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Dr. Kenneth Wright | Wright LabAbstract:
Circadian rhythms and sleep are highly integrated systems important for healthy physiology. In modern society, exposure to less sunlight light during the day and electrical light at night disturbs sleep and circadian rhythms. Disturbed sleep and circadian rhythms contribute disease and mechanisms of disease risk include alterations in energy metabolism and in the human proteome and metabolome. This talk will briefly review the above concepts and present new findings in this area of integrative translational research.
Bio:
Kenneth P. Wright Jr., Ph.D. is professor of distinction and sssociate vhair for graduate sffairs in the Department of Integrative Physiology and director of the Sleep and Chronobiology Laboratory at the University of Colorado Boulder. He is also professor of medicine adjunct in the Division of Endocrinology, Metabolism and Diabetes at the University of Colorado School of Medicine.
Wright has more than 30 years of experience in sleep and circadian research and has led individual and multicenter/transdisciplinary team projects. His research aims to understand the physiology of sleep and circadian rhythms in humans and the health and safety consequences of sleep and circadian disruption, such as cardiometabolic dysregulation and impaired cognition.
His research also explores the development of circadian and sleep biomarkers and strategies to promote sleep and circadian health to enhance alertness and maintain health and safety when sleep and circadian rhythms are challenged as well as circadian medicine and sleep-based treatment strategies. He has published more than 185 peer-reviewed original articles, given more than 85 invited international talks (five keynotes/plenary lectures) and more than 180 invited national talks (seven keynotes/plenary lectures). The National Institutes of Health support his current research efforts.
Wright manages a large undergraduate, graduate and postgraduate training program in sleep and circadian physiology at CU-Boulder. Wright is committed to training the next generation of leaders in the sleep and circadian field. He directs two training grants a NIH T32 ‘Transdisciplinary Training in Sleep and Circadian Rhythms and a NIH R25 Multi-Institutional Summer Undergraduate Research Program to Promote Sleep and Circadian Research Careers. He also serves on the executive committee for NIH T32 Integrative Physiology of Aging Training Grant at University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus. He is also on the external advisory board for three sleep and circadian T32s (at Harvard Medical School, Northwestern University and at the University of Miami).
Wright serves in leadership, consulting and advisory roles for government, professional, community and commercial stakeholders. Wright serves on NIH-National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) Board of External Experts, on the Governmental Affairs Committee of the Society for Research on Biological Rhythms and as chair of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine Clinical Practice Guideline for the Treatment of Adults with Shift Work Disorder Workgroup. He has served on the NIH Sleep Disorders Research Advisory Board of the NHLBI, the search committee for the director of the NIH/NHLBI National Center for Sleep Disorders Research, on NHLBI T32 Study Section and on the board of directors of the Sleep Research Society.
He also has chaired the SLEEP meeting program committee, the SRS circadian rhythms section and the SRBR trainee professional development day and has served on the SRS presidential task forces on research funding, SRS strategic planning and scientific offerings workgroups.
He has served on the AASM task force involving evaluation and treatment of circadian rhythm sleep disorders and the AASM Circadian Rhythm Disorders workgroup for the International Classification of Sleep Disorders Revision 3 (ICSD-3) and was editor of the SRS bulletin and APSS Trainee Manual in Sleep Research. He was co-chair for the World Sleep Federation Trainee Development Day. He also serves as a reviewer for numerous national and international granting agencies and scientific journals.
Abstract:
Circadian rhythms and sleep are highly integrated systems important for healthy physiology. In modern society, exposure to less sunlight light during the day and electrical light at night disturbs sleep and circadian rhythms. Disturbed sleep and circadian rhythms contribute disease and mechanisms of disease risk include alterations in energy metabolism and in the human proteome and metabolome. This talk will briefly review the above concepts and present new findings in this area of integrative translational research.
Dr. Jake Ferguson | Ferguson LabAbstract:
Population cycles are a common phenomenon though there has been relatively little work assessing how environmental variability can impact these populations. In this talk, I explore how stochastic variation can drive lower total system variance as environmental fluctuations become more variable.
This effect arises due to the influence of an unstable or stable equilibrium, often driving short-term transient dynamics that lead to qualitative changes in the long-run dynamics. I explore these effects in four ecological examples to illustrate the range of impacts of these effects on ecological systems. These results illustrate the complex interactions between stochasticity and nonlinear dynamics with significant implications for predicting how complex populations will respond to changing environments.
Dr. Robbie Burger | Burger LabAbstract:
Life is extraordinarily diverse — from fast-living microbes to long-lived giants, from communities in local green spaces to the global biosphere, and across timescales spanning Earth’s deep history to rapid environmental change today. Why do some animals live fast while others live slow? How do the dynamics of epidemics scale with population size? And why does biodiversity follow similar — or surprisingly different — patterns across mountains, cities, and islands?
In this talk, I’ll explore how data and theory reveal general scaling principles linking biological pattern and process from metabolism and life history to epidemics and biodiversity. Drawing on research with students and collaborators, I’ll show how scaling across levels of biological organization can reveal unexpected patterns, challenge established ideas, and open new questions. I’ll conclude with the Equal Fitness Paradigm, a framework that connects metabolism, life history, and demography through a common energetic currency and points toward new ways of understanding of how life persists and changes across scales.
Dr. Wendy Hood | Hood LabBio:
Dr. Wendy Hood is an evolutionary physiologist, professor and curator of mammals at Auburn University. She has published extensively on nutritional constraints on lactation and reproductive performance as well as on the evolution of milk composition.
The current focus areas of her lab group are:
She has received grant funding from the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health and is a recipient of the prestigious NSF CAREER award. Her research group has studied species across diverse taxa, currently including mice (laboratory and wild-derived Mus), lab rats, Tigriopus copepods, migratory and non-migratory birds and butterflies.
Abstract:
Twice a year, migratory birds fly thousands of kilometers on a fuel budget that pushes vertebrate physiology to its limits. Mitochondria, the cellular engines behind that effort, are surprisingly understudied in this context. Using white-crowned sparrows, including a long-distance migratory subspecies (Gambel's) and a non-migratory subspecies (Nuttall's), we examined two complementary axes of mitochondrial performance: respiratory function and remodeling.
Sampling across matched non-migratory, pre-migratory and active migratory periods, we found that Gambel's consistently exceeded Nuttall's in mitochondrial volume (citrate synthase) and respiratory capacity (OXPHOS and basal respiration), particularly before and during migration, along with elevated remodeling markers (e.g., NRF1, OPA1, Drp1) that were specific to the flight muscle (pectoralis).
Nuttall's values most closely resembled Gambel's non-migratory baseline, suggesting migratory capacity reflects an induced, season-specific state rather than a fixed subspecies trait. Together, these findings reveal seasonal mitochondrial respiratory and structural remodeling as an integrated strategy supporting migration's energetic demands, offering a mechanistic view of how animals dynamically reconfigure cellular energy systems under fluctuating performance demands.
