Laureate Lecture - Dr. Andrew Knoll
Tuesday, April 25, 2023
9:30am general lecture, 3:00pm technical lecture in the USU Ballrooms
Every year the College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics (CNSM) Student Council invites a laureate to the Cal State Long Beach campus to speak to our students, faculty, staff, and community.
Our Laureate Lecturer for 2023 is Dr. Andrew Knoll, who received the Crafoord Prize in Geosciences in 2022 "for fundamental contributions to our understanding of the first three billion years of life on Earth and life's interactions with the physical environment through time."
All are welcome to attend.
Please note that Dr. Knoll will be presenting remotely. The presentation can be viewed via a live broadcast in the USU Ballroom, or by joining the Zoom webinars.
Registration
There are 2 separate lectures. For Cal State Long Beach students, faculty, and staff, no registration is needed to attend the live broadcast in the USU Ballroom.
If you are attending via Zoom, a short registration is needed for each lecture.
Register for the general lecture at 9:30am.
Register for the technical lecture at 3:00pm.
Read abstracts:
Presentation starts at 9:30am. A Q&A session with Dr. Knoll will be held at the end of the presentation.
Abstract
The interplay between life and environment plays out on many scales, none more dramatic than the largest -- planetary in extent and billions of years long. Fossils of shells, bones, tracks and trails record a history of animal evolution nearly 600 million years in duration. Our planet, however, accreted 4.6 billion years ago -- what kinds of organisms characterized Earth's youth and middle age? And how do we establish the nature of surficial environments on the early Earth? Comparative biology suggests that the deep history of life is microbial, and over the past five decades paleontologists have discovered a tractable record of ancient microorganisms in rocks that long predate the earliest evidence of animals. Sedimentary geochemistry, in turn, provides a sense of Earth's dynamic environmental history. The first billion years of microbial evolution played out on a planet without oxygen. 2.4-2.2 billion years ago, the initial accumulation of oxygen in the atmosphere and surface oceans opened a new chapter in Earth history, one in which bacteria – soon joined by algae and protozoans -- lived in oceans with moderate oxygen in surface waters but oxygen-free waters below. Only with a further increase in oxygen, beginning about 600 million years, did our familiar world of animals and plants begin to take shape, adding complexity of size and shape to ecosystems still governed by microbial metabolisms that originated on the early Earth. The pervasive theme of deep history, then, is one of the interplay between Earth and life, each influencing the other through time.
Presentation starts at 3:00pm. A Q&A session with Dr. Knoll will be held at the end of the presentation.
Abstract
In nature, extinction follows speciation, as death follows birth. Most species that have ever graced our planet are extinct, a fact clearly documented by the fossil record. But fossils tell us something else: at a few moments in the past, a majority of animal species disappeared all at once. Called mass extinctions, these events have played a major role in shaping the biological world that surrounds us today. The mass extinction that removed dinosaurs and many other less evocative creatures 66 million years ago reflects the impact of a large meteorite. In contrast, the largest known extinction event, 252 million years ago, was driven by volcanism a million times greater than anything ever experienced by modern humans. Huge amounts of carbon dioxide spewed into the atmosphere, resulting in global warming, ocean acidification and oxygen loss in deep waters of the world's oceans. If that sounds familiar, it should. In the 21st century, technological humans are, once again, emitting carbon dioxide at high rates, putting our biological heritage at risk. The question is whether we – all of us – will have the will and the wit to do something about it.
About Dr. Knoll
Andrew H. Knoll is the Fisher Research Professor of Natural History at Harvard University. He received his B.A. in Geology from Lehigh University in 1983 and his Ph.D., also in Geology, from Harvard in 1997. Following five years on the faculty of Oberlin College, Knoll returned to Harvard as Associate Professor of Biology in 1982. He has been a member of the Harvard faculty ever since, serving as Professor of Biology, Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences, chair of the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, and Associate Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.
Professor Knoll's research focuses on the early evolution of life, Earth's Precambrian environmental history, and, especially, the interconnections between the two. Knoll has also contributed to our understanding of mass extinction, the early evolution of terrestrial ecosystems, biomineralization, complex multicellularity, and phytoplankton. He served on the science team for NASA's MER mission to Mars and maintains an interest in research on the Red Planet.
Professor Knoll's honors include the Walcott and Thompson medals of the US National Academy of Sciences, the Moore Medal of the Society for Sedimentary Geology, the Paleontological Society Medal, the Wollaston Medal of the Geological Society (London), the Oparin Medal of the International Society for the Student of the Origins of Life, Honorary Fellowship in the European Union of Geosciences, the Phi Beta Kappa Book Award in science (for Life on a Young Planet), the Sven Berggren Prize of Royal Physiographic Society, Sweden, the International Prize for Biology, and the Crafoord Prize, awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. Knoll is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society, and a Foreign Member of the Royal Society of London.
About the Crafoord Prize
"The Crafoord Prize is one of the major international science prizes and is awarded in partnership between the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and the Crafoord Foundation in Lund. The Academy is responsible for selecting the laureates. The disciplines are selected as a complement to the Nobel Prize; they alternate every year, between mathematics and astronomy, geosciences, biosciences and polyarthritis."
- From The Crafoord Prize in Geosciences 2022
Past Laureate Lecturers
A laureate has been invited to speak to the Cal State Long Beach campus nearly every year since 1976. A list of these guest speakers can be found on CNSM Laureate Lecturer Series archive.
The series was originally named the Nobel Laureate Lecturer Series, but in 2023 the scope was expanded to include other prestigious awards such as the Crafoord Prize; this has enabled the CNSM Student Council to invite professionals from a more diverse range of fields.
