the Head of School.