This page highlights some of our group’s major outreach efforts and media attention, in reverse chronological order. It is woefully out of date. I will try to update it soon!
December 2022
Masterclass for the STEM Talent Girl program at the Museo de la Evolución Humana, 3 diciembre 2022
November 2022
preLights interview, 20 December 2021
Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB), Spain
Sharing Notes, a conversation with Leslea Hlusko, Carola Ortiz and Toni Pou. This was a conversation between me, an evolutionary biologist and a musician (Carola Ortiz) moderated by a science journalist (Toni Pou) to compare notes on our process of discovery and experimentation. Here is the link to the CCCB website to watch the video (1 hour 30 minutes). Minimally, watch it for the excellent music!
La Vanguardia, 3 de diciembre de 2021
Interview with Lluis Amigulet, “Los plástics y pesticidas están afectando a nuestra descendencia” (behind a paywall)
Diario de Burgos “CENIEH Attracts Talent“, May 21, 2021
14 Fun Facts About the Science of Motherhood, May 7, 2021
Abigail Tucker includes our work on human adaptation to the Arctic in her piece for Smithsonianmag.org.
Research highlight: The France-Berkeley Fund, March 18, 2021
Darwin Day Lecture, Centro Nacional de Investigación sobre la Evolución Humana, Burgos, Spain, February 15, 2021
The Bearded Lady Project: A Reading
Spring/summer 2020, participation in this women in STEM project. “The Moments When I Am Not A Woman” -The Bearded Lady Project Book, reading by Dr. Leslea Hlusko from The Bearded Lady Project on Vimeo.
Interview: The Sausage of Science
Interview about my lab’s research approach, being the Vice President of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists, and moving to the CENIEH, recorded on September 10, 2020; aired September 28, 2020.
Podcast interview: The Sausage of Science
Interview remembering Alan Walker, recorded on September 10, 2020; aired September 21, 2020.
Race, the power of an illusion: the difference between us
September 11, 2020, Panel discussion following the screening of Episode 1 of this 2003 ground-breaking PBS documentary.
Teaching the Science of Skin Color to Sees the Day Summer Camp
Race: The Power of an Illusion, Expert Connection
Check out this video of my interview on Vimeo: The Evolution of Human Biology & Genomics: Leslea Hlusko
Machine Learning & Our Last Common Ancestor with Chimpanzees
Inverse.com “A New Clue About Humanity’s Last Common Ancestor with Apes is Revealed“
What’s in a Fossil?
Human adaptation to high latitudes in Beringia
The research on human adaptation to high latitude/low ultraviolet radiation is out in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA. Enjoy the open access!
Here’s some of the press coverage:
- SPLASH! Milk Science Update, the newsletter of the International Milk Genomics Consortium
- Listen to the Alaska Public Radio report.
- Science
- ZME Science
- The Times, “Sunless People got Abreast of the Situation“
- International Business Times
- https://nplus1.ru/news/2018/04/23/adaptation
- https://actualite.housseniawriting.com/science/archeologie/2018/04/24/la-derniere-periode-glaciaire-a-t-elle-affecte-lallaitement-chez-les-americains-natifs/26510/
- http://news.sciencenet.cn/htmlnews/2018/4/410253.shtm
- https://derstandard.at/2000078488760/Ur-Amerikaner-besassen-genetische-Besonderheit
Caption: Modern-day mesic shrub tundra new the Northwestern Alaskan town of Kotzebue, showing what the environmental refugium humans occupied during the Last Glacial Maximum in Beringia would have looked like. Photo credit: Scott Elias
Beringia and Teeth
One of the newest projects in the lab investigates dental variation and the peopling of the Americas. Leslea was invited to speak in a special session at the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences on how dental variation informs on this question. Her contribution to this story was captured in an interviewed with the amazing Robyn Williams from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation as part of an episode on Teeth that aired on March 17, 2017. You can listen to her interview here: https://radio.abc.net.au/programitem/pgmVy8eqz6?play=true
The Bearded Lady Project
All the ladies in my lab are proud to be a part of this cool project exploring what it is like to be a woman working in field paleontology/geology. Here’s the trailer for the upcoming full-length documentary.
World Economic Forum, June 2016
In June of 2016, I was one of three UC Berkeley faculty who came together for an Ideas Lab on what makes us human at the World Economic Forum‘s Annual Meeting of the New Champions in Tianjin, China.
We gave pecha kucha style presentations, which is a pretty unusual way for academics to present their research, but I think they turned out pretty well.
Consider watching the tripartite set of our pecha kucha style talks, as the other two presentations (by Ronald Dahl and Mahesh Srinivasan) are excellent.
The World Economic Forum is a very different meeting from the kind us academics regularly attend, and I learned so much from the experience. I also greatly appreciated the opportunity to speak in three different forums (the Science Hub presentation photos are here too), which gave me the chance to share some of the new pedagogical approaches we are using at Berkeley with world leaders — pedagogy that blurs the lines between research and teaching.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences paper, 2016
Our article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA on the genetic underpinnings of primate dental evolution from July 2016 got a little bit of press attention from UC Berkeley News, Phys.org, ScienceDaily, and Heritage Daily. We even got the Berkeley homepage — you know it is a good day when monkey teeth are the first thing people see when they click on berkeley.edu…
P. David Polly, one of my intellectual inspirations, wrote a very nice commentary on this article. Check it out here.
Science paper, 2016
There was a little bit of media attention from Science Daily for the Perspective piece Leslea and Peter Ungar published in Science on 1 July 2016 entitled, “The Evolutionary Path of Least Resistance“. The New Historian picked it up too.
Tesla’s radio show
Tesla Monson’s radio talents with The Graduates on KALX was featured by UC Berkeley’s Graduate Division.
Museum of Vertebrate Zoology lecture
Fossils, Genes, and Teeth: The Evolutionary History of the Mammalian Dentition, February 12, 2014
La Brea Dire Wolf Project
Our lab’s work on the LaBrea fossil collections that are here on the Berkeley campus was included in the centennial celebrations of the Campanille in 2015 (and check out the last part of the Cal Alumni Association’s California article here, and this site as well). Here’s a video of an excerpt of some of the interview that took place deep inside the Campanille.
Of course, our work on the La Brea dire wolves had a connection with the Games of Thrones that wasn’t missed by Berkeley News.
Some of Leslea’s earlier interviews and talks
Leslea was asked to read Rad American Women from A to Z‘s entry on Rachel Carsen at the famous City Lights bookstore in San Francisco in the fall of 2015. Yep, the same place that Allen Ginsberg famously read Howl in 1956.
Leslea Hlusko gave a presentation at the Athiest Community of San Jose in the spring of 2015.
Short little video about Leslea talking about the La Brea fossils in UC Berkeley’s campanile in 2014.
The Leakey Foundation profiled in its Dig Deeper series in 2011.