Dr. Alison Sweeney, Associate Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and Physics, Yale University, presents "A Simple Mechanism for Optimal Light-Use Efficiency of Photosynthesis Inspired by Giant Clams".

Alison Sweeney is an Associate Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and of Physics at Yale University. Before joining the faculty at Yale, she was Associate Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Pennsylvania. Professor Sweeney’s interdisciplinary group focuses on the mechanisms by which novel materials arise in natural evolution, and the mechanisms by which evolution finds novel routes to self-assembly. She was a postdoctoral scholar and research scientist in the group of Dan Morse at the University of California, Santa Barbara, focusing on marine biophotonic materials. Sonke Johnsen at Duke University advised her Ph.D. work on the evolution of squid optics. Recently, they researched photosymbiotic giant clams seeking to create a highly efficient system using living clams over static clams. Their model may demonstrate the maximum realizable-light use efficiency of a large photosynthetic system relative to the solar resource. This could therefore provide inspiration both for engineering novel efficient photoconversion processes and materials and inform optimal land-use estimates for efficient industrial biomass production.

Host: Constance Man Kei Tse (mktse@ucdavis.edu)