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It's a Different World Out There: Leadership in the States
7:30 PM – WebEx (see below) - 2022 Mary Louise Smith Chair Webex Link: https://bit.ly/3spYpZ6 Former New Mexico Governor Susana Martinez will present “It’s a Different World Out There: Leadership in the States” on Wednesday, Feb. 16, 2022, as the 34th recipient of the Mary Louise Smith Chair in Women and Politics. While states are often referred to as “laboratories of democracy,” Martinez believes that they are increasingly becoming battlefields for the nation’s most intractable and difficult policy fights. In her presentation, Martinez will discuss how state executive leadership must navigate issues such as balancing budgets, overseeing public education, making heath care decisions, competing with other states for jobs and business investment, and responding to natural disasters in today’s political climate. This event will be recorded. The recording will be posted on the Lectures website at Recordings > Available Recordings for two weeks.

Seed Sovereignty: Who Owns the Seeds of the World, Bio-Piracy, Genetic Engineering and Indigenous Peoples
6:00 PM – WebEx (see below) - WebEx Link: https://bit.ly/3EgdDSP Winona LaDuke is a Harvard-educated economist, environmental activist, author, hemp farmer, grandmother, and a two-time former Green Party Vice President candidate with Ralph Nader. LaDuke specializes in rural development, economic, food, and energy sovereignty and environmental justice. Living and working on the White Earth reservation in northern Minnesota, she leads several organizations including Honor the Earth (co-founded with The Indigo Girls 28 years ago), Anishinaabe Agriculture Institute, Akiing, and Winona’s Hemp. These organizations develop and model cultural-based sustainable development strategies utilizing renewable energy and sustainable food systems. She is also an international thought leader and lecturer in climate justice, renewable energy, and environmental justice, plus an advocate for protecting Indigenous plants and heritage foods from patenting and genetic engineering. She has written seven books including, Recovering the Sacred, All Our Relations, Last Standing Woman, The Winona LaDuke Chronicles, and her newest work, To Be A Water Protector: The Rise of the Wiindigo Slayers. This event will be recorded. The recording will be posted on the Lectures website at Recordings > Available Recordings for two weeks.

From ISU Student to CIA Spy: The Dangers of Clandestine Government Operations
6:00 PM – Sun Room, Memorial Union - This event will be in person and live streamed. The live stream link: https://iastate.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=32c9c3dd-cddc-4d4a-aafc-ae19016df85b While an Iowa State University student, Verne Lyon was recruited by the CIA to spy on college professors and fellow students as part of Operation CHAOS, a massive domestic surveillance program carried out at the height of the Vietnam War. He was later dispatched to Cuba to subvert the Castro regime. Mr. Lyon's book, Eyes on Havana: Memoir of an American Spy Betrayed by the CIA, chronicles the actions Lyon took on campus and abroad for the U.S. government. Mr. Lyon will discuss the dangers of covert operations and how unchecked agencies threaten our country and world order. Mr. Lyon is an aerospace engineer and private pilot. He helped found and direct the Association of Responsible Dissent and the Association of National Security Alumni. The University Book Store will be on site selling copies of Mr. Lyon's book, and he will do a book signing.

Better, Not Bitter: Living on Purpose in the Pursuit of Racial Justice
6:00 PM – Great Hall, Memorial Union - Martin Luther King, Jr. Keynote 2022 This event will be in person and live streamed. The live stream link: https://iastate.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=ff668d6f-89a2-43e9-9ccd-ae190166dcc3 On April 19, 1989, a young woman in the prime of her life was brutally raped and left for dead in New York City’s Central Park. Five boys—four black and one Latino—were tried and convicted of the crime in a frenzied case that rocked the city. They became known collectively as “The Central Park Five.” Their convictions were vacated in 2002 after spending between seven (7) and thirteen (13) years of their lives behind bars. The unidentified DNA in the Central Park Jogger Case, unlinked to any of the five, had finally met its owner, a convicted murderer and serial rapist who confessed. The convictions of the boys, now men, were overturned and they were exonerated. One of those boys, Yusef Salaam, was just 15 years old when his life was upended and changed forever. Since his release, Yusef has committed himself to advocating and educating people on the issues of false confessions, police brutality and misconduct, press ethics and bias, race and law, and the disparities in America’s criminal justice system. In 2013, documentarians Ken and Sarah Burns released the documentary “The Central Park Five,” which told of this travesty from the perspective of Yusef and his cohorts. In 2014, The Central Park Five received a multi-million dollar settlement from the city of New York for its grievous injustice against them. Yusef was awarded an Honorary Doctorate that same year and received the President's Life Time Achievement Award in 2016 from President Barack Obama. He was appointed to the board of the Innocence Project in 2018, and has released a Netflix Feature limited series called When They See Us based on the true story of the “Central Park Five” with Ava DuVernay, Oprah Winfrey and Robert De Niro, in May of 2019. He released a book about his experiences and philosophy of life in May 2021, called Better, Not Bitter.

Extraterrestrial Life: Are We the Sharpest Cookies in the Jar?
6:00 PM – Virtual: Link to Come - The search for extraterrestrial life is one of the most exciting frontiers in Astronomy. First tentative clues were identified close to Earth in the form of the weird interstellar object `Oumuamua in 2017. Our civilization will mature once we find out who resides on our cosmic street by searching with our best telescopes for unusual electromagnetic flashes, industrial pollution of planetary atmospheres, artificial light or heat, artificial space debris or something completely unexpected. We might be a form of life as primitive and common in the cosmos as ants are in a kitchen. If so, we can learn a lot from others out there through the new frontier of "space archaeology". Abraham (Avi) Loeb is the Frank B. Baird, Jr., Professor of Science at Harvard University and a best-selling author. He received a Ph.D. in Physics from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel, led the first international project supported by the Strategic Defense Initiative, and was subsequently a long-term member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. Dr. Loeb has written eight books, including most recently, Extraterrestrial, and about 800 papers on a range of topics, including black holes, the first stars, the search for extraterrestrial life, and the future of the universe. He was the longest-serving chair of Harvard's Department of Astronomy (2011-2020), founding director of Harvard's Black Hole Initiatieve, and Director of the Institute for Theory and Computation. Dr. Loeb is a former member of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, a former chair of the Board on Physics and Astronomy of the National Academies, and a current member of the Advisory Board for "Einstein: Visualize the Impossible" of Hebrew university. He also chairs the Breakthrough Starshot Intiative and serve as the Science Theory Director for all intiatives of the Breakthrough Prize Foundation.

Crying in the Bathroom
12:00 PM – Step-a-torium, Student Innovation Center - Minka CEO and co-founder Ana Pinto da Silva drives transformational change at the intersection of housing, healthcare and technology. Minka provides a radical alternative to traditional senior housing, building intergenerational communities that seek to strengthen connections, improve health and increase wellbeing. This is part of the ISU Student Innovation Center noon talks. Attend @ SICTR or via Zoom. For details, go to https://sictr.iastate.edu/

Soil Erosion in Biochemical Cycling of Essential Elements
2:10 PM – Campanile Room, Memorial Union - 2021 William H. Pierre Memorial Lecture in Soil Science Most of the earth's terrestrial ecosystem is composed of sloping landscapes, where soil organic matter dynamics is partly controlled by the mass movement events that laterally distribute topsoil. Accurate estimation of the global soil carbon stock or the potential of soils to sequester atmospheric carbon dioxide are complicated by the effects of soil redistribution on both net primary productivity and decomposition. In this presentation, Dr. Berhe will discuss: (1) why and how soil erosion can constitute a C sink; and how soil erosion is being considered within the context of global climate models; (2) the role of soil erosion on determining spatial distribution and stocks of SOM, stability, and stabilization mechanisms; (3) emerging understanding of the role of soil erosion in soil nitrogen dynamics; and I will conclude the presentation by highlighting remaining knowledge gaps in our understanding of the role of soil erosion in soil phosphorus dynamics, and SOM dynamics in temperate and arctic ecosystems. Dr. Berhe was recently nominated by President Biden to lead the Department of Energy's Office of Science.

Immigration and Sino-U.S. Foreign Relations
6:00 PM – Great Hall, Memorial Union - Through the lens of Chinese immigration and its regulation, this lecture explores key values and approaches applied by the U.S. government in managing racial and cultural diversity in its population and how immigration policy interacts with economic and international relations priorities.  As a racial minority associated with a major world power and economy, Chinese American and immigrant experiences reveal major shifts in U.S. conceptions of democracy and its place in the world.   Madeline Y. Hsu is Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin and served as Director of the Center for Asian American Studies eight years (2006-2014). She was president of the Immigration and Ethnic History Society and is presently representative-at-large for the International Society for the Study of Chinese Overseas. She was born in Columbia, Missouri but grew up in Taiwan and Hong Kong between visits with her grandparents at their store in Altheimer, Arkansas. She received her undergraduate degrees in History from Pomona College and PhD from Yale University. Her first book was Dreaming of Gold, Dreaming of Home: Transnationalism and Migration between the United States and South China, 1882-1943 (Stanford University Press, 2000). Her most recent monograph, The Good Immigrants: How the Yellow Peril Became the Model Minority (Princeton University Press, 2015), received awards from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, the Immigration and Ethnic History Society, the Asian Pacific American Librarians Association, and the Association for Asian American Studies.

Cracks in Your Character
12:00 PM – Student Innovation Center - Anthony Sardella is the Founder and Vice-Chairman of evolve24, a company he founded in 2004. He guides the company’s advancements in artificial intelligence, data, and decision sciences. evolve24 is a leader in predictive analytics and decision sciences that drives greater certainty in strategic decision making. This is part of the ISU Student Innovation Center noon talks. Attend @ SICTR or via Zoom. For details, go to https://sictr.iastate.edu/

What Race Is, What It Is Not, and Why It Matters
7:00 PM – Webex - Fall 2021 Sigma Xi Lecture "Race" as we use it is not a biological category, not a way in which the forces of biology and evolution have divided up our species. There is no inherently biological reason that most starting running backs in the NFL are black or most CEOs of Fortune 500 companies are white. Nor is there a “natural” explanation for why race relations are often difficult, but there are lots of interesting social, political, psychological, and historical ones. Race and Racism are completely intertwined making Race a tangible reality in our society. But Race is not what most think it is. Racism pervades the very structures of daily life in the USA, and most of us are afraid to talk about race or racism in any depth or with any detail. Fear and ignorance surround the concepts and realities of Race and Racism. In an effort to tackle that this lecture engages what race is, what it is not, and why that matters. Agustín Fuentes is a Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University researching human evolution, multispecies anthropology, and structures of race and racism. Fuentes’ books include Race, Monogamy, and Other Lies They Told You: Busting Myths about Human Nature, The Creative Spark: How Imagination Made Humans Exceptional, and Why We Believe: Evolution and the Human Way of Being.