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DUI: A Powerful Lesson - Mark Sterner
8:00 PM – Great Hall, Memorial Union - Mark Sterner helps students realize the choice they make to drink and drive can have a lasting impact on their friends, families and themselves. Just three months before graduation, Mark and four of his best friends headed to Spring Break. On the final night they decided the least drunk would drive home. The next morning, three of the men were dead, and Mark lay in the hospital critically injured and facing three felony counts of DUI manslaughter. Instead of being the first in his family to graduate from college, Mark ended up the first member of his family to go to prison for his role in the tragic death of his three friends. Iowa State personnel will be available to offer risk-management resources and services specific to this campus following the talk.

Rhetoric and Science: Two Cultures or One? David Zarefsky
7:30 PM – 101 Carver Hall - David Zarefsky is a scholar of rhetoric, author of six books and more than seventy articles on American public discourse. He has focused his research on two of the most contentious periods in American history: the years leading up to the Civil War and the decade of the 1960s. He is also known for his work on presidential communication and on the theory of argumentation. In this talk, Zarefsky will discuss how debates over policy can in fact resemble the scientific method. Rhetoric is often thought of as manipulative, partisan and self-interested, while scientific discourse is rational, dispassionate and fact-based. But are they truly opposites?

Kinship of Rivers: Readings by Wang Ping & Rick Bass
7:00 PM – Sun Room, Memorial Union - Wang Ping grew up on a small island in the East China Sea. Her Kinship of Rivers project focuses on the destructive effects of China's globalization and modernization on natural and cultural landscapes. Wang Ping's books include two collections of poetry, The Magic Whip and Of Flesh & Spirit; a novel, Foreign Devil; and two fiction collections, American Visa and The Last Communist Virgin. She attended Beijing University, earned her PhD from New York University and now teaches creative writing at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota. Author and environmentalist Rick Bass is the author of more than twenty books, including the autobiographical Why I Came West. His 2002 collection, The Hermit's Story, was a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year. A Texan by birth, Bass worked as a gas and oil geologist in Mississippi after earning a degree from Utah State University. His career as an author grew out of a pastime of writing short stories during his lunch breaks. He now lives in the Yaak Valley in the northern Rockies. Part of the Wildness, Wilderness & the Environmental Imagination Series

Changing Course in Global Agriculture - Hans Herren
7:00 PM – Sun Room, Memorial Union - Hans Herren is president of the Millennium Institute, an international NGO that facilitates sustainable development. An internationally recognized scientist and World Food Prize recipient, Herren has developed programs in the area of human, animal, plant and environmental health as they relate to insect issues. They include the highly successful biological control program that saved the African cassava crop and averted Africa's worst-ever food crisis. Over the years, Herren's interests shifted toward integrated sustainable development, in particular, linking environmental, plant, animal, and human health issues. Herren points to three major challenges in food systems: finding solutions to sustainable productivity, feeding a growing global population, and rising food prices. 2013 Shivvers Memorial Lecture.

Pragmatic Optimism: How Behavioral Economics is Helping to Solve Global Poverty - Dean Karlan
8:00 PM – Great Hall, Memorial Union - Yale economist Dean Karlan is coauthor of More Than Good Intentions: Improving the Ways the World's Poor Borrow, Save, Farm, Learn, and Stay Healthy. His work demonstrates how small changes in development initiatives can drastically improve the well being of the poor. Karlan is a development economist who uses insights from behavioral and experimental economics in his work. Behavioral economics is an emerging field that focuses on how psychological barriers and emotional factors can lead to irrational choices in the decision-making process. Karlan uses randomized evaluations to develop and test solutions to real-world problems facing the poor. Much of his research is focused on micro finance. He is the founder and president of Innovation for Poverty Action. His work to improve the financial capabilities of low and moderate-income individuals around the world has been funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation as well as Citi Foundation. Part of the World Affairs Series.

Are Corporations People? A Forum
7:00 PM – Sun Room, Memorial Union - MaryBeth Gardam is the Iowa Coordinator for MoveToAmend, a grassroots organization working to amend the Constitution to establish that money is not speech, and that human beings, not corporations, are persons entitled to constitutional rights. Sonia Ashe is the director of IPIRG, Iowa Public Interest Research Group, a consumer group that stands up to powerful interests whenever they threaten citizens' health and safety, financial security or right to fully participate in a democratic society. Jorgen Rasmussen is a Distinguished Political Science Professor Emeritus at Iowa State University, where he taught courses in constitutional law and civil liberties. Tony Smith, professor of Philosophy and Religious Studies, will moderate.

Early Childhood Mental Health: Supporting Emotional Development in Young Children - Ross Thompson
7:00 PM – Sun Room, Memorial Union - Dr. Ross Thompson, Distinguished Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Davis, will share ideas for building mental health resources for children and families as well as strategies for intervention. Dr. Thompson is known for his work on early childhood emotional development and its application to public policy concerns. He studies early parent-child relationships, the development of emotion regulation, conscience development, and the growth of self-understanding in young children. He has written several books and publications, including Preventing Child Maltreatment through Social Support, and is currently working on a new book, Early Brain Development, the Media, and Public Policy. Barbara E. (Mound) Hansen Early Childhood Lecture Series

Switch: What Is the Future of Energy? Documentary & Discussion
7:00 PM – Great Hall, Memorial Union - Energy is one of the most important issue of our time. Our transportation, global commerce, food and water, medicine, communications and computing all depend on it. The film Switch explores the way we use energy, from coal to solar, oil to biofuels. Writer and producer Scott Tinker, a geologist, talks to the people driving energy research and production today, including national and international government officials, industry leaders and academics. The film removes politics from the discussion, makes the technical accessible and documents our likely path of transition to new energy sources. A discussion will immediately follow the 98-min film.

What Makes a Family? Zach Wahls
7:00 PM – Great Hall, Memorial Union - The son of two lesbian mothers, the 19-year-old University of Iowa engineering student had no idea that his heartfelt testimony before the Iowa House Judiciary Committee would have such an impact. Just two days later, a YouTube video of his testimony went viral. He was a state champion in high school debate and multiple national finalist in competitive acting, but Zach had never before been given such an opportunity to stand up and speak out on behalf of his family. So that is what he did, becoming an advocate for his family and families like his all over the country. Whatever your thoughts on the subject, Zach provides a new perspective on marriage equality and something to think about.

Crazy Brave - Joy Harjo
8:00 PM – Great Hall, Memorial Union - Author, poet, and musician Joy Harjo is one of the leading Native American voices of our time. Her new memoir, Crazy Brave, is a tale of a hardscrabble youth, teenage motherhood, and her journey to becoming an internationally recognized writer and performer. Joy Harjo's body of work features seven books of poetry, including How We Became Human-New and Selected Poems, The Woman Who Fell From the Sky, and She Had Some Horses. She has also released four CDs of original music and in 2009 won a Native American Music Award for Best Female Artist of the Year. Her many other awards include the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Writers Circle of the Americas and the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. The 2013 Richard Thompson Memorial Lecture and the 2013 English Department Goldtrap Lecture.