Sponsored by the Arizona State University Center for Evolution and Medicine In collaboration with the ASU Biosocial Complexity Initiative Live streaming link at the CEM Website on the symposium day This free symposium brings together experts from evolutionary biology, medicine, physiology, genetics, engineering, and complex systems to develop strategies for testing hypotheses about why natural selection has left physiological control systems vulnerable to failures that cause diseases such as cancer, autoimmune diseases, obesity, and emotional disorders.
Learn more and register (registration required only for on site attendees)

Thursday February 2, at noon (AZ time zone)

Keynote: The State of Detection Theory Pete Trimmer, NSF-Funded Postdoctoral Researcher University of California, Davis Winner of the 2016 George C. Williams Prize for the best paper in Evolution, Medicine & Public Health

Friday, February  3 Symposium 8:30-12:00 (Phoenix, AZ time zone)

8:30am Randolph M. Nesse (ASU Life Sciences) Fitness cliffs and vicious cycles: Evolutionary explanations for vulnerable control systems 8:50am Fred Nijhout (Duke University) Homeostatic mechanisms enable the persistence and accumulation of deleterious genes 9:10am Carl Carlson (Carlson Reliability Consulting) Using Failure Mode and Effects Analysis to advance evolutionary biology research and application 9:30am Jay Schulkin (University of Washington Medical School) Obesity: Biology and Culture 9:50am Athena Aktipis (ASU Psychology) The good, the bad and the arms race: How cooperation, competition and escalating conflict shape human health and disease 10:30am Ken Buetow (ASU Life Sciences) Complex human disease phenotypes as emergent properties of network variability 10:50am Manfred Laubichler (ASU Life Sciences) Stability vs. Vulnerability: The evolutionary conundrum 11:10am Rustom Antia (Emory University) ”Design principles” for robust immune systems 11:30am Carl Bergstrom (University of Washington) A hygiene hypothesis for anxiety