Abstract

Professor Kate Jones is a Professor of Ecology and Diversity at UCL and is the Director of their Biodiversity Modelling Research Group. An expert in evolution and extinction, her speciality is bat research and conservation.

To improve global biodiversity models, she has developed new algorithms to automatically classify species using artificial intelligence and has pioneered ground-breaking technologies to enable the public to monitor bat populations acoustically. This led her to investigate how climate change will impact the spread of human infectious diseases through animals (like Ebola or SARS ). With a global team of researchers, she has drew up a map of global hotspots to try and predict where the next ‘zoonotic’ disease will emerge.

Through her innovative, broad cross-disciplinary research, she won the Philip Leverhulme Prize for outstanding contributions to Zoology in 2008. Kate is a passionate science communicator and regularly appears in the national and international media, including the Life Scientific on BBC Radio 4 in 2015. Allegedly, Charles Darwin is her 8th cousin (6 times removed). ancestry.co.uk

What working achievement or initiative are you most proud of? “Producing the first ever estimate of the evolutionary relationships of all 5,000 mammal species and showing that dinosaurs did not suppress the diversification of mammals (as previously thought)!”

One not to miss!

Free talk, free drink, free food! Open to all!

Where: Junior Parlour, Trinity College Doors open: 6.00pm Talk starts: 6.15pm

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