This seminar is presented in conjunction with the Embassy of Colombia in Canberra. Please join us online via Zoom.
 

There are 78 species of glass frog species that live in Colombia—more than half of the total number of glass frogs in the world. New ones that live in the tropical Andes region are still being discovered, with researchers finding new information about their incredible biology.

Physicists and optics experts have theories about what makes their belly skin as transparent as glass and how their bones almost disappear. Other research focuses on the behaviors of bachelor males to attract females, while studies into their evolution is revealing new data.

This seminar will be presented with photos that serve as a window into the threatened world of these amazing amphibians, a living treasure trove of biodiversity in Colombia.

About the Speaker

Angela Posada-Swafford is an award-winning Colombian-American science, environment and exploration journalist, lecturer, moderator and book author. She has participated in many international research expeditions and has been writing stories on environmental subjects for 30 years for all media platforms, in Spanish and English. She has been a speaker in TEDx and is engaged in giving public talks at Colombian embassies throughout the world on diplomacy of science and communicating science. She has given science/health communication seminars for Roche and the Gabriel Garcia Marquez Foundation in Colombia and Mexico. She engages with audiences of all ages.

Her recent awards include the 2017 Premio Simón Bolívar, Colombia’s top journalism prize. She was the first Hispanic journalist to receive the Knight Fellowship in Science Journalism at MIT/Harvard, she has been instrumental in connecting and serving as a liaison among Colombia’s Antarctic Program, the National Science Foundation and the Antarctic programs of Chile and the United States. She actively connects scientists in the US and Europe with scientists in Latin America.

She writes for National Geographic Magazine and has been a team member of several Colombian and international expeditions from Antarctica to the Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean Sea.