Search For Lectures

The Early Bear Gets the Goose: Polar Bears, Snow Geese and Climate Change - Robert Rockwell
7:00 PM РGreat Hall, Memorial Union - Conservation biologist Robert Rockwell is the director of animal research at La P̩rouse Bay Tundra Biology Station, the primary research site of the collaborative Hudson Bay Project. Rockwell's work focuses on the long-term monitoring of snow geese in this coastal tundra ecosystem. His research is in population dynamics, community ecology, lifetime reproductive success, and the genetic structure and gene flow of migratory waterfowl such as snow geese, emperor geese, northern pintails and spectacled eiders. Rockwell is a research associate with the American Museum of Natural History Ornithology Department and a professor at CUNY City College. He holds a PhD in biology from Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario. The 2009 Paul L. Errington Lecture.

People I Wanted to Be: A Fiction Reading - Gina Ochsner
3:30 PM – 212 Ross Hall - Gina Ochsner is the author of People I Wanted to Be and The Necessary Grace to Fall, and her short stories have been featured in The New Yorker magazine and The Best American Nonrequired Reading. Ochsner graduated with a master's degree in English from Iowa State University and a master in fine arts from the University of Oregon. She has won more than twenty awards for her writing, including the Flannery O'Connor Award, the Oregon Book Award, and the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Book Award. Her latest book, The Russian Dreambook of Color and Flight, will be published by Houghton Mifflin in 2010. Part of the Eco-Voices Series.

Trade and Food Policy Alternatives for Developing Countries - Will Martin
8:00 PM – Sun Room, Memorial Union - Will Martin, the World Bank's research manager for rural development, will speak on trade policy options for developing countries and the use of trade policy to fight poverty. He has published extensively on such topics as the World Trade Organization and economic development as well as agricultural trade reform. His recent work examines how such factors as changes in the prices of staple foods or improvements in agricultural technology can have an impact on poverty in low-income countries. Martin teaches frequently in World Bank training courses and is manager of a number of large World Bank research projects. He obtained his Masters and PhD degrees from Iowa State University. Part of the World Affairs Series.

Economic Recovery - A Faculty Forum
8:00 PM – Great Hall, Memorial Union - Iowa State Faculty will share their expertise on topics related to national economic recovery. Participants include Peter Orazem, University Professor in Economics, who has researched and written on labor economics and unemployment; David Peters, assistant professor of sociology, who has studied U.S. poverty rates and recently published "The Typology of American Poverty"; and David Frankel, associate professor of economics, who has written about adaptive expectations and stock market crashes. GianCarlo Moschini, chair of Economics and the Pioneer Chair in Science and Technology Policy, will moderate the discussion. Part of the Faculty Forum Series.

The Role of Engineers in Managing Risks from Natural Hazards - Robert Gilbert
8:00 PM – Alliant Energy-Lee Liu Auditorium, Howe Hall - Robert Gilbert is the Hudson Matlock Professor in Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin. His expertise is the assessment, evaluation and management of risk in civil engineering, including building foundations, pipelines, dams and levees, and landfills. His recent research has focused on analyzing the performance of offshore platforms and pipelines in hurricanes; managing earthquake and flooding risks for the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta in California; and performing a forensic analysis of the New Orleans levee failures. Gilbert earned a Ph.D. in civil engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and practiced with Golder Associates Inc. as a geotechnical engineer. Sigma Xi Fall Lecture.

Sowing the Seeds of Victory Gardens: Then and Now - Rose Hayden-Smith
7:00 PM – Garden Room, Reiman Gardens - Rose Hayden-Smith is a practicing U.S. historian and a nationally recognized expert on victory gardens, wartime food policies and school garden programs. She is the director of the University of California's Cooperative Extension in Ventura County, which houses the Farm Advisors Office, Master Gardeners and 4-H programs. She is also a 2008-9 Kellogg Foundation Food and Society Policy Fellow. She holds masters degrees in education and U.S. history and is a PhD candidate in U.S. history and Public Historical Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Revitalizing Agricultural Research for Global Food Security - Gebisa Ejeta
8:00 PM – Sun Room, Memorial Union - Gebisa Ejeta of Ethiopia is the recipient of the 2009 World Food Prize for his work developing sorghum hybrids resistant to drought and the devastating Striga weed, or witchweed. The science has increased the production and availability of sorghum, one of the world's five principal grains and a staple in the diet of 500 million people living in sub-Saharan Africa. Ejeta was raised in a one-room thatched hut in rural Ethiopia and through education was able to rise out of poverty. It was during the 1980s while working in Sudan that he developed his first hybrid sorghum. He subsequently worked to integrate seed distribution with farmer education programs and conservation initiatives and to promote economic development in rural Africa. Ejeta earned his Ph.D. in plant breeding and genetics at Purdue University, where he later became a faculty member and today holds a distinguished professorship. The 2009 Norman Borlaug Lecture and part of the World Affairs Series. A reception and student poster display will precede the lecture from 7 to 8 p.m. in the South Ballroom, Memorial Union. Posters will address world food issues and are submitted by undergraduate and graduate students. The competition is funded by the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, the College of Human Sciences, and the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.

Mobile Technologies for Children - Allison Druin
12:00 PM – Alliant Energy-Lee Liu Auditorium, Howe Hall - Allison Druin is the director of the Human-Computer Interaction Lab and an associate professor in the University of Maryland's College of Information Studies and Institute for Advanced Computer Studies. Her work includes developing digital libraries for children, designing technologies for families, and creating collaborative storytelling technologies for the classroom. Druin's most active research is the International Children's Digital Library (www.childrenslibrary.org), now the largest digital library in the world for children, which she and colleagues expanded to a nonprofit foundation. She is the author or editor of four books, including Mobile Technology for Children. Druin received her Ph.D. from the University of New Mexico. Part of the Women in Human-Computer Interaction Series and the Women in STEM Series.

Following the Money: From Enron to Hedge Funds - Bethany McLean
8:00 PM – Sun Room, Memorial Union - Before joining Vanity Fair as a contributing editor in 2008, Bethany McLean was an editor-at-large for Fortune magazine, where she wrote an article in March 2001 that raised questions about the immense profitability of Enron, then a darling of the stock market. Her article "Is Enron Overpriced?" was the first in a national publication to openly question the company's dealings. In 2003 she cowrote a book about the scandal that led to the energy company's collapse, The Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron, which was developed into a documentary in 2005. McLean graduated from Williams College with a double major in math and English. She worked as an investment banking analyst at Goldman Sachs until 1995, when she joined Fortune as a reporter. The 2009 Chamberlin Lecture.

Against Publication: Rethinking the Reward System within the New Corporate University - Frank Donoghue
7:00 PM – Great Hall, Memorial Union - Frank Donoghue's The Last Professors examines how the growing corporate culture of higher education threatens its most fundamental values by erasing one of its defining features: the tenured professor. In particular, he observes this trend through the lens of tenured professors in the arts and humanities, the value of whose work does not always lend itself to modes of cost benefit analysis. Donoghue is an associate professor of English at the Ohio State University and the author of The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities and The Fame Machine: Book Reviewing and Eighteenth-Century Literary Careers. He earned his PhD from The Johns Hopkins University. The 2009 Goldtrap Lecture.