Jacob D. Cooper
Because society demands little from theoretical ecology, one can have a successful lifetime career in the field without any of one's theories being put to the practical test of actual prediction... In unimportant fields, theories evolve neutrally.
Ginzburg & Jensen, 2005

Long Story Short

I've worked in science education and math education at Berkeley, Northwestern, Loyola University, the Shedd Aquarium, New Trier High School, UW, and Washington State Reformatory.

I've done science research at U Strasbourg, NASA Ames, U Chicago, UW, and the Hutch Cancer Research Center.

Because society demands little from theoretical ecology, one can have a successful lifetime career in the field without any of one's theories being put to the practical test of actual prediction... In unimportant fields, theories evolve neutrally.
Ginzburg & Jensen, 2005

Prior Research

Mebrane Trafficking and Hepatitis C Virus (HCV)
Randall lab - To identify host membrane trafficking pathways relevant to the HCV life cycle
We compiled a list of host membrane trafficking genes likely relevant to HCV infection. I developed and ran a high-throughput RNAi screen of these genes in the infectious system, and quantified results for HCV entry, replication, and egress. To confirm the 'hits,' we made constructs of the most interesting results, and visualized potential interactions with live cell microscopy. When I left the Randall Lab, the entry, replication, and egress stories were passed on to two post-docs and a graduate student, respectively. The replication story was published in PNAS.
Hepatitis C Virus (HCV) and Putative Interactors
Randall lab - To assay putative HCV interactors for relevance in a fully infectious system
A fully infectious HCV cell culture system was developed in 2005, and it allowed scientists to probe the viral life cycle to an extent not previously possible. Prior research had identified a gamut of cellular products that interacted with HCV proteins or RNA elements in vitro. We compiled a list of 62 published putative interactors, and ran an RNAi screen to quantify their effects in the infectious system. 26 of the 62 putative interactors modulate infection by at least 3-fold in the fully infectious system. To our great surprise, we found that the native RNAi machinery itself was required for efficient HCV replication. The results were published in PNAS.
Planetary Ices Database
Dalton lab - To create a spectral database for ices relevant to the outer solar system
Current spectrographic databases are typically created from materials viewed at temperatures and pressures relevant to Earth. Spacecraft like Galileo and Cassini, however, take spectrographs of objects in a variety of temperatures and pressures. I searched the literature to find spectrographs of key materials in relevant conditions, and we determined what still needed to be measured, and took the measurements. PI Brad Dalton presented the database at the Outer Planets Advisory Meeting, in Bethesda, MD.

Most water ice on Earth is ice-1h (h for hexagonal). The colorfully named ice-1 through ice-7 were known in 1963, when an atmospheric scientist's younger brother published a book that made the fictional 'ice-9' a household term. Within 5 years, both ice-8 and the real ice-9 were discovered. (A contemporary opined, "The properties of ice-9 described by Whalley et al. are somewhat more mundane.") In 2009, an Oxford lab created the last predicted form of H2O ice: ice-15. Of course - and I love this - many planetary ices are not H2O at all.

Low-Cost Biology Curriculum
Kanter lab - To create a low-cost biology curriculum for Chicago's underfunded public schools
Science is an empirical endeavor, exploring the world around you, but microscopes and frogs are a financial burden that many public schools cannot bear. We developed an engaging computer-based curriculum highlighting the practical value of biological data and methods. In Disease Detectives!, students perform virtual experiments to determine what illness is afflicting the Village Park community, and how to best combat it. I created videos of all the curriculum's experiments, so the curriculum software displayed actual empirical results. We also trained Chicago public school teachers to implement the curriculum.
And there's Houston, there's home, you know, and you look out, and you identify with it.... And you go out across the Atlantic Ocean and back across Africa, and you do it again and again and again... and then you identify with Los Angeles and Phoenix... And the next thing you recognize in yourself is that you're identifying with North Africa. You look forward to it, you anticipate it, and there it is. And that whole process of what it is you identify with begins to shift. When you go around the Earth in an hour and half, you begin to recognize that your identity is with the whole thing.
Rusty Schweickart (Apollo 9), 1983

Outreach

When you've just heard a good joke, you want to tell other people. I feel that way about science; I think it's the most successful and audacious ideology ever conceived.

Teaching

What kind of bonehead designer makes air-breathing whales? Why does an ostrich look so suspiciously like a giant chick that never matured into a bird? Why are baby anythings so darn cute?

Well, (1) whales used to live on land, (2) ostriches had ancestors that did mature into flying birds, but they got huge and lost the maturation ability, and (3) nobody really knows.

So lineages change, and what exists today depends on what existed yesterday. There you go, that's evolution: change with heritability. (Not "change over time," which is silly, because all change occurs over time.)

Evolution occurs when you have any kind of heritable change. Fitness, selection, drift, migration - these concepts are bigger than biology.

What if a language split into two populations, they evolve a bit, and then come back together - what might that sound like? Well, you might get doublets like skin/shin, skirt/shirt, scatter/shatter, and skipper/ship! (Old Norse kept the primitive 'sh' sound, while Anglo-Saxon changed it to 'sk' around 500AD.) Anyone who's said 'nacht' or 'licht' in German can tell you why 'night' and 'light' are spelled so funny. And what happened to the long s (pictured left), anyway?

Would it help if the process of evolution was first introduced without biology - without challenging the identities of those who were raised religious? It's possible, you know.

"The struggle for existence holds as much in the intellectual as in the physical world. A theory is a species of thinking, and its right to exist is coextensive with its power of resisting extinction by its rivals."

Thomas Huxley, 1880

I think about education a lot.

My folks are both professors. Mom teaches labor law and specializes in workplace discrimination, and Dad's a fellow of the Society of Breast Imaging. My brother and his wife met getting their Masters in Education. We're big into teaching.

I tutored and student-taught in high school, and led lab sections for intro bio at UC Berkeley. I was a curriculum developer for Disease Detectives!, a low-cost biology curriculum for Chicago's under-funded public schools. I've guest lectured for my mom's law classes - "The Use and Power of Statistics in Employment Discrimination Cases." I was a presentation diver at the Shedd Aquarium.

I want teaching to be a big part of my life. Science is just too cool not to share.

Shedd Aquarium Diver

From 2005 - 2008, I volunteered as a presentation diver at Chicago's Shedd Aquarium. I absolutely love that place, where I first connected with the alien ambassadors of planet Earth. I'm tremendously proud to be have been a (tiny) part of that aquatic embassy.

In 1936, six fish were loaded on the German airship Hindenburg, Shedd-ward bound. Only two of the adventurers remained after the slow Atlantic crossing, and just one lonely, "very weak" fish survived the inland journey to Chicago. After three days in Shedd's veterinary care unit, Lindy made a full recovery, and became America's first displayed neon tetra.

Besides getting to check off a childhood dream of being that diver I watched as a kid, and besides getting to feed sharks and rays and the community of reef inhabitants, I got to chat with the audience during the presentations. (The mask is adapted to house a microphone and earpieces.) Folks want to know how a turtle can hold its breath for so long, or why the tarpon is gulping at the surface, or why the sharks do not eat the other fish. These are questions of physiology, evolution, and behavior. This is biology, and people love it.

Best questions asked during Q&A:

  • 4-year-old boy - "Do you like my shirt?"
  • confused adult - "How do you keep your hair dry in there?" (NB - I don't.)
  • 5-year-old girl - "Where do you sleep?"

Evolution is the crown jewel of biology, the single greatest discovery in the history of science, and still less than half of Americans accept it. This is a loss for truth and for beauty. The core tenet of evolutionary theory - that we, that you and I and our friends and coworkers and the ducks and the trees and the whole grand entirety of life on Earth, that we are all one ancient family - is a uniquely connecting idea. It instills in me a curious sense of pride, and a deep empathy for all living things.

You don't have to orbit the planet in an hour and a half to realize that Schweickart was right: your identity - our identity - really is with the whole thing.