What Makes You, You?

I will present two traits that help us understand the origins and expression of sexual orientation: These traits are masculinity-femininity and physiological sexual arousal. I will focus on specific groups whose behaviours remain poorly understood, including bisexual men and women, genetically identical twins with different sexual orientations, and transgender men and women.

About 1 in 7 couples have difficulty conceiving, and half of that is due to problems with male fertility. If you have ever seen a picture of a sperm, it probably looked like a little tadpole. That's mostly true - in humans. However there are a wide range of weird and wonderful sperm shapes across the animal kingdom, and in my lab we are discovering the ways sperm shape can affect male fertility. In this talk we will look at some of the variety of sperm shapes in animals, how we can precisely measure and quantify shape, and the impact of shape on sperm function.

We’re used to saying ‘it’s genetics’ and believing that we are who we are because of the genes we inherited from our parents. But what if our life experiences and environment also shape our genetics? Every cell of an organism contains its complete set of instructions to build that organism—its DNA. DNA is made up of the four bases, A,T,C and G, 3 billion of them. But how can identical twins that share the same DNA exhibit such dramatic differences in the way that they live and age? Tonight, I want us to get to fifth base and of course, I am talking about epigenetics.