On Sunday, October 17 at 4:00 pm, Joan Edwards will give a lecture as part of the Distinguished Lecture Series on fast plants entitled “Botanical Explosions: Ultra-fast Movements in the World of Plants.”
Professor Joan Edwards has been Washington Gladden 1859 Professor of Biology at Williams since 1979. Most of her work is on the evolution of plant-animal interactions. She is especially interested in the very fast movements of certain plants, such as exploding dogwood flowers and the propulsion of spores in sphagnum moss. Regarding her work on spore propulsion, Professor Edwards has written “”
In 2005, Edwards was cited in the “Guinness Book of World Records” entry for the world’s fastest-opening flower, running a team that discovered that the bunchberry fires its pollen into the air in a third of the time that it takes a bullet to leave a rifle barrel. To further such research on extremely rapid biological movements, Edwards was co-recipient of a 2007 National Science Foundation grant for a high-speed imaging facility at Williams College.
Edwards has served as dean of the college and director of research at Hopkins Memorial Forest. She has also taught at the State University of New York at Buffalo, the University of Michigan Biological Station, and the University of Illinois at Chicago, and was a visiting scholar at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand. Dr. Edwards received her B.A. in 1971, her M.S. in 1972, and her Ph.D. in 1978, all from the University of Michigan.
Dr. Edward’s appearance at the Lenox Library is the second of the 2010-11 Distinguished Lecture series. All programs in this series are free and open to the public thanks to donor contributions.
The Distinguished Lecture series is organized and hosted by Professor Jeremy Yudkin of Lenox. Lectures are held monthly in the Lenox Library Association’s Sedgwick Reading Room at 18 Main Street Lenox, MA. No reservations are required. For information about future lectures in the series, please visit the Library’s “Calendar of Events” at www.lenoxlib.org .