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Bright Horizons 18 Speakers

Rhone River • November 29th – December 6th, 2013

 

THOMAS H. CARPENTER, PH.D.

Thomas H. Carpenter is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Classics and World Religions at Ohio University and specializes in ancient Greek religion and iconography. He has degrees in both Theology (MTS Harvard) and Classical Archaeology (Ph.D., Oxford University). He has written numerous books on Greek mythology including Art and Myth in Ancient Greece (Thames and Hudson 1991), which has been translated into six languages, and Dionysian Imagery in Fifth Century Athens (Oxford University Press 1997). His most recent work deals with the reception and worship of Dionysus by the native people in South Italy and he has co-edited a forthcoming book, Beyond Magna Graecia, New Developments in South Italian Archaeology (Cambridge University Press). He is the director of the Ping Institute for the Teaching of the Humanities at Ohio University and has been named University Professor for his performance in the classroom. He has recently been awarded the 2014–2015 Joukowsky Lectureship by the Archaeological Institute of America for which he will travel throughout the U.S. as a public lecturer.

JAMES KENNEDY, PH.D.

James Kennedy is Professor and Chair of the Department of Viticulture and Enology, and Director for the Viticulture and Enology Research Center at California State University, Fresno. Dr. Kennedy is most widely recognized for his research on improving our understanding of grape and wine tannin chemistry, with the primary goal being the improvement of red wine astringency quality. Dr. Kennedy has published extensively as an author or co-author in peer-reviewed journals, grape and wine industry publications, and proceedings. He has contributed numerous book chapters on grape and wine phenolic chemistry and has co-edited a book on the chemistry of red wine color.

Dr. Kennedy received his Bachelor’s degree in Chemistry and his Ph.D. in Agricultural and Environmental Chemistry, both from the University of California, Davis, and has worked in the wine industry (Ridge Vineyards). After receiving his Ph.D., Dr. Kennedy conducted post-doctoral research on grape and wine phenolic chemistry at the University of Adelaide in South Australia before becoming a faculty member at Oregon State University where he was instrumental in developing the Enology and Viticulture option in their Food Science program. Upon leaving Oregon State University, Dr Kennedy worked at the Australian Wine Research Institute as their Research Manager for Chemistry before becoming Chair and Director at Fresno State. He is a Fulbright Scholarship recipient, conducting research at the University of Bordeaux. In recognition of his research accomplishments, the American Chemical Society-Division of Agricultural and Food Chemistry awarded Dr. Kennedy with its Young Scientist Award in 2008. He serves as an Associate Editor for the American Journal of Enology and Viticulture and is a contributing editor for Practical Winery and Vineyard. Kennedy currently sits on the Board of Directors and is First-Vice President for the American Society for Enology and Viticulture. Kennedy also sits on the Board of Directors for the California Raisin Marketing Board, and the San Joaquin Valley Winegrowers Association.

LYNNE C. LANCASTER, PH.D.

Lynne C. Lancaster is a Professor in the Department of Classics and World Religions at Ohio University and specializes in ancient Roman construction and technology. She has degrees in both architecture (B.Arch., Virginia Tech) and Classical Archaeology (Ph.D., Oxford University). She was a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome in 2001–2002 and has written articles on major monuments in Rome, such as the Colosseum, Trajan’s Markets, and the Pantheon, and has published a book entitled Concrete Vaulted Construction in Imperial Rome: Innovations in Context (Cambridge University Press 2005), which was the recipient of the James Wiseman book award from Archaeological Institute of America in 2007. She is currently working on a sequel entitled Innovative Vaulted Construction in the Roman Imperial Provinces, for which she was awarded a National Science Foundation grant in 2007 and subsequently has traveled throughout the ancient Roman world documenting building methods used to construct their most impressive structures. In 2010 she was elected onto Governing Board of the Archaeological Institute of America. She is an active public lecturer to groups throughout the country.

FRANK LINDE, PH.D.

Professor Frank Linde was born in the Netherlands. He studied astronomy and physics at the University of Utrecht and earned a Ph.D. at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in California. In 1988 he continued his research career at CERN in Switzerland, where he worked on the L3 experiment at the LEP accelerator. In 1993 he obtained a professorship at the University of Amsterdam. From that year onwards, his focus at CERN shifted from the LEP data analysis to the development of the LHC, in particular the immense ATLAS detector. In 2000, he returned to the Netherlands, where he became the ATLAS project leader at Nikhef. Since 2004 he has been the director of Nikhef (the Dutch National Institute for Subatomic Physics), where he focuses on management and science policy. He is presently looking forward to harvesting the results of the LHC runs and finding the elusive Higgs boson, and also joining in the attempts to solve the issue of Dark Matter.

He enjoys teaching and giving lectures. He has collaborated with artists and film makers to make science — particle physics in particular — more understandable to the general public.

ROBIN LLOYD, PH.D.

Robin Lloyd is the news editor at Scientific American, responsible for editing and assigning stories primarily for Scientific American’s Wwebsite. She also heads up Scientific American’s social media efforts on Facebook, Twitter, and beyond. Previously, she was a senior editor for LiveScience.com and SPACE.com. She has additional experience in print journalism (Pasadena Star-News); wire journalism (City News Service in Los Angeles); and network online journalism (CNN.com). She has a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and received a Knight Science Journalism Fellowship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for the 1998–1999 academic year.

STEVE MIRSKY, M.SC.

Steve Mirsky has been an editor at Scientific American magazine for 15 years. Mirsky’s personal evolutionary path encompasses a degree from the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, acting in summer stock, a bachelor’s degree from City University of New York, hosting a morning radio show and a master’s degree in chemistry from Cornell University.

Mirsky left chemistry (to the relief of the American Chemical Society) for journalism after receiving an American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Mass Media Fellowship in 1985, which he spent at the NBC TV affiliate in Miami. Other academic fellowships include two stints (general, 1993, and molecular evolution, 2001) at the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, a Reuters Foundation Fellowship in Medical Journalism at Columbia University in 1997 and the Knight Science Journalism Fellowship at MIT for the 2003–2004 academic year (during which he also attended a semester of criminal law with Alan Dershowitz at Harvard Law School).

DAVID SADAVA, PH.D.

David Sadava is the Pritzker Family Foundation Professor of Biology, Emeritus, at Claremont McKenna, Pitzer and Scripps, three of the Claremont Colleges. In addition, he is Adjunct Professor in the Department of Cancer Cell Biology at the City of Hope Medical Center.

Dr. Sadava graduated from Carleton University in 1967 as science medalist, with a B.S. with first class honors in biology and chemistry. While an undergraduate, he worked in biological control at the Canada Department of Agriculture and as a science policy officer to the government of Canada. A Woodrow Wilson Fellow, he received a Ph.D. in biology from the University of California at San Diego in 1971. Following postdoctoral research at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, he joined the faculty at Claremont in 1972 as an assistant professor, and was promoted to associate professor in 1977 and full professor in 1984. In 1996, he became the inaugural Pritzker Foundation Chair of Biology. He has taught a wide range of courses in the biological sciences, ranging from genetics, to biology for non-majors, to cancer biology and has mentored hundreds of undergraduates in research. He served as Chair of the science program at Claremont for two terms. He repeatedly won awards for superior teaching as well as other faculty honors. In 2009, he left teaching to devote full time to laboratory research and writing.

Dr. Sadava has been a visiting professor at the University of Colorado and at the California Institute of Technology. He currently serves as an Advisory Board member at the Keck Graduate Institute and at the UCLA Center for Society and Genetics and is a trustee of Western University of Health Sciences. A bench scientist throughout his career, he has held numerous research grants and written over 55 peer-reviewed scientific research papers, many with undergraduate student co-authors. His published research has been wide-ranging, from the biochemistry of plant growth, to the genetics of racehorses, to human genetic diseases, to the mechanisms of drug addiction. For the past 20 years, his research has focused on resistance to chemotherapy in human lung cancer, with a view to developing new, plant-based medicines to treat this disease. He is the author or co-author of five books, including Plants, Genes and Crop Biotechnology and the recently published tenth edition of a leading biology textbook, Life: The Science of Biology. Committed to educating the general public, he has presented innumerable public talks on biological topics and has given free public courses on cancer. The success of his video course for The Great Courses series, Understanding Genetics: DNA, Genes and Their Real-World Applications has been followed by a recently developed course entitled What Science Knows About Cancer. He lives in Los Angeles.

MARK WHITTLE, PH.D.

Dr. Mark Whittle was born and educated in England, obtaining a bachelor’s degree in Physics at Oxford University and a Ph.D. in Astronomy at Cambridge University in 1982. Following post-doctoral fellowships at the University of Arizona in Tucson and at Jesus College Cambridge, in 1986 he joined the Faculty of the Astronomy Department at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, where he is currently Professor.

In his research Dr. Whittle uses large optical and radio telescopes, including the Hubble Space Telescope, to study processes occurring within 1000 light years of the central supermassive black hole in Active Galaxies. His most recent interests focus on the way in which fast moving jets of gas, which are driven out of the active nucleus, subsequently crash into, accelerate, and generally “damage” the surrounding galactic material.

Dr. Whittle teaches introductory astronomy courses to non-science majors, and graduate courses on Extragalactic Astronomy to doctoral students. In 2004, following the success of the WMAP mission, he developed for public outreach a detailed acoustic analysis of the sound present in the early universe, as seen in the cosmic microwave background. In 2008 he produced a 36-lecture series on Cosmology: The Nature and History of Our Universe for the Teaching Company, which is currently one of their highest rated courses.

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