LSUS alum to deliver inaugural science series lecture
04/05/06

Dr. Kurt M. Pickett, an LSUS alumnus and Theodore Roosevelt Fellow at New York City’s American Museum of Natural History, will deliver two lectures at LSUS, including the inaugural lecture in Science Symposium Series sponsored by the LSUS Museum of Life Sciences at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, April 25, in the Science Lecture Auditorium. The symposium is free and open to the public.

Pickett, a 1990 graduate of Caddo Magnet High School and a 1996 graduate of LSUS with a B.S. in biology, will also speak at 11 a.m. on Monday, April 24 in the LSUS Science Lecture Auditorium. This presentation is also free and open to the public.

“ Four Billion Years of Altruism: From Molecular Alliance to Super-organism” is the title of Picket’s April 25 lecture, and his topic on April 24 will be “Testing Behavioral Scenarios: The Phylogenetics of New World Wasps and the Evolution of Sociality.”

Pickett earned Master of Science and Ph.D. degrees in entomology from Ohio State University. After receiving his doctoral degree in December 2003, he worked on two post-doctoral fellowship projects at the Museum of Natural History beginning in January 2004. His first project, “Computational aspects of phylogenetics,” was completed under a NASA Fellowship, while his Roosevelt Fellowship project, “Morphological, Molecular and Behavioral Phylogenetics of New World Polistes (Paper Wasps),” is scheduled to be completed this month.
For information on the LSUS Science Symposium Series, contact Dr. Jim Ingold at 318-797-5236 or JIngold@lsus.edu.