MƒA teachers can register for this event on the Small-World Network. Other guests can register here.
Gerald D. Fischbach Auditorium
160 Fifth Avenue, 2nd Floor
The MƒA Thursday Think Speaker Series brings accomplished speakers who dive into cutting-edge topics in STEM education to MƒA. These talks, held once a month throughout the school year, invite MƒA teachers and the general public to learn and engage with these thought leaders and professionals in mathematics, science, and education.
Whether you love them or fear them, spiders are everywhere. With more than 50,000 known species, they thrive in nearly every terrestrial ecosystem on Earth. Much of their evolutionary success stems from their ability to spin silk, a remarkable material that is stronger than steel by weight, yet thinner than a human hair. Spiders are the true silk superstars of the natural world, producing an extraordinary variety of silks each tailored for a specific function: building webs, capturing and wrapping prey, protecting their eggs, and traveling through the air. But what do we really know about spider silk?
In this talk, Dr. Cheryl Hayashi reveals groundbreaking discoveries about the biology, evolution, and genomic basis of spider silk. She also explores how insights from nature’s itsy-bitsy engineers advance the development of innovative, high-performance materials with applications extending far beyond the spider’s web. Join us to learn the science of spider silk and why our eight-legged friends have inspired myths, literature, comics, and blockbuster films!
Dr. Cheryl Hayashi is the Provost of Science at the American Museum of Natural History. She also works at the Richard Gilder Graduate School as a professor, a curator in the Division of Invertebrate Zoology, and as the Leon Hess Director of Comparative Biology Research.
Previously, she was a professor of Biology at the University of California, Riverside. Hayashi is an expert on spider silks, investigating the characteristics of these remarkable biological materials and their genomic basis.
She earned her Ph.D. in Biology from Yale University and was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship for her cross-disciplinary work studying the structure, function, and evolutionary genetics of spider silks.
