Student Projects

Endless Forms: Engaging Evolution
Organized by students and faculty in the group A&D Life. Endless Forms: Engaging Evolution is an exhibition project that will explore the diversity of forms that communicate, comment on, and engage the science of evolutionary biology and mechanisms of evolutionary change. The exhibition will be on display from February 24 to March 24, 2006, the WORK exhibition space at 306 South State Street in Ann Arbor. A call for submissions is available at www.endlessforms.net.

Evolution Mural Project
Students in LSA's Lloyd Hall Scholars Program 140 will attend many of the theme semester events as preparation for their project to create a mural on the theme of evolution. The mural will be installed in the new Undergraduate Science Building.

Tuesday, April 11
Evolution Mural Opening Celebration
Created by Students in Lloyd Hall Scholars Program 140
5-7pm, Undergraduate Science Building

Genre Evolution Project
Students and faculty are working together on the Genre Evolution Project to test the hypothesis that cultural creations evolve in the same way as biological organisms. As a test case, the GEP currently focuses on science fiction short stories in America of the 20th century. Membership in the GEP team is arranged through the principal investigators, Eric Rabkin (esrabkin@umich.edu) and Carl Simon. Individual team members participate either as purely voluntary researchers or through some more institutionalized mechanism such as independent study or the Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program. New student participants are welcome; visit the “Invitation to Join” section of the GEP web site to learn more.

Chris Landau: The Flocking Party
An MFA student in the School of Art + Design, Chris Landau has developed a web-based project called “The Flocking Party.” The site presents a message sent back from the future in the form of a field notebook. In the notebook, a young scientist describes how a virus has rapidly evolved to change the brain and behavior of birds.

Jennifer Zee: Grasshopper Evolution Comic
Jennifer Zee is an MFA student in the School of Art + Design and has a Masters degree in Biology. Jen is interested in communicating science research using "user-friendly" artistic techniques such as comic style drawing. A current project is a comic explaining Ecology and Evolutionary Biology/Museum of Zoology Professor Lacey Knowles's research on the evolution of Melanoplus grasshoppers in the northwestern United States. Her studies investigate the effects of climate change, phylogeography, genetic drift and sexual selection on grasshopper speciation.