UH Presents 27th Annual Albert L. Tester Memorial Symposium

HONOLULU - The 27th Annual Albert L. Tester Memorial Symposium is scheduled for March 20-22, 2002, at Keoni Auditorium in the East-West Center‘s Jefferson Hall and will feature oral presentations by UH graduate students and two lectures by this year‘s distinguished guest speaker, Dr. Marc Mangel, professor of environmental studies at the University of California at Santa Cruz.

Mangel‘s first lecture is entitled "Growth, Maturity and Longevity in Fish and Implications for Management," and will be held on Wednesday, March 20, at 4:30 p.m. in the Marine Science Building Room 114. His keynote address will be on Friday, March 22, at 3:30 p.m. in Keoni Auditorium at the East-West Center‘s Jefferson Hall. The topic for his keynote address is "What Does the Evolutionary Theory of Aging Tell Us About the Limits of Human Life Span."

Mangel‘s research interests include quantitative and behavioral ecology, and marine fisheries, with particular application to salmonids, rockfish, and krill. He received a bachelor‘s degree in physics and a master‘s degree in biophysics from the University of Illinois, and a doctorate in applied mathematics and statistics from the University of British Columbia.

Graduate student presentations of the Tester Symposium will take place on Thursday, March 21, from 8:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m., and on Friday, March 22, from 8:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. Presentations will be held in Keoni Auditorium in the East-West Center‘s Jefferson Hall. Topics range from plate tectonics and the morphology of open channel lava flows to studies on marine creatures such as squids, sharks and dolphins.

The event will conclude on Friday evening, March 22, with an awards banquet at Waikīkī Aquarium. Awards are given for the best papers, which are judged on quality, originality, and importance of research reported, as well as the quality of the public presentation. Judges include Department of Zoology faculty members and the previous year‘s student award winners. Mangel also will serve as a judge as the invited distinguished scholar.

Last year‘s winners, and student organizers of this year‘s event, include Buffy Cushman, Tim Fitzgerald, and Carl Meyer. Cushman presented her research on "Geochemistry of Plume-Ridge Interaction at the Galapagos Spreading Center," while Fitzgerald presented "Electroreception in Juvenile Sandbar Sharks, Carcharhinus plumbeus," and Meyer presented "Are Hawaiʻi‘s Marine Reserves Large Enough? The Waikīkī Marine Life Conservation District as a Case in Point."

The Albert L. Tester Memorial Symposium is held in honor of Professor Albert Tester, who, at the time of his death in 1974, was senior professor of zoology at UH Mānoa. The faculty and students of the Department of Zoology proposed an annual symposium of student research papers as a means of honoring Tester‘s lively encouragement of student research in a broad range of fields within marine biology. Papers reporting original research on any aspect of science are solicited from students and these papers are presented at the symposium, which takes place during the spring semester.