Analyzing Dr. Joel Brown's Speech

Dr. Joel Brown’s speech Our first presentation for this class was given by dr. Joel Brown. Dr. Brown is an evolutionary ecologist. He has been a member of the UIC faculty team for about 26 years. That’s almost 4 years before I was even born. He was a chemistry major when he was a freshman in high school. The only reason that made him choose chemistry was his hobby which is bomb making. The story that made him change his major was really funny. It was because of a flyer that said, “fire ecology assistant needed”. If the word “fire” weren’t there, he would have never even bothered with the position. After having this job he realized that he likes working outside with the nature. Currently, he’s teaching at UIC and he’s taking a year off to go to the Negev desert in Israel to make some research there because he has been given a job opportunity to work on
some researches over there.
There are lots of things that I have learned from his speech. I am a chemistry major and I’m probably the least person in this class who knows anything about biology and about living things. Before his speech, I didn’t even know what the word ecology meant. I thought it was just some branch of biological science that I had no interest in. The way Dr. Brown explained and presented ecology made me realize what it really meant. Ecology is the study of the interaction of organisms with their environments. Another thing that I have learned from his speech is that animals give up food based on different factors. Fear is the one of them; number of predators in the area affects the density of the food given up. I also learned about the different factors of dynamics in nature. If there were a question I could ask to Doctor Brown, it would be “which country out of all the ones you have visited and done researches about has the most diverse
and interesting habitats?” What I really liked about his presentation is the entertaining and fun stories he told to us. One of those stories was the example of giving up food from the human life. It is when eating a bag of chips. Different individuals eat and give up at the end in different ways. Another interesting story was the story of his cat and the fox squirrel. As the fox squirrels attacked his cat, he was observing what was happening as a scientist and wanted to see how far they would go; but as a human being, he wanted to save his cat from their attack. One thing I didn’t like about the presentation is that he was going too fast over the PowerPoint slides and we didn’t have enough time to take all the notes we needed. Another thing I liked about his presentation is that he provided real numbers and real data from his researches that showed how important understanding ecology is, not only for us humans, but also for other animals. I have realized that understanding ecology helps us to prevent the extinction of other animals; because understanding ecology makes us understand the way those animals live and the way they react with each other and with their environment. I would definitely recommend Doctor Brown for future classes, because the way he presents and explains a subject makes everyone likes it and want to find out more about it. He provides enough information and a good background of the subject with supplemental entertaining stories to keep the audience awake and not falling behind with him.