Graduate College - Source for general information, deadlines, forms, etc.

Master's Degree Requirements

Doctoral Degree Requirements - Including Preliminary Exam Committee and Dissertation Committee

Thesis Manual (pdf document)

NSF Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant Information from NSF's web site

Dissertation Improvement Grants - Advice

NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Information from NSF's web site

STAR Fellowships from the Environmental Protection Agency

Funding Opportunities and Awards from UIC

How to Create a Poster that Graphically Communicates Your Message from Neuroscience Professor Kathryn Tosney.  Tons of useful information presented in a very amusing way.

Tips for Making Effective Posters from Forestry Professors George Hess and Leon Liegel.  Step-by-step tips for planning, making, and presenting posters.

Advice on Designing Scientific Posters from Colin Purrington, and evolutionary biologist at Swarthmore college who specializes in parasitic plants.  His main page contains a list of other topics ("gratuitous advice") that you might find useful.

Download SeaMonkey

Web Publishing at UIC from the ACCC

See the files in the "HTML" and "Mozilla_Composer" folders on the cd.

UIC's requirement to use secure FTP for transferring files to tigger and icarus begins on March 15th.  Find more information, and download software for secure FTP (including SecureFX for Windows and Fetch for Mac) here.

Survey of Doctoral Education and Career Preparation

Job Qualification Survey - posted 1/16; due

Visit Boris's lab web page

--Dobzhansky, T. 1950. Evolution in the tropics. American Scientist  38:209-221.

Questions: due Monday, January 21, by 4:00 PM.  Why do you think there are more species in the tropics? What might one guess about speciation and extinction rates, or the relative importance of biotic and abiotic factors in the tropics vs. temperate zones? Do you expect more self-incompatible species as the proportion of the total number of species in the tropics or temperate areas? Why?

YOUR ANSWERS

--Coyne, J.A. and H.A. Orr. 1997. "Patterns of speciation in Drosophila" Revisited. Evolution 51:295-303

Questions: due Wednesday, January 23, by 4:00 PM. What else, other than reinforcement, could cause the pattern of exaggerated evolution of isolation in sympatry? Does reinforcement invoke or necessitate selection? Why or why not? Do you think this pattern will hold for other organisms?

YOUR ANSWERS

--Schemske, D.W. 2000. Understanding the origin of species (Book Review). Evolution 54:1069-1073.

Questions: due Monday, January 28, by 4:00 PM. What does Schemske argue is a necessary component for the persistence of hybrids? How do you think human-induced changes to landscapes may affect species identity? What do you think is the best evidence for the reality of species (that they are not just byproducts of limited imaginations of the promulgators of the Western Civilization)?

YOUR ANSWERS

--Hoekstra, H.E. and J.A. Coyne. 2007. The locus of evolution: evo devo and the genetics of adaptation. Evolution 61:995-1016.

Questions: due Wednesday, January 30, by 4:00 PM. Write a brief summary of (what you think are) the most controversial arguments in Hoekstra and Coyne (2007), and explain why you disagree or think others will disagree.

YOUR ANSWERS

Visit Robie's lab web page

For Tuesday March 18th and Thursday, March 20th. Choose a paper in which phylogenetic information is applied to your own field of research.  We will spend about 10 minutes per paper.  Be ready to tell us the main point of the paper you choose, and how phylogenetic information was used.

See the papers here.

Visit Roy's research web page

For Tuesday, April 1
Rudolf A. Raff. 2007. Written in stone: fossils, genes and evo-devo. Nature Reviews Genetics 8:911–919.

For Thursday, April 3
Roy E. Plotnick. 2007. Chemoreception, odor landscapes, and foraging in ancient marine landscapes. Palaeontologia Electronica 10:1A.

Visit Joel's departmental web page

For Thursday, April 17
Joel S. Brown. 2001.  Ngongas and ecology: on having a worldview. Oikos 94:6–16.