Nature Sunday: Life in Extreme Environments

October 25, 2026, 10 am – noon

While the places that humans can live are limited by our relatively delicate physiology, a wondrous variety of life exists under more extreme conditions, including at spectacularly high and low temperatures, crushing pressures, and even where there is no oxygen to breathe. Join Mandy Ward to learn about our planet’s extreme-loving organisms and where you might find them. The talk will wander between amazing feats of mammalian physiology (e.g., the deep dives of elephant seals) and the truly spooky abilities of bacteria (e.g., their reassembly of DNA blasted into pieces by radiation). It being Halloween you might expect some ghoulish fun alongside the science.

Mandy Ward is a microbiologist of considerable natural curiosity. Mandy trained in the biochemistry and molecular biology departments at Oxford and Berkeley, respectively, after getting her Ph.D. in Scotland. She worked as a member of staff at Stanford to gain experience in environmental engineering before taking a faculty position at Johns Hopkins University in the Geography and Environmental Engineering department. Retiring early after an incident with a train, Mandy moved to the central coast where she has curated a skull and bone collection, scoured local beaches for dead birds, prepared skulls and other skeletal bits and pieces for exhibit, given talks for Life Long Learners and other groups, and run a start-up company of no particular distinction.