Halmos Faculty Organize Tiny Earth Conference

This July, Halmos faculty member Aarti Raja, Ph.D. from the Department of Biological Sciences co-organized the annual Tiny Earth symposium with researchers from around the world. Faculty members Aarti Raja, Ph.D. and Julie Torruellas Garcia, Ph.D.  then traveled to the Tiny Earth National Conference at the Wisconsin Institute of Discovery, Madison, WI. They were invited to present their research at the conference. Dr. Raja’s talk was entitled, “Tiny Earth at NSU: Journey from Classroom-based Research to Independent Research”. Dr. Torruellas Garcia’s talk was “Beyond Antibiotics: Targeting Bacterial Virulence Factors”.

Tiny Earth was launched in 2018, however it began six years earlier when Dr. Jo Handelsman (former scientific advisor to Barack Obama) founded a course—then called “Microbes to Molecules”—at Yale University with the goal of addressing both the antibiotic crisis and the shortage of science trainees. In short order, the course grew and became a part of a larger initiative until Handelsman returned to the University of Wisconsin-Madison and launched Tiny Earth in collaboration with its hundreds of partners worldwide.