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Climate crisis, pandemics, extinction of species and natural catastrophes confront us with enormous challenges, choices and constraints for action. This is where BIOTOPIA - Naturkundemuseum Bayern, the planned natural science museum in Bavaria, already takes action and provides a communicative interface for worldwide research and efforts with the aim of restoring the balance on our planet. Only a joint effort is the basis for success.
With internationally renowned speakers, the virtual event series is dedicated to the topic of how we can save our planet and ensure the survival of humans and other living beings. Discussions will be held on topics relating to all aspects of life and extinction: From climate change to the loss of biodiversity to the origin and handling of future pandemics. New events will be added on an ongoing basis. The events are held partly in German, partly in English with simultaneous translation, registration and participation are free of charge.
Prof. Claudia Traidl-Hoffmann is a dermatologist, allergist and one of the leading international environmental medicine experts. She researches the consequences of climate change on the environment and human health. She leads the Chair of Environmental Medicine at TU Munich in 2013, she is now a physician-scientist and heads the Department of Environmental Medicine at the University Hospital of Augsburg and at Helmholtz Zentrum München. She is a board member of numerous academies and societies and is involved in climate and health protection, among other things, as part of the initiative Climate Change and Health, KLUG e.V..
Katja Trippel studied geography and attended the Henri Nannen School of Journalism. After more than ten years as GEO editor, she now writes as a freelance science journalist for the GEO family, SZ and riffreporter.de, among others. A report on overfishing in the world's oceans, which she co-authored, was awarded the Henri Nannen Prize in 2008. In 2013, her book "Stadtlust. Vom Glück in der Großstadt zu leben" (with B. Schaefer). She curates the Innsbruck Nature Film Festival and lives in Berlin.
Prof. Harald Lesch is Professor of Theoretical Astrophysics at LMU in Munich and one of the best-known natural scientists in Germany. For many years he has been imparting exciting popular scientific knowledge to a broad public. He hosts "Leschs Kosmos" on ZDF and has published a number of successful books, including the 2018 book "Die Menschheit schafft sich ab - die Erde im Griff des Anthropozän" (Mankind is abolishing itself - the Earth in the grip of the Anthropocene).
Preventing the next pandemic - zoonoses, viruses and pathogens and what we can do to prevent disasters like the Corona pandemic in the future are topics of the second event in the series ÜBER:LEBEN | ESCAPING EXTICTION - Prof. Ulrike Protzer, Dr. Fabian Leendertz in conversation with Dr. Dora Dzvonyar.
Dr. Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg is an artist whose work addresses our fraught relationship with nature and technology. Daisy Ginsberg's work explores themes of artificial intelligence, exobiology, synthetic biology, conservation and evolution, and the human impulse to "improve" the world. Daisy exhibits internationally, including at MoMA New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, the National Museum of China, the Centre Pompidou, and the Royal Academy.
Dr. Dan Stowell is an associate professor of artificial intelligence and biodiversity at Tilburg University in the Netherlands and a fellow of the Alan Turing Institute. His research revolves around machine hearing and computational bioacoustics, which is the use of computers, specifically machine learning, to understand animal sounds and other sound signals. Stowell is developing automated methods for analyzing large volumes of sound recordings.
Prof. Dr. Michael John Gorman is the founding director of BlOTOPIA and head of the chair "Life Sciences in Society" at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich. He studied physics and philosophy at Oxford, received his PhD in the history of science from Florence, and has held positions at the Massachussetts Institute of Technology, Harvard, and Stanford. Before taking up his post in Munich, he was the founding director of the Science Gallery at Trinity College Dublin.
Our guest Dr. Jane Goodall states that “you cannot get through a single day without having an impact on the world around you. What you do makes a difference, and you have to decide what kind of difference you want to make.” Her powerful message “think global, act local” is one of the topics we want to explore in this BIOTOPIA event from the series ESCAPING EXTINCTION with speakers Dr. Jane Goodall, Dr. Auguste von Bayern, Dr. Nikolas Fricke and Prof. Dr. Michael John Gorman.
Dr Jane Goodall has been a UN Messenger of Peace since 2002 and helps the United Nations to draw attention to environmental issues. The "Queen of Conservation", age 87, is still active 24/7. With her podcasts, online talks, audio books and interviews, her message reaches more people than ever; she gives hope and inspires: "... to use the gift of our lives to make the world a little better...".
In parallel to her rise as the world's leading primatologist, Jane Goodall has also almost incidentally redefined conventional conservation and environmental protection. 30 Jane Goodall Institutes around the world are committed to comprehensive nature and species conservation, education in sustainable development and global development cooperation. In 1991, she founded the children's and youth program "Roots & Shoots" in Tanzania, in which more than 150,000 children and young people in almost 100 countries are positively changing their everyday environment and actively shaping the future.
Dr Auguste von Bayern studied biology in Munich and holds a degree in zoology from the University of Cape Town in South Africa. After completing her PhD in social intelligence of jackdaws at the University of Cambridge, she was a postdoctoral researcher in the Behavioural Ecology Research Group in the Zoology Department at the University of Oxford. Since 2014, she has been leading a research group in comparative cognitive biology at the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology, Seewiesen, as well as a research station on Tenerife studying the cognitive abilities of parrots. Auguste is involved as chair of the board of BIOTOPIA e.V., an association she founded to give the innovative BIOTOPIA museum the necessary political and public impetus.
Dr Nikolas Fricke studied agriculture and sustainable resource management at the Technical University of Munich and earned his doctorate in economic geography at the Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt. His research trips to all climate zones of this Earth have given the systems ecologist far-reaching insights into the complex interplay between humans and nature.
Currently, Nikolas works as a senior sustainability manager in the Munich urban development project Werksviertel-Mitte (www.werksviertel-mitte.de). To make this area sustainable, Nikolas initiated the Werksviertel-Mitte climate protection alliance and co-founded the innovation and research program.
Prof. Dr. Michael John Gorman is the founding director of BlOTOPIA and head of the chair "Life Sciences in Society" at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich. He studied physics and philosophy at Oxford, received his PhD in the history of science from Florence, and has held positions at the Massachussetts Institute of Technology, Harvard, and Stanford. Before taking up his post in Munich, he was the founding director of the Science Gallery at Trinity College Dublin.
Dr. Michael E. Mann is Distinguished Professor of Atmospheric Science at Penn State, with joint appointments in the Department of Geosciences and the Earth and Environmental Systems Institute (EESI). He is also director of the Penn State Earth System Science Center (ESSC). Mann is the author of more than 200 peer-reviewed and edited publications, numerous op-eds and commentaries. He has written several books, including „Dire Predictions: Understanding Climate Change“, „The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines“, „The Madhouse Effect: How Climate Change Denial is Threatening our Planet, Destroying Our Politics, and Driving Us Crazy“, and the children’s book „The Tantrum that Saved the World“. In his most recent book, „The New Climate War – The Fight to Take Back Our Planet” he shows how fossil fuel companies have waged a thirty-year campaign to deflect blame and responsibility for climate change onto the individual, and offers a battle plan for how we can save the planet.
Luisa Neubauer, born 1996 in Hamburg, is one of the co-organizers of Fridays for Future and the one of the most prominent representatives of the German movement in the media. In 2018, she met the Swedish student Greta Thunberg at the UN Climate Change Conference and then started the movement in Germany together with other activists. Since then, Luisa Neubauer has met various heads of state and government, participated in the World Climate Conference in Madrid and the World Economic Forum in Davos.
Luisa Neubauer graduated in 2019 with a bachelor's degree in geography. She is currently studying resource analysis and management in the master's program at the Georg-August-University of Göttingen. She co-authored the German book „Vom Ende der Klimakrise: Eine Geschichte unserer Zukunft” ("From the End of the Climate Crisis - A History of Our Future") in 2019 with Alexander Repenning. Luisa currently lives in Berlin, hosts the Spotify Original Podcast "1.5 degrees" and writes a column at Stern magazine.
Prof. Dr. Michael John Gorman is the founding director of BlOTOPIA and head of the chair "Life Sciences in Society" at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich. He studied physics and philosophy at Oxford, received his PhD in the history of science from Florence, and has held positions at the Massachussetts Institute of Technology, Harvard, and Stanford. Before taking up his post in Munich, he was the founding director of the Science Gallery at Trinity College Dublin.
AI and machine learning have become indispensable in industry, where they influence the way services are provided and products manufactured. But they are also opening up completely new avenues for research. AI has great potential in the field of health in particular: it is a powerful tool that can be used to identify patterns in large and complex data sets faster and more precisely than before; and can also be used to search the scientific literature for relevant studies.
When different types of data are combined in this way, it can support drug discovery, for example. AI systems used in healthcare could also be valuable for medical research by helping to analyze correlations between prevention or treatment techniques and patient outcomes, and to find suitable patients for clinical trials.
Panel discussion with Helmholtz Zentrum München
AI and machine learning are having an unprecedented impact on our society and are being applied in myriad areas. AI has the potential to help address major health challenges and is already being used or tested for a range of health and research purposes. BIOTOPIA welcomes a panel of experts from Helmholtz Zentrum München to discuss AI in healthcare.
Matthias Tschöp is Managing Director of Helmholtz Zentrum München, Alexander von Humboldt Professor, Chair of Metabolic Diseases at Technische Universität München and works as Adjunct Professor at Yale University.
Fabian Theis is director of the Institute of Computational Biology at Helmholtz Zentrum München, scientific director of the Helmholtz Cooperation Unit Artificial Intelligence (Helmholtz AI) and full professor at Technische Universität München with the chair "Mathematical Modeling of Biological Systems". He is co-chair of the Bavarian AI Council of the Bavarian State Ministry of Science and Art.
Julia A. Schnabel is Professor of Computational Imaging and AI in Medicine at Technische Universität München, Director of a new Institute for Machine Learning in Biomedical Imaging at Helmholtz Zentrum München (Helmholtz Distinguished Professorship), with a second appointment to a Chair in Computational Imaging at King's College London. Julia Schnabel's research focuses on applications in cancer, cardiovascular disease, and maternal/perinatal health.
Eleftheria Zeggini is the founding director of the Institute of Translational Genomics at Helmholtz Zentrum München and has held the TUM Liesel Beckmann Distinguished Professorship at Technische Universität München School of Medicine since May 2020. Her research leverages big biomedical data and aims to translate insights from genomics into mechanisms of disease development and progression, shorten the path to translation, and strengthen precision medicine.
Ali Ertürk is director of the Institute of Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine (iTERM) at Helmholtz Zentrum München and leads the NOMIS Human Heart Atlas project. His research aims to develop novel technologies based on tissue cleanup and AI to image and analyze intact rodent bodies, human organs, artificial tissues and organoids at cellular resolution.
Fungi exist in immense diversity. Estimates put the number of fungal species at up to 3.8 million - over 90 percent may still be unknown at present. Like plants and animals, fungi form their own kingdom in nature. They are omnipresent in our environment: with every breath we take, we inhale fungal spores suspended in the air; they are found in our bodies and on our skin, as mold on food and in buildings, as yeast in beer and bread, as a widely ramified mycelial network under the ground or in lichens on trees and stones.
Fungi possess an inexhaustible treasure of exciting properties and possibilities. In our FUNGI FOR FUTURE series, fungi experts provide amazing insights into the world of these often underestimated creatures.
An evening with Merlin Sheldrake
“Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds and Shape Our Futures”: Biologist and writer Merlin Sheldrake discusses his new book with BIOTOPIA Founding Director Michael John Gorman in an online event - and in connection with the exhibition "Fungi for Future" at the BIOTOPIA Lab. Sheldrake’s first book shows that fungi provide a key to understanding the planet on which we live and, ultimately, life itself.
Merlin Sheldrake is a biologist and a writer. He received a Ph.D. in Tropical Ecology from Cambridge University for his work on underground fungal networks in tropical forests in Panama, where he was a predoctoral research fellow of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. He is a musician and keen fermenter.
Prof. Dr. Michael John Gorman is the founding director of BlOTOPIA and head of the chair "Life Sciences in Society" at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich. He studied physics and philosophy at Oxford, received his PhD in the history of science from Florence, and has held positions at the Massachussetts Institute of Technology, Harvard, and Stanford. Before taking up his post in Munich, he was the founding director of the Science Gallery at Trinity College Dublin.
An evening with Prof. Dr. Vera Meyer
Can you wear fungi? Build houses with them? Or even travel through space? Prof. Dr. Vera Meyer talks about her passion for bringing science and art together and her exciting next projects at this interface in connection with the exhibition "Fungi for Future" in the new BIOTOPIA Lab.
Vera Meyer is Professor of Molecular Microbiology at the TU Berlin and an artist herself under the pseudonym V.meer. Her recently completed project "Mind the Fungi" expanded scientific research with artistic and design-based approaches around the future potential of fungi as building materials, packaging materials, or even leather.
Prof. Dr. Michael John Gorman is the founding director of BlOTOPIA and head of the chair "Life Sciences in Society" at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich. He studied physics and philosophy at Oxford, received his PhD in the history of science from Florence, and has held positions at the Massachussetts Institute of Technology, Harvard, and Stanford. Before taking up his post in Munich, he was the founding director of the Science Gallery at Trinity College Dublin.
The Citizen Science and Arts platform DAWN CHORUS is a project of BIOTOPIA and the Foundation Art and Nature based in the Bavarian foothills of the Alps. The idea for this project was born in May 2020 in the face of the worldwide Corona Lockdown and the unique silencing of human civilization at this historic moment. In a very short period of time, this situation brought together people for whom nature is the focus of their creative work - inspired by the work of the "father of soundscaping" Bernie Krause.
Earth day Event with Bernie Krause
On the 50th anniversary of International Earth Day, our founding director Prof. Michael John Gorman spoke with soundscape expert Dr. Bernie Krause. They talked about the importance of experiencing biodiversity with our ears, and how stopping and listening to nature's morning concert can make us aware of the consequences of climate change, urbanization, and deforestation.
After pioneering the Moog synthesizer with major artists such as The Doors, The Weavers, George Harrison and other music legends, legendary sound artist and bioacoustician Bernie Krause turned his attention to the sounds of nature. To date, he has recorded more than 15,000 species on over 5,000 hours of tape, culminating in his Great Animal Orchestra.
Prof. Dr. Michael John Gorman is the founding director of BlOTOPIA and head of the chair "Life Sciences in Society" at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich. He studied physics and philosophy at Oxford, received his PhD in the history of science from Florence, and has held positions at the Massachussetts Institute of Technology, Harvard, and Stanford. Before taking up his post in Munich, he was the founding director of the Science Gallery at Trinity College Dublin.
Interview with Dipl.-Ing. Philipp Herrmann [in German]
Dipl.-Ing. Philipp Herrmann, better known as "Der Vogelphilipp", is a conservationist, bird expert and a big fan of our Dawn Chorus project. He talked to us about his fascination for native biodiversity and the importance of Citizen Science projects and public participation for species conservation.
Seit 2016 betreibt der Landshuter Ornithologe Philipp Herrmann (Vogelphilipp) eine Vogelstimmenhotline. Auf diese Weise hilft er Ratsuchenden, den Gesang der Vögel zu bestimmen.
Interview with Dr. Tina Roeske [in German]
Why do we actually find birdsong beautiful? After all, the song is not meant for our ears. Dr. Tina Roeske from the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics in Frankfurt brings us up to date on the latest research and, of course, has a few bird songs with her. Those who stick with it to the end will be rewarded with an alien-like veery song.
Dr. Tina Roeske works at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics in Frankfurt, where her research includes animal communication, sound learning, rhythm and melody of music and birdsong, as well as their aesthetics and social and neural aspects.
BIOTOPIA creates a modern and attractive place of learning for all generations that awakens curiosity about life and nature, promotes empathy for the diverse forms of life and encourages action for the future of our planet. The goal of all educational measures is to enable lifelong learning for everyone through inclusive and high-quality offerings - in line with the fourth "Sustainable Development Goals" (SDG) of the United Nations.
BIOTOPIA at the Digital Life Design Conference, DLD 2022
What is the future of education? The Digital Life Design Conference, DLD 2022, addressed today's challenges, developments and potentials of education.
Participants: Michael John Gorman (founding director of BIOTOPIA), Bettina Stark-Watzinger (Federal Minister of Education and Research), Jeanne Rubner (TUM), Fabiana Bertram (Level Ex), Felix Ohswald (GoStudent).
Under the motto "The Power of Perception", an exciting program awaited the festival guests at four locations: Where lie the biological origins of the musical senses? How do mobile robots perceive their environment? And what do optical illusions reveal about our brain?
How will we eat in the future? How does our eating behavior shape the planet? How can we feed the world without destroying fragile ecosystems? And is synthetically produced meat an alternative - or will we be eating algae burgers in the future?
Together with experts from the fields of science, design, innovation and culinary arts (including Auguste von Bayern, Richard David Precht, Bernhard Kowatsch, Brent Loken, and many more), visitors to the BIOTOPIA EAT Festival on May 26, 2019 explored, experienced and tasted the many dimensions of the topic of food.
Is it possible to grow ivory or leather? Is spider silk the material of the future? What is still considered natural, what is already synthetic? What is our future made of? Under the title "HAUTNAH", the BIOTOPIA festival on June 16, 2018 was dedicated to the topic of life sciences and materials research in the context of fashion and design. From hands-on labs and workshops to a children's program with quizzes and exciting scavenger hunts to exhibitions, lectures and a fashion show.
Naturkundemuseum Bayern
Botanisches Institut
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