The Art and Science of Scientific Inquiry
PUBLISHED July 15th, 2014 05:32 am | UPDATED May 9th, 2018 03:13 am
Science Café is a free event that recurs every last Thursday of the month. Scientists and Science professionals are invited to speak in a casual setting where everyone can learn and discuss the scientific issues of the day.
Topic for July
The Art and Science of Scientific Inquiry
Speaker: Dr. Nick Tolwinski
What do scientists actually do all day at the lab? How are scientific advances made? How do we trust what we cannot see? Questions of this nature are at the heart of the scientific enterprise. Scientists struggle to make advances in their respective fields making mainly minor, incremental changes in the face of very skeptical colleagues. How do we convey this struggle to non-scientist without undermining the project? How do we convince students that science isn’t a series of revealed truisms as provided by their teachers?
These are some of the issues that we attempt to address in a course on scientific inquiry at Yale-NUS. This course is for all students regardless of science background or interest, and focuses on inquiry as a process rather than specific content. These are also issues that I deal with in my research especially being a part of the cancer biology enterprise. We (meaning the collective cancer research field made up of many people) have worked very hard, spent a lot of taxpayer’s money, and still no ‘cure’ has been found. This may be disappointing and difficult explain to government ministers, but it is not a surprise to a scientist.
About the Speaker:
Nick Tolwinski is an Assistant Professor of Biology at Yale-NUS College. He received his BA from the University of Colorado and completed his PhD at Princeton University in Molecular Biology in 2004. Prior to moving to Singapore, he was in the Program in Developmental Biology at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and the University of Michigan. His research focus is in intercellular communication and cellular polarity. His laboratory specializes in analyzing the early embryonic development of Drosophila focusing on signal transduction, or the intra-cellular communication that organizes groups of cells into tissues, and what goes wrong when cells disregard signals and form cancers.
