The University of Florida Whitney Laboratory for Marine Bioscience Evenings at Whitney Lecture Series continues Thursday, March 13, 2025, at 6 p.m. with the program titled “Origins of Animals, Brains and Minds”. Dr. Leonid Moroz, Distinguished Professor of Neuroscience, Genetics, Biology, and Chemistry, UF Whitney Laboratory, will be the speaker.
This free lecture will be presented in person at the UF Whitney Laboratory Lohman Auditorium, 9505 Ocean Shore Boulevard, in St. Augustine. Those interested also have the option of registering to watch via Zoom live the night of the lecture.
Register to watch online: https://ufl.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_ehfgzY6KRJOe1Rc6Fw4Qfw
The emergence of animals, brains, and minds exemplifies the most transformative events, shaping our planet. These are also major transitions crucial not only for understanding fundamental biological processes but also for the search for complex extraterrestrial life.
If Earth's history were to repeat, would animals and minds evolve again? By integrating recent interdisciplinary advances in biology and earth sciences, Prof. Leonid Moroz will discuss and outline conditions that led to alternative ‘designs’ of animal complexities and ask why it took so long and what triggered such outcomes.
Remarkably, addressing and resolving these questions is absolutely essential to understanding the very core of multiple human diseases (from cancer and developmental pathologies to cognitive disorders and even aging) toward new regenerative medicine of the 21st century and Planetary Health.
Dr. Leonid L. Moroz takes advantage of marine biodiversity (>20 phyla) to understand how neurons operate, learn and remember; how this complexity formed. He reveals that
neurons and centralized brains independently evolved from ancestral cell lineages. Using massive single-cell ‘omics’ together with physiology and advanced imaging, he reconstructs how the descendants of these cell lineages “come together” to form nervous systems of ctenophores or bilaterian brains, including octopuses or humans. Unique floating labs have been developed to sequence marine organisms directly aboard (Ship-Seq) to reconstruct the Genealogy of Neurons and Cell Type Tree of Life. Here, he integrates Planetary Biodiversity and Biomedicine.