Distinguished speakers come to Case Western Reserve University as part of this annual lecture series to engage our community in active discourse on important subjects.
Previous speakers for the Distinguished Lecture Series include:
Henry Petroski is the Aleksandar S. Vesic Professor of Civil Engineering and a professor of history at Duke University. He has written broadly on design, success, failure and the history of engineering and technology, and lectured on these topics to audiences around the world.
In his 15 books, Petroski has explored large topics (such as ideas and bridges) in titles like To Engineer is Human, Design Paradigms, and Engineers of Dreams, and found smaller foci in The Pencil, The Toothpick and The Evolution of Useful Things. His memoir, Paperboy, tells his story of delivering newspapers in the 1950s and what predisposed him to becoming an engineer. His most recent book, The Essential Engineer, examines how engineering and science relate in dealing with global problems. His essays have been featured many newspapers and magazines, including the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times and Wall Street Journal. He writes regular columns for the American Scientist and ASEE Prism magazines, and has discussed engineering and other topics on radio and television.
His honors include the Washington Award from the Western Society of Engineers, the History and Heritage Award from the American Society of Civil Engineers, and the Ralph Coats Roe Medal from the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. Petroski has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities, four honorary degrees, and distinguished alumnus awards from Manhattan College and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He has also been elected to membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the U.S. National Academy of Engineering.
Edward O. Wilson is a legendary biologist and is widely considered to be the father of the modern environmental movement. A two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, he has made a significant contribution to our understanding of the rich spectrum of the earth's biodiversity.
Wilson's works include Ants and On Human Nature, which both won the Pulitzer Prize; The Future of Life, which offers a plan for saving Earth's biological heritage; Consilience, which draws together the sciences, humanities, and the arts into a broad study of human knowledge; The Creation, a plea for science and religion to work together to save the planet; and From So Simple a Beginning, a collection of the four seminal works of Darwin, with new introductions by Wilson. His latest book, 2008's The Superorganism, was hailed by the New York Times as "an astonishing account of the intricate and unexpected swarm intelligence of wasps, bees, ants and termites."
Wilson's latest project, The Encyclopedia of Life Web site, catalogs all key information about life on Earth, including data about every living species. Wilson is the recipient of the U.S. National Medal of Science, the Crafoord Prize (a sister to the Nobel), and the Audubon Medal. He is the Pellegrino University Research Professor Emeritus at Harvard University, and continues to conduct research at the Museum of Comparative Zoology.
An international authority and researcher on mood disorders and a recipient of the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship, Kay Redfield Jamison has unique insight into the world of mental illness.
She has been there herself.
Jamison has published over 100 articles in academic journals and has authored or co-authored five books. She is co-author of the standard medical textbook on manic-depression. Jamison's rigorous yet compassionate approach is an offshoot of her own journey from suffering to sharing. She offered a powerful message of hope to those who most need it.
Lisa Randall is one of the world's leading physicists and is among the most cited scientists of our time. Her book, Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe's Hidden Dimensions, brings her quest to explain the very fabric of reality-via string theory-to a broad readership.
A professor of theoretical physics at Harvard University, Randall's book takes readers into the incredible world of warped, hidden dimensions that underpin the universe we live in. Randall demystifies the science and beguilingly unravels the mysteries of the myriad worlds that may exist just beyond the one we are only now beginning to know.
Randall was the first tenured woman in the Princeton physics department and the first tenured woman theoretical physicist at MIT and Harvard. She is the winner of an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship and a National Science Foundation Young Investigator Award. In 2006, she received the Klopsted Award from the American Society of Physics Teachers and was featured in Newsweek's "Who's Next in 2006" issue.
Jared M. Diamond is an American author, evolutionary biologist, physiologist, and biogeographer. Best known for the Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Guns, Germs, and Steel (1998), which explores the geographic, cultural, environmental, and technological factors which have led to domination of Western culture in the world and argues for a new kind of history based on science that can make predictions rather than merely describing "one damn fact after another."
Diamond spoke about his most recent book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (2004) on Wednesday, March 1, 2006 beginning at 5 p.m. in Severance Hall. Collapse examines what caused some of the great civilizations of the past to collapse into ruin and considers what contemporary society can learn from their fates.
In addition to being a renowned author, Diamond is a professor of geography at the University of California, Los Angeles. He has received a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (the so-called "Genius Award") as well as research prizes from the American Physiological Society and the National Geographic Society. He has been elected a member of all three of the leading national scientific/academic honorary societies, the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.
Steven Pinker is the Johnstone Professor of Psychology at Harvard University and a world-renowned linguist and cognition expert. He delivered the first in Case Western Reserve University's annual Distinguished Lecture Series on March 14, 2005.
Pinker is best known for his books on language: The Language Instinct (1994), How the Mind Works (1997) and Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language. In 2002 he published The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, which explored the political, moral and emotional colorings of human nature. He is a three-time winner of the William James Book Prize.
A native of Montreal, Pinker holds a B.A. in experimental psychology from McGill University and a Ph.D. from Harvard. He taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1982-2003, when he moved to Harvard.
He's a licensed professional engineer, author of 15 books, a professor of civil engineering and a professor of history. And that's just the beginning. Learn more about this past speaker.
