What Shapes Life: From Invisible Enemies to Global Shifts

What happens when artists, scientists, and citizens co-create climate solutions? This talk explores how we can activate sustainability at the intersection of disciplines—through education, creativity, and systems change that speaks to both hearts and minds. What happens when artists, scientists, and citizens co-create climate solutions?

Many human diseases are caused by pathogens that usually live within animals - think COVID-19, HIV, Flu, Ebola, the list goes on. Beyond recent pandemics, important human diseases, like tuberculosis, are thought to have emerged when humans began domesticating animals, which brought them closer to new sources of disease. My research focuses on understanding disease in the ancient past and the role animals played in transmission. Take a journey with me through disease history using ancient DNA!

For over a century, biologists have puzzled over how we evolved from single cells into complex beings. My research focuses on understanding the hidden rules etched in our DNA that create the amazing diversity of life. I'm particularly interested in the "dark genome," which is the part of our DNA that doesn't make proteins. Once thought to be “junk DNA”, it's now clear that it acts as the blueprint of multicellular life.