Lectures

The Olmsted Legacy: Parks, Green Spaces, and Human Health April 28, 2022

Parks and green spaces aren’t just for nature—they can improve your health. Frederick Law Olmsted argued that great public parks would function as the “lungs of the city,” improving human health by providing fresh air and controlling the spread of diseases.

In this panel discussion, public health experts discuss 1) how the use of parks and urban green spaces lead to positive health outcomes, 2) the distribution and utilization of parks across different communities, and 3) how the efficacy of health programs related to green spaces vary across socioeconomic groups and populations.

The panelists:

Viniece Jennings is an assistant professor of public health at Agnes Scott College where she focuses on the intersection between green space, health, and social justice. She previously served for over a decade as a research scientist with the USDA Forest Service. Her innovative articles on green spaces, health disparities, and social determinants of health are among the most cited in the field. She earned her PhD in environmental science with a focus in policy and management from Florida A & M University.

Stephen Van Rhein is an ecologist and environmental manager at KC Parks, which maintains 221 parks, 12,242 acres of parkland, 158 miles of trails and bikeways, 29 lakes, and miles of scenic boulevards and parkways that crisscross the city. He previously worked as Community Conservationist at the Missouri Department of Conservation. He earned an MS in ecology from Illinois State University.

Robert Zarr, MD, MPH, Founder and Medical Director, Park Rx America and a board-certified pediatrician at Unity Health Care in Washington, DC, where he cares for low-income and immigrant populations. He is Founder and Medical Director of Park Rx America, a community health initiative to prescribe nature to patients and families to prevent and treat chronic disease and promote wellness. He previously served as the Park Rx Advisor to the National Park Service in his national advocacy to connect people to parks.
After Hours with Erhard Ratdolt
Tornado Alley: Climate Change and Extreme Weather in the Midwest
NASA’s Evolving Role in Human Spaceflight March 31, 2022, at William Jewell College

Presented in partnership with William Jewell College.

Astronaut Linda Godwin includes her own spaceflight experiences as she discusses how NASA human exploration has changed over time, and how the evolving role of commercial and private space flight in low Earth orbit, and possibly beyond, partners with NASA’s plans for human missions to the Moon, asteroids, and eventually to Mars.

The speaker:

Linda Godwin, PhD, a native of Jackson, Missouri, received a BS degree in mathematics and physics from Southeast Missouri State University and an MS and PhD in physics from the University of Missouri, where her research was in low temperature condensed matter physics. In 1980, Dr. Godwin joined NASA at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, working in Payload Operations. In this role she supported the development and integration of science missions for the early Space Shuttle Program and served as a flight controller and payloads officer in the Mission Control Center for several flights prior to being selected as an astronaut candidate in 1985.

A veteran of four shuttle flights, Dr. Godwin has logged over 915 hours (over 38 days) in space. She flew in space as a mission specialist on STS-37 (1991), which deployed the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory. She was assigned to STS-59, an Earth science mission, as a payload commander. She then was a mission specialist on STS-76 in 1996, which docked to the Russian Space Station MIR. Dr. Godwin participated in a spacewalk to install experiment packages on the Mir station to detect and assess debris and contamination surrounding the space station. On STS-108, launching in December of 2001, a station crew exchange mission, Dr. Godwin used the shuttle’s robotic arm to install the Multipurpose Logistics Module (MPLM) onto the station node and she participated in a spacewalk to install thermal blankets on two Beta Gimbal Assemblies at the base of the station’s two solar wings.

Following her NASA career, Dr. Godwin was a professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Missouri, in Columbia, Missouri for eight years where she taught physics and astronomy classes and worked with students in undergraduate research in astrophysics. She is currently an emeritus professor of the department and still serves in an adjunct capacity.

Video filmed and produced by The VideoWorks, LLC.
Adventures in Spring: Upcoming Blooms in the Arboretum February 16, 2022

The 14-acre grounds surrounding the Linda Hall Library are home to some 300 trees representing 48 genera and 130 species. Highlights of the Arboretum include a Peony Garden, which are located on the Northeast side of the grounds, and 12 Champion Trees.

In this talk, Samantha Sanchez, Head of Grounds at the Linda Hall Library, describes the rich variety of flowering plants soon to bloom this spring in the Arboretum and answers questions about which flowers and trees to plant to brighten a lawn and garden (and when to plant them!).

The speaker:

Samantha Sanchez has been Head of Grounds with the Linda Hall Library for over six years, where she oversees the horticulture of the arboretum. She received a Bachelor’s degree in Horticulture in 2007 from Northwest Missouri State University and has nearly 20 years of experience in nurseries, landscaping, and gardening.
After Hours with Birds of Texas February 24, 2022

Ornithological books—or bird books—are among the most arresting printed combinations of art and science. Indeed, some of the most celebrated books in existence are ornithological works: Audubon’s Birds of America and Catesby’s Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahamas. The work of bird illustrations and natural history continues today and can be seen in the work of Texas artists, Scott and Stuart Gentling. Their work, Of Birds and Texas, published in 1986, continues the work of Audubon and Catesby in a grand manner. The folio book, recently acquired by the Library, combines the artistry of the Gentlings with the ornithological and natural history work of their predecessors.

In this presentation, Gentling Curator Jonathan Frembling and the Linda Hall Library’s Vice President for Special Collections Jason W. Dean explore the art and science embodied in the Gentling’s masterwork, Of Birds and Texas.

Jason W. Dean is Vice President for Special Collections at the Linda Hall Library. Prior to coming to the Library, Jason was Director of Special Collections & Archives at Southwestern University. He has previously held positions at the University of Arkansas and Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. He earned an undergraduate degree in history from Hardin-Simmons University and his MS in Library and Information Science from Syracuse University. He is a member of the Grolier Club, and a past Institute of Library and Museum Services-Rare Book School fellow.

Jonathan Frembling received an MA in History from the University of Texas. He served as the Archivist of the Amon Carter Museum of American Art from 2003 to 2018, when the museum received the Gentling endowment for an Archives Curator. This expanded role leads the archives department, the special collections study room, two fellowships, and develops exhibitions built on the Museum’s extensive special collections. 2021 saw Frembling assemble a comprehensive career retrospective of the artists Scott and Stuart Gentling as the first program of this expanded program.
Show-Me Paleontology: A New Dinosaur Discovery in Missouri January 25, 2022, via Zoom

Presented in partnership with the Kansas City Public Library

The program:

Recent fossil discoveries in southern Missouri have helped scientists identify a new species of dinosaur, Parrosaurus missouriensis. The large duck-billed dinosaur measured 35 feet in length and roamed the region 75 to 90 million years ago. The Missouri dig site has yielded fossil remains for over 80 years and has helped expand the knowledge of dinosaurs in the U.S. east of the Western Interior Seaway, a body of water that divided North America more than 70 million years ago.

In this presentation, paleontologist Peter Makovicky, who helped lead the dig, will explain the significance of the new dinosaur skeletons and how the Missouri site informs our understanding of Earth’s prehistoric ecology.

The speaker:

Dr. Peter Makovicky is a professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Minnesota. He is a paleontologist whose research aims to understand the patterns and processes of macroevolution using the fossil record, with an emphasis on Mesozoic vertebrates. He addresses these questions with a combination of fieldwork, anatomical studies using character analysis and morphometrics, phylogenetic inference, biogeography, and comparative methods analyses of trait evolution. He principally uses dinosaurs as a research model because of the group’s longevity surpassing 150 million years, global distribution, high diversity, and the possession of unique anatomical structures. Dr. Makovicky’s fieldwork spans the globe with longstanding, active programs in Argentina, China, Antarctica, as well as the United States.
Ecosystem Restoration and Partnerships: Reintroduction of the Brown-headed Nuthatch to Missouri Pine Woodlands December 15, 2021, via Zoom

If you visit Mark Twain National Forest in the near future, you may hear a birdcall that hasn’t been in the Missouri Ozarks since the early-1900s. What may sound like the squeak of a rubber ducky is actually the Brown-headed Nuthatch, a songbird that was extirpated in Missouri at the turn of the century. The state lost millions of acres of pine woodlands through widespread logging at that time, which also happened to be the Brown-headed Nuthatch’s ideal habitat. Luckily for us, and for this squeaky songbird, conservation efforts have restored the Missouri pine woodlands leading to the Brown-headed Nuthatch returning to the Show-Me State.

In this talk, Sarah Kendrick, the Missouri State Ornithologist, discusses bird conservation research and the work being done to reintroduce the Brown-headed Nuthatch to the Missouri pine woodlands.

The speaker:

Sarah Kendrick is a Missouri native and the State Ornithologist with the Missouri Department of Conservation where she works across the state, Midwest region, and internationally to focus bird conservation work at varying scales. She wrote and coordinated the Missouri Bird Conservation Plan with partners, which acts as a reference to public and private land managers to promote bird habitat management for our most-threatened species and focuses bird outreach messages. Sarah also coordinates the Great Missouri Birding Trail, conducts bird monitoring on the state’s priority lands, organized the reintroduction of the previously-extirpated Brown-headed Nuthatch to the state, and acts as the public and agency contact bird topics and issues. She serves on national and international committees to address threats to migratory birds and works to inspire action in Missouri’s citizenry to learn more about how they can help declining bird populations.
Grid Resiliency in an Electrifying, Interconnected World November 17, 2021, via Zoom

In February 2021, multiple severe winter storms swept the United States, bringing extreme cold temperatures that pushed our power grid to its limit. These icy conditions created electricity shortages that resulted in rolling blackouts in an effort to conserve energy in the region. Most notably was the Texas power crisis that left citizens without electricity and heat for days and resulted in at least 210 deaths. This event left people wondering, “How could something like this happen? And just how vulnerable is our electric grid?”

In this talk, Kayla Messamore, Senior Director of Long Term Planning and Grid Modernization for Evergy, discusses how our electric grid works, the interdependence of the system, and its resiliency.

The speaker:

Kayla Messamore is the Senior Director of Long Term Planning and Grid Modernization for Evergy and is responsible for generation resource planning, transmission and distribution planning, operations compliance, and operations technology for Evergy’s operations across Missouri and Kansas. Through these responsibilities, Kayla leads the creation of Evergy’s Integrated Resource Plans (which include the company’s long-term plans for its generating fleet), transmission and distribution investment plans, operations compliance processes, grid automation deployments (including both software and hardware), distribution standards, and unmanned aircraft system (UAS) programs.

Prior to this position, Kayla was responsible for Operations Strategy at Evergy and has worked as a strategy consultant in the power and utilities sector. She graduated from the University of Texas at Austin with a degree in business administration and a concentration in mechanical engineering.
After Hours with Aldus Manutius November 4, 2021, via Zoom

In the last decade of the 15th century, a middle-aged private tutor named Aldus Manutius made the stunning decision to leave the comfortable employ of a noble family and enter the cutthroat world of printing. The implications of that career change reverberate to this day throughout the worlds of textual criticism, book design, typography, book production, copyright law, collecting, and classical philology. Whether by accident or design, Aldus’s career change put him in the right place at the right time to apply the relatively new technology of printing with movable type to the difficult task of printing Greek, catalyzing the re-entry of ancient science to western Europe. As a result, virtually the entire surviving Greek canon found its way into print for the first time, and therefore into posterity. Collector and scholar G. Scott Clemons and Jason W. Dean, the Library’s Vice President for Special Collections, explore the enduring legacy of the Aldine Press, exemplified by materials held by the Library.

The speakers:

G. Scott Clemons has collected the Aldine Press since his days as an undergraduate in the Classics Department at Princeton University. He is the immediate past president of the Grolier Club of New York City, the treasurer of the Bibliographical Society of America, and is a trustee of Rare Books School at the University of Virginia, as well as the Morgan Library and Museum. In 2015 he co-curated an exhibition at the Grolier Club, drawn largely from his own collection, to commemorate the 500th anniversary of the birth of Aldus Manutius. By day, Clemons is a partner at the investment firm Brown Brothers Harriman & Co. in New York City.

Jason W. Dean is Vice President for Special Collections at the Linda Hall Library. Prior to coming to the Library, Jason was Director of Special Collections & Archives at Southwestern University. He has previously held positions at the University of Arkansas and Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. He earned an undergraduate degree in history from Hardin-Simmons University and his MS in Library and Information Science from Syracuse University. He is a member of the Grolier Club, and a past Institute of Library and Museum Services-Rare Book School fellow.
Listening in the Anthropocene: Humpback Whale Communication in a Changing Ocean October 20, 2021, via Zoom

The program:

Humpback whale song changed the human relationship with whales when it was first recorded in the 1970s. But humpback whales do more than sing, and their social sounds – or “calls” – can tell us more about how they communicate and engage with their environments in an increasingly noisy world. In this talk, Dr. Michelle Fournet, whose work took center stage in the recently released Apple TV+ documentary, Fathom, shares her research on humpback whale calls, what it has revealed about their culture, and how increased human activity impacts ocean life.

The speaker:

Dr. Michelle Fournet is an acoustic ecologist that studies marine animal communication. Her research program spans the tropics to the poles investigating toadfish, snapping shrimp, Arctic seals, and bowhead whales, but her primary focus is on how humpback whales communicate on their Alaskan foraging grounds, and their resilience to changing ocean soundscapes. Dr. Fournet received her MS and Ph.D. from Oregon State University, where she worked with NOAA and the National Park Service. She is a postdoctoral researcher with Cornell University’s K. Lisa Yang Center for Conservation Bioacoustics and also the director of the Sound Science Research Collective.
After Hours with Banned Books September 30, 2021, via Zoom

The program:

In 1616, nearly 75 years after Nicholaus Copernicus’ theories on planetary motion first appeared in print, the Congregation of the Index of Prohibited Books ruled that copies of De Revolutionibus must be “suspended until corrected.” This was not an outright ban of the text, but a call for its “expurgation”, a practice for selectively censoring parts of books that the Catholic Church deemed suspect, dangerous, or otherwise heretical. The Congregation’s final decree, issued in 1620, called for the removal of only a few passages, as the book was “most useful and necessary to astronomy.” The history of science offers many similar cases, where useful books for scientists, doctors, and other professionals were allowed to circulate, even despite explicitly controversial content. Censoring scientific books was not at all straightforward, and readers were often allowed access to “banned” works because of the value of their content. In this talk, Harvard professor Hannah Marcus and the Library’s Assistant Curator for Special Collections Jamie Cumby discuss how prohibited books were read in early modern Europe, and share examples of expurgated books held by the Library.

The speakers:

Dr. Jamie Cumby joined the Linda Hall Library in 2020 as Assistant Curator of Rare Books and Manuscripts. Dr. Cumby holds a doctorate in modern history and an MLitt in book history from the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. Prior to joining the Library, she worked as Special Collections Librarian for Pequot Library in Connecticut and served as Senior Editor on “Preserving the World’s Rare Books.” She has also served in roles with the University of St. Andrews, Cambridge Public Library, the MIT Press, and Wellesley’s Special Collections Library. Her doctoral research focused on the history of the book, and her career has included a commitment to public outreach and access to special collections.

Dr. Hannah Marcus is an assistant professor in the Department of the History of Science at Harvard University. Her research focuses on the scientific culture of early modern Europe between 1400 and 1700. Professor Marcus’s first book, Forbidden Knowledge: Medicine, Science, and Censorship in Early Modern Italy (University of Chicago Press, 2020), explores the censorship of medical books from their proliferation in print through the prohibitions placed on many of these texts during the Counter-Reformation. This account explains how and why the books prohibited by the Catholic Church in Italy ended up back on the shelves of private and public Italian libraries in the seventeenth century. Her second book, Methuselah’s Children: The Renaissance Discovery of Old Age, is a study of ideas about longevity and experiences of advanced old age in a period when the average life expectancy was 35. She is also writing a book with Paula Findlen about Galileo’s correspondence called Galileo’s Letters: Experiments in Friendship, which grows out of their collaboration on The Galileo Correspondence Project. Her public writing has appeared in The New York Times, Scientific American, and The Conversation, among other venues. Dr. Marcus earned her BA at the University of Pennsylvania and her PhD at Stanford University. Before coming to Harvard, she worked as a postdoctoral researcher on the Galileo Correspondence Project, which she directs with Paula Findlen.
Tiny Conspiracies: Cell-to-Cell Communication in Bacteria September 23, 2021, via Zoom

Presented in association with the Harvard-Radcliffe Club of Kansas City, the Princeton Alumni Association of Greater Kansas City, and the Yale Club of Kansas City.

The program:

Bacteria are tiny ancient organisms. Harmful bacteria have the capacity to kill humans, animals, and plants. How do bacteria do it? The answer is that bacteria work in groups: They communicate, count their numbers, and act as collectives to carry out processes that would be unproductive if undertaken by an individual bacterium acting alone. Current biomedical research seeks to interfere with bacterial communication as a strategy to combat globally-important bacterial pathogens.

The speaker:

Dr. Bonnie Bassler, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator and the Squibb Professor of Molecular Biology at Princeton University, wants to understand how bacteria communicate and orchestrate group behaviors. This process, known as quorum sensing, relies on chemical “words” and enables populations of bacteria to regulate gene expression, and therefore behavior, on a community-wide scale. Through a range of approaches, Bassler and her team are providing insight into: intra-species, inter-species, and inter-domain communication; population-level cooperation; and the principles underlying signal transduction and information processing at the population and individual cell levels. One objective of Bassler’s team is to develop quorum-sensing interference strategies to combat pathogenic bacteria that use this process to regulate virulence. Dr. Bassler received a BS in biochemistry from the University of California at Davis, and a PhD in biochemistry from the Johns Hopkins University.
The Chemistry of Your Cup of Coffee September 15, 2021, via Zoom

Every morning, millions of people around the world start their day with a cup of coffee. But most put little thought into the science behind what makes this daily ritual possible. What makes a consistently good cup of coffee, and how can we use that knowledge to maximize the flavor experience?

Computational chemist Dr. Christopher Hendon shares his research on coffee and how chemistry plays a significant role in consistently brewing a quality cup of Joe. The presentation touches on several research areas, including the chemistry of water, the physics of grinding (including cryogenics), and his team’s latest endeavors of using mathematical modeling to improve espresso reproducibility.

The speaker:

Dr. Christopher H. Hendon is a computational chemist with interests in energy materials and coffee extraction. He obtained his BSc. Adv. HONS from Monash University in 2011 and PhD from the University of Bath in 2015. After a two year postdoc at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he joined the University of Oregon as a tenure-track Assistant Professor of Chemistry where his research group focuses on the chemistry of metal-organic frameworks. Professor Hendon’s interest in coffee began during his PhD, and since then has published several peer-reviewed articles and a book, Water For Coffee. He enjoys washed African coffees, dry Rieslings, and east coast oysters.
The Ultimate Cosmic Time Machines: The Hubble and James Webb Space Telescopes September 9, 2021, via Zoom

Since its launch and deployment by the space shuttle Discovery in 1990, the Hubble Space Telescope has revolutionized astronomy with its crystal-clear view of the universe. Scientists have used Hubble to observe some of the most distant stars and galaxies yet seen, as well as the planets in our solar system.

Scheduled for launch in late 2021, the James Webb Space Telescope will be the largest, most powerful, and complex space telescope ever built. It will be the premier space observatory for astronomers worldwide with the power to fundamentally alter our understanding of the universe. The Webb will be an orbiting infrared observatory that will complement and extend the discoveries of the Hubble Space Telescope with longer wavelength coverage and greatly improved sensitivity, which will enable the telescope to look much closer to the beginning of time and to hunt for the unobserved formation of the first galaxies where stars and planetary systems are forming today.

In this presentation, Drs. Jonathan Gardner and Jennifer Wiseman from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center give an insider’s look at the scientific legacy of Hubble and the future possibilities of the James Webb.

The speakers:

Dr. Jonathan Gardner is the Deputy Senior Project Scientist for the James Webb Space Telescope and also serves as the Chief of the Laboratory for Observational Cosmology in the Astrophysics Science Division of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. He has worked at Goddard since 1996, except for a brief term as a Program Scientist at NASA Headquarters, Washington, D.C. in 2004. He earned a BS in astronomy and astrophysics from Harvard University and a PhD in astronomy from the University of Hawaii.

Dr. Jennifer Wiseman is a senior astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, where she serves as the Senior Project Scientist for the Hubble Space Telescope. Her primary responsibility is to ensure that the Hubble mission is as scientifically productive as possible. Previously, Wiseman headed Goddard’s Laboratory for Exoplanets and Stellar Astrophysics. She started her career at NASA in 2003 as the program scientist for Hubble and several other astrophysics missions at NASA Headquarters. As an undergraduate, Wiseman studied physics at MIT, where she discovered the comet 114P/Wiseman-Skiff. She then earned a PhD in astronomy at Harvard University, and continued her research as a Jansky Fellow at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory and as a Hubble Fellow at The Johns Hopkins University.
COVID-19 and Return to School: Health and Safety Challenges in the New Normal August 30, 2021, via Zoom

Back to school has new meaning this fall as excitement over in-person classes is tempered by a deadly surge in COVID-19 cases. And with coronavirus vaccines not yet available for children 12 and under, many kids are returning to school unvaccinated and under a variety of safety rules. Pediatrician Natasha Burgert, MD, discusses the latest information about kids and COVID, and answers your questions about how best to safely navigate back to school during a pandemic.

Dr. Natasha Burgert is a board-certified pediatrician at Pediatric Associates in Overland Park, KS, and a national spokesperson for the American Academy of Pediatrics. Since completing pediatric residency at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, her passion to uplevel the traditional medical experience using digital tools has fueled her private practice. In addition to being nationally recognized as a child health expert, she is a sought-after speaker, vaccine advocate and medical writer. Find out more about Dr. Natasha at kckidsdoc.com.

Her work with patients has been featured in outlets such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Parents magazine. She has also been on NBC Nightly News, CBS This Morning, and other local news programs. She is a regular contributor to NBC News’ Parent Toolkit and her local NPR affiliate, and has been quoted in numerous print and digital articles. She’s also been the keynote speaker at various health marketing, vaccine advocacy, and physician-led organizations.
2021 Kansas City Invention Convention Virtual Awards Show April 29, 2021 via Zoom

Join us in congratulating young inventors from the inaugural Kansas City Invention Convention. Prizes will be awarded in grade categories along with a Best-of-Show winner. Five Kansas City- area inventors will also be invited to compete in the National Invention Convention sponsored by The Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan.
Science Matters Lunch and Learn: Pets, Animal Behavior, and Return to Work during COVID-19 August 18, 2021 via Zoom.

Presented in partnership with the Kansas City Public Library.

After more than a year of working at home, our pets have become acclimated to us being close by every day. With many workers returning to the office, pet owners may be wondering how to best prepare their animal friends for the daily separation. Luckily, science has answers for that, too. Join us for a talk from veterinarian and animal behaviorist Dr. Wayne Hunthausen, who will share some curated tips from the most recent animal behavioral research on how to help Fido or Fluffy transition back to normalcy.
Toward 10.9 Billion: Challenges of Global Population Growth July 29, 2021 via Zoom.

Presented in partnership with the International Relations Council.

It took hundreds of thousands of years for the global population to reach 1 billion people, and just 200 years later it has skyrocket to over 7 billion. The World Population Report now estimates that the human population will swell to 10.9 billion before the end of the century. Driven largely by advances in medical care and improved living standards, how will this rapid growth impact our environment and communities? In this discussion, experts will examine the potential outcomes of this considerable population increase and how it will affect people and our planet.

The moderator

Dr. Jennifer D. Sciubba (Ph.D. University of Maryland) is the Stanley J. Buckman Professor of International Studies and department chair at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee. Dr. Sciubba has studied at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research and frequently advises the US Government and others on demographics. She is the author of The Future Faces of War: Population and National Security (2011) and 8 Billion and Counting: How Sex, Death, and Migration Shape Our World (2022), and editor of A Research Agenda for Political Demography (2021). Dr. Sciubba is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and Phi Beta Kappa and of the board of the Population Reference Bureau. She is affiliated with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the Environmental Change and Security Program at the Woodrow Wilson Center, and the Rising Powers Initiative at Boston University.

The panel

Dr. Kanta Kumari Rigaud is a Lead Environmental Specialist and Regional Climate Change Coordinator in the Africa Region of the World Bank Group. She is a leading expert on climate adaptation and resilience and works on climate policy, strategy and knowledge management. She led the development of the World Bank’s Next Generation Africa Climate Business Plan; and is working on programs in Kenya and Uganda and provides advice on multiple other countries. Her passion and leadership is reflected in the pioneering flagship report on Groundswell – Preparing for Internal Climate Migration; upcoming Groundswell Africa series; and advancing climate action through World Bank’s Climate and Disaster Risk Screening tools; and most recently the Resilience Booster tool. She has a doctorate from the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom. She is the co-chair of the Environmental Change and Migration Working Group of the Global Knowledge Partnership on Migration and Development KNOMAD.

Lisa Palmer is a journalist, author, and the National Geographic Professor of Science Communication at the School of Media and Public Affairs at George Washington University. As an award-winning environmental and science journalist and author, Palmer teaches science communication at GWU and draws on her two decades of experience to lead the education program at GW’s national collegiate publishing platform, Planet Forward, and at the National Geographic Storytelling division. Palmer has written for a wide range of publications including the Nature family of journals, Yale E360, The Guardian, Nautilus, The New York Times, The New Republic, Ensia, Slate, and many others. Her book, HOT, HUNGRY PLANET: The Fight to Stop a Global Food Crisis in the Face of Climate Change (St. Martin’s Press; 2017), chronicles her travels around the world and the urgent innovations needed to feed a growing population. Palmer was previously a senior fellow at the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center (SESYNC) and she was a public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, D.C., where she conducted research on global food security, resilience, and environmental sustainability. She is professional member of the Society of Environmental Journalists, the National Association of Science Writers, and the D.C. Science Writers Association. She is a Trustee of the Population Reference Bureau (PRB).
Forty Years Later: The Kansas City Skywalk Tragedy July 21, 2021, via Zoom

Presented in partnership with the Kansas City Public Library.

On July 17, 1981, two skywalks collapsed at the Hyatt Regency Kansas City Hotel during a tea dance that was being held in the lobby below. The tragedy ultimately killed 114 people, injured at least 216, and left the survivors and first responders with enduring trauma. This disaster was the deadliest structural collapse in U.S. history until the tragic events of the World Trade Centers in 2001. How could something like this happen? And as we witness the devastation at the Surfside condos collapse in Florida, what can be done to prevent structural failures like these in the future? Join us for this month’s Science Matters Lunch and Learn with Robynn Andracsek, P.E., who will discuss the Kansas City skywalk collapse, what went wrong, and what engineers can learn from this tragedy forty years later.

The speaker:

Robynn Andracsek, P.E., is an associate environmental engineer from Burns & McDonnell in Kansas City, MO. She has 20 years of experience with specializations in air permitting and the utility industry. Robynn has a BS in mechanical engineering and a MS in environmental engineering, both from the University of Kansas, where she currently serves on the Advisory Board for the Department of Civil, Environmental and Architectural Engineering. As a freelance writer and speaker, Robynn is a contributing editor to Power Engineering magazine and Engineering360 magazine. She has also volunteered for the Skywalk Memorial Foundation, a nonprofit that works to honor those who were lost in the skywalk collapse.
A Life of Science and Baseball: A Conversation with Dr. Lawrence Rocks June 23, 2021, via Zoom

Dr. Lawrence Rocks, a world-renowned chemist, energy expert, baseball scientist, and author, in conversation with Eric Ward, VP for Public Programs at the Library Hall Library.

From 2019 to 2021, Dr. Rocks was honored by Topps with baseball cards three years in a row, commemorating his lifelong contributions to science, including recent research with Paul DeJong of the St. Louis Cardinals on the role of chemistry in baseball. Dr. Rocks has been featured on MSNBC and MLB Network and his lab footage has been shown on ESPN Sunday night baseball. He was also recently cited by USA Today baseball writer Bob Nightengale on the ineffectiveness of foreign substances to aid a pitchers’ control and he appeared on the popular CBS Sports Network show, Tiki & Tierney, to discuss the science of sticky substances.

Professor Rocks has also developed the WeatherStationMoon concept of an unmanned weather station on the moon to accurately measure the earth’s temperature and cloud cover for climate change research. In 2021, both Topps and Upper Deck released WeatherStationMoon cards in honor of Dr. Rocks, the only scientist to be honored by both companies. On Earth Day 2021, the New York Islanders honored Professor Rocks with a commemorative hockey puck in recognition of his work to fight climate change.

Dr. Rocks’ research career has spanned from analytical chemistry to sports biochemistry to novel antiviral research. His 1972 book, The Energy Crisis, published just prior to the 1973 oil crisis, was widely acclaimed by both television and print media, and was influential in the creation of the U.S. Department of Energy during the Carter Administration. He has been featured as an energy expert in the New York Times, Time Magazine, and National Review, and he has addressed the United Nations, appeared on the Today Show, To Tell The Truth, and The Mike Douglas Show.

Dr. Rocks, Professor Emeritus at Long Island University, received an MS in chemistry from Purdue University and his DSc (Doctor of Science) from Technische Hochschule Vienna, where he wrote his doctoral thesis in German in the field of analytical chemistry.
Science Matters Lunch and Learn: Bridging the Gender Divide – Toys that Build STEM Skills June 16, 2021, via Zoom

The program:

From chemistry to construction, toys have prepared generations of kids to pursue careers in STEM fields. Discover how these toys, once marketed primarily to boys, have evolved to encourage all children through play to explore science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Bridging the Gender Divide – Toys that Build STEM Skills offers a historical look at how toys helped children develop the skills that contributed to success in STEM-based careers, and how the advertising of these toys has changed over time to reflect cultural values.

The speaker:

Amy McKune has served as T/m’s Curator of Collections since 2017 and is the curator of the exhibit, Bridging the Gender Divide: Toys that Build STEM Skills. She holds a BA in Anthropology from Kenyon College and an M.A. in History Museum Studies from the Cooperstown Graduate Program, SUNY – Oneonta. During Amy’s 30-year career, she has served in curatorial and collections management positions for five museums. Between 1992 and 1996, she played a key role in creating the new Washington State History Museum (Tacoma, WA) and a 23,000 ft² long-term exhibition on Washington State’s history. Amy is drawn to topics related to equity for women, so she welcomed the opportunity to curate this exhibition.
Changing the Game: The Statistical Analysis of Sports June 10, 2021, via Zoom

A panel of analytics experts from professional football, basketball, and baseball discuss the impact of math and science in sports and what the future holds for our data-driven pastimes.

Moderator: Dr. Jeremy Abramson, Lecturer in Data Science, University of Southern California

Dr. Eric Eager, Vice President of Research and Development, Pro Football Focus

Diana Ma, Data Scientist, Los Angeles Lakers

Dr. Daniel Mack, Assistant General Manager—Research & Development, Kansas City Royals
From Flyover State to Travel Hub: The New KCI Single Terminal Hits the Halfway Mark May 19, 2021, via Zoom

The program:

As Kansas City gains more attention as a travel and relocation destination, the new single terminal design at KCI could transform the metro from a “Flyover State” to a bustling travel hub. The new terminal project has recently reached a milestone of 50% completion and is on track to finish on time and on budget. Join us for a project update with Jade Liska, Deputy Director of the Kansas City Aviation Department’s Planning and Engineering Division. He will discuss the progress that has been made and what kind of experience travelers can expect from the new terminal design.

The speaker:

Jade Liska, Deputy Director of Planning and Engineering for the Kansas City Aviation Department, where, as the primary-project-manager, he leads the teams that are responsible for building Kansas City’s $1.5 billion new single terminal and parking infrastructure for Kansas City International Airport. He has worked for the City for nearly 17 years, serving in a variety of management roles. For the past seven years, he collaborated with airlines, civic groups, and design professionals to study future options for the new terminal modernization program. Liska is familiar with all aspects of the airport’s infrastructure and construction projects and has worked extensively with the Aviation Department since 2007. Prior to joining KCMO, Liska worked in Wichita, Kansas, where he was in the private sector working as lead project manager in multi-disciplinary engineering, planning, surveying and construction firms for more than 12 years. Jade is also a licensed Professional Landscape Architect in the states of Kansas and Missouri.
Cancer Moonshot: The Search for a Cure May 6, 2021, via Zoom.

Established in 2016 with strong bipartisan support, the Cancer Moonshot is marshalling resources across the federal government to achieve three goals: accelerate scientific discovery in cancer, foster greater collaboration, and improve the sharing of data.

Five years later, is science on the road to better cancer detection, prevention, and cure? In this program, a panel of expert physicians and researchers will share their experiences and insights into the current state and future of cancer research.

The moderator:

Margot Sanger-Katz is a domestic correspondent at The New York Times, where she covers health care for The Upshot, the Times site about politics, economics, and everyday life. She is also a regular panelist on Kaiser Health News’s What The Health? podcast. She was previously a reporter at National Journal and the Concord Monitor, and an editor at Legal Affairs Magazine and the Yale Alumni Magazine. In 2014, she completed a Knight-Bagehot Fellowship in Economics and Business Journalism at Columbia University.

The panel:

Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee is the author of The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, winner of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize in general nonfiction, and The Laws of Medicine. Dr. Mukherjee’s The Gene: An Intimate History is his latest work—the story of the quest to decipher the master-code of instructions that makes and defines humans, that governs our form, function, and fate, and determines the future of our children. Mukherjee is an assistant professor of medicine at Columbia University and a cancer physician and researcher. A Rhodes scholar, he graduated from Stanford University, University of Oxford, and Harvard Medical School. He has published articles in Nature, The New England Journal of Medicine, The New York Times, and Cell.

Roy Jensen, MD, has been Director of The University of Kansas Cancer Center since 2004. With his guidance, the center achieved National Cancer Institute designation in July 2012 and is currently one of 71 NCI-designated centers across the country. Dr. Jensen graduated from Vanderbilt University School of Medicine in 1984 and remained there to complete a residency in anatomic pathology and a surgical
Making the Grade; The Future of America's Infrastructure April 22, 2021, via Zoom

The 2021 Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, released on March 3rd, found that the nation’s infrastructure earned a cumulative grade of a “C-.” Though it’s a slight improvement over four year ago, 11 of the 17 categories are still in the “D” range. The report also found a $2.59 trillion investment gap over 10 years between what we are currently projected to spend and what we must spend to improve the nation’s infrastructure. In this program, leading engineers and decisionmakers discuss the state of America’s infrastructure, how it can be improved, and what it will take to get there.

Speakers:

(Moderator) Dan McNichol, Bestselling Author and Award-Winning Journalist

Aaron Attebery, Director, Connected Communities, Black & Veatch

Dr. Kenneth Gillingham, Associate Professor of Economics, Yale University

Mary Joyce Ivers, Deputy Public Works Director, Ventura, California; and President, American Public Works Association

Maria Lehman, Director of U.S. Infrastructure, GHD; and Treasurer, American Society of Civil Engineers
Honeybees, Pollen, and the Planet April 21, 2021, via Zoom

Everyone knows that honeybees are an important part of our ecosystem, but in the last few years new research has given us a window into the influence of climate change on bees. Beekeeper Erik Messner explores these climate change issues and also briefly discuss what non-beekeeping folks can do to help honeybees and other local pollinator species.

The speaker:

Erik Messner is a professional engineer on the weekdays, but, on the weekends, he removes his pocket protector and glasses to become the lead-beekeeper for Messner Bee Farm! The Messners have been keeping bees for about 10 years in Kansas City and love sharing the importance of bees and educating the community on bee-friendly practices.
Solar Geoengineering: Innovative Technologies to Offset Climate Change April 8, 2021, via Zoom

Presented in partnership with William Jewell College

Dr. David Keith, Professor of Applied Physics at Harvard University, is in conversation with William Jewell College professors Dr. Will Lindquist and Dr. Rose Reynolds, to explore the possibilities, challenges, risks, and uncertainties of developing technologies to cool the Earth by reflecting solar radiation back to space.
Science Headlines: COVID-19 Vaccine Equity April 6, 2021, via Zoom

As COVID-19 vaccines become available, efforts are underway to ensure delivery of affordable and accessible vaccines across the country and world. This program explores the issues of vaccine equity and the work being done to deliver vaccines to underserved communities and disproportionately affected populations.

Brian S. Hail, FACHE, is Deputy Executive Director of External Operations, Cherokee Nation Health Services, where he leads the pandemic vaccine task force.

Qiana Thomason, President and CEO of Health Forward Foundation, has dedicated her career to the improvement of health and wellness across the Kansas City region, with a special focus on communities with significant health disparities.

Trevor Zimmer is co-director of the COVID-19 Vaccine Equity Project, a joint initiative of the Sabin Institute, Dalberg, and JSI, with support from the Skoll Foundation.
A History of Mental Illness Treatments March 17, 2021, via Zoom

Cole Klawuhn, historic preservationist and archival assistant for St. Joseph Museums, Inc., discusses treatments, such as blood theory, hydrotherapy, lobotomies, all the way up to modern-day psychopharmacologies.

The speaker:

Cole Klawuhn is the historic preservationist and archival assistant for St. Joseph Museums, Inc., where he has worked extensively with the Glore psychiatric collection. The award-winning Glore Psychiatric Museum, located in St. Joseph, Missouri, chronicles the 145-year history of the state hospital and centuries of mental health treatment. The museum is located on the adjoining grounds of the original state hospital and has been recognized as “one of the 50 most unusual museums in the country” with mentions in national publications and on television networks, including The Learning Channel, The Discovery Channel, PBS, and The Science Channel.
Conversing with the Starry Messenger March 25, 2021, via Zoom

Galileo’s Sidereus Nuncius (Venice 1610) is one of the most thrilling and important scientific texts ever written. Galileo’s work describing the moon and his observations of the satellites around Jupiter had a profound impact on astronomy and modern science. The Linda Hall Library copy, arguably one of the most important copies in existence, is still revealing its secrets after 400 years. In this presentation, Nick Wilding, Professor of History at Georgia State University, and Jason W. Dean, Vice President for Special Collections at the Linda Hall Library, explore astronomy, printing and publication, and the tools book historians and librarians use to make new discoveries. Nick and Jason also discuss recent discoveries about the early ownership of Linda Hall’s Sidereus Nuncius that provide insight into the production of the book and into Galileo’s world.

The speakers:

Nick Wilding is Professor of History at Georgia State University, where he teaches early modern history, the history of science, and the history of the book. He is the author of Galileo’s Idol: Gianfrancesco Sagredo and the Politics of Knowledge (Chicago University Press, 2014), Faussaire de Lune: Autopsie d’une Imposture, Galilée et ses contrefacteurs (Bibliothèque Nationale de France, 2015) and a dozen research articles. He has held fellowships at Stanford, Cambridge, Columbia, the American Academy in Rome, the New York Academy of Medicine, the Cullman Center at the New York Public Library, and the Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship of Scholars in Critical Bibliography, Rare Book School. He currently serves on the Council of the Bibliographical Society of America. He received his BA in English from Oxford University, his MA in Renaissance Studies from the University of Warwick, and his PhD in history from the European University Institute, Italy.

Jason W. Dean is Vice President for Special Collections at the Linda Hall Library. Prior to coming to the Library, Jason was Director of Special Collections & Archives at Southwestern University. He has previously held positions at the University of Arkansas and Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. He earned an undergraduate degree in history from Hardin-Simmons University and his MS in Library and Information Science from Syracuse University. Jason has also completed coursework at Rare Book School at the University of Virginia. He is a member of the Grolier Club, and a past Institute of Library and Museum Services-Rare Book School fellow.
The Future of Information featuring Sir Tim Berners-Lee March 4, 2021, via Zoom webinar

Over the past 75 years, the information landscape has seen some of the most dramatic changes in human history with the advent of the internet and world wide web as major disruptive innovations that emerged during the last decades of the 20th century.
Nearly every aspect of our lives–from how we stay informed of current events, to how we learn and work, to how we connect to our social communities–has been touched by these innovations. This forum will look briefly at the history of this highly complex and rapidly evolving technology landscape before projecting ahead to anticipate the next big thing in the future of information.
Moderator:

Rebecca MacKinnon, Founding Director, Ranking Digital Rights

Panelists:

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web

Asta Zelenkauskaite, associate professor of communications, Drexel University

David Danks, L.L. Thurstone Professor of Philosophy & Psychology, Carnegie Mellon University
George Washington Carver: Inventor, Scientist, Educator February 17, 2021, via Zoom webinar

George Washington Carver, one of the best-known scientists of his day, developed hundreds of products from peanuts, sweet potatoes, and mineral clays; promoted home-canning and the addition of natural fertilizers to improve soil fertility; and developed new varieties of cotton and amaryllis. Born a slave on a Missouri farm in 1865, Carver became the first black student and the first black faculty member at what is now Iowa State University, where he led bacterial laboratory work in the Systematic Botany Department. Carver later moved to Tuskegee Institute in Alabama to serve as the school’s director of agriculture, a position he held for 47 years. Join Carver biographer Dr. Gary Kremer for a lively discussion on the history and legacy of one of America’s most important inventors and scientists.

The speaker:

Gary R. Kremer, PhD, is the executive director of the State Historical Society of Missouri and the Western Historical Manuscript Collection and adjunct professor of history at the University of Missouri in Columbia. Dr. Kremer received his Ph.D. from American University in Washington, DC. He is the author and editor of numerous works, including Race and Meaning: The African American Experience in Missouri; Missouri’s Black Heritage, Revised Edition; and George Washington Carver: In His Own Words.
The Art and Science of Distillation January 27, 2021, via Zoom

Distillation is the process by which a liquid is heated to create a vapor and then condensed back into a liquid again. When this ancient practice is applied to fermented products, the result is wonderfully tasteful spirits. Master distiller Benay Shannon, co-founder and owner of Restless Spirits Distillery, provides an insider’s look at the art and science behind creating spirits from experimenting in the lab to taste testing the finished product. Benay also shares how Restless Spirits has aided the community during the COVID-19 pandemic by manufacturing and donating hand sanitizers.

The speaker:

Benay Shannon founded Restless Spirits Distilling Company in 2015 with her husband, Michael. A former high school science teacher at Park Hill South, Benay uses her scientific expertise to create finely crafted whisky, gin, and vodka products, including the award-winning and nationally distributed Builders Gin.
War Fare: Modern Food, Moral Food January 21, 2021, via Zoom

Presented in partnership with the National WWI Museum and Memorial

The lecture:

American eating changed dramatically in the early 20th century. As food production became more industrialized, nutritionists, home economists, and so-called racial scientists were all pointing Americans toward a newly scientific approach to diet. Food faddists were rewriting the most basic rules surrounding eating, while reformers were working to reshape the diets of immigrants and the poor. And by the time of World War I, the country’s first international aid program was bringing moral advice about food conservation into kitchens around the country. In this talk, Helen Zoe Veit argues that the 20th-century food revolution was fueled by a powerful conviction that Americans had a moral obligation to use self-discipline and reason, rather than taste and tradition, in choosing what to eat.

The speaker:

Helen Zoe Veit, associate professor of history at Michigan State University, specializes in the history of food in the United States in the 19th and 20th centuries. She is now writing a book called Picky: A History of American Children’s Food, which traces the relatively recent emergence of picky eating among children in the United States. Her first book, Modern Food, Moral Food: Self-Control, Science, and the Rise of Modern American Eating in the Early Twentieth Century (UNC Press, 2013) explores food and nutrition in the Progressive Era. Modern Food, Moral Food was a finalist for the 2014 James Beard Award in Reference and Scholarship. Professor Veit directs the What America Ate project, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, a digital archive and interactive website on food in the Great Depression. She is also a member of the editorial collective of Gastronomica: The Journal for Food Studies.
A Shot in the Arm: What You Need to Know about the COVID Vaccines January 14, 2021, via Zoom webinar

With two vaccines approved for emergency use in the U.S., the next major hurdle in the fight against the pandemic will be getting people immunized. In the U.S. alone, distributing vaccines to over 300 million people will present an unprecedented logistical challenge. The accelerated pace of vaccines development has also given rise to many questions and unease among the public.

Moderator Alex Knapp, Senior Editor of Healthcare and Science at Forbes, leads a discussion with Dr. Kelly Moore about COVID-19 vaccines, including their safety, effectiveness, and distribution process.

Speakers:

Alex Knapp is a Senior Editor at Forbes, where he manages coverage of healthcare and science topics. He writes about a wide variety of topics related to the intersection of science and business, including healthcare, the commercial space industry, and quantum computing. He also edits the Forbes’ “30 Under 30 Science and Healthcare” lists as well as Forbes’ “Europe 30 Under 30 list for Industry & Manufacturing.

Kelly Moore, MD, MPH, is Deputy Director of Immunization Action Coalition (IAC) and an adjunct associate professor in the Department of Health Policy at Vanderbilt University. The IAC works to increase immunization rates and facilitates communication about the safety, efficacy, and use of vaccines within the broad immunization community of patients, parents, healthcare organizations, and government health agencies. For more than two decades, the CDC has worked in concert with and provided financial support to IAC for the purpose of educating healthcare professionals about U.S. vaccine recommendations.
Citizen Science and Bird Watching in the City December 16, 2020, via Zoom

City dwellers may think bird watching is a pastime just for their country cousins, but birds are everywhere! Despite being one of the most beloved facets of the natural world, birds are often overlooked in urban environments. Whether you are an experienced birder or a novice, join Dr. Charles Nilon, Professor of Fisheries and Wildlife at the University of Missouri, to learn how you can explore the world of birds no matter where you live. You will also discover how bird watching provides great opportunities to get involved in citizen science, just in time for the National Audubon Society’s annual Christmas Bird Count—the longest-running citizen science survey in the world!

The speaker:

Charles Nilon, PhD, is the William J. Rucker Professor in Fisheries and Wildlife at the University of Missouri’s School of Natural Resources. He holds a PhD in Ecology and Wildlife from SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry. His research and teaching focus on urban wildlife ecology and conservation, and the human dimensions of wildlife management.
The Science of Sustenance: Experimenting in the Kitchen November 18, 2020, via Zoom webinar

As the holiday season approaches many of us will be looking forward to tasty turkeys and pumpkin pies, but have you ever considered the science behind all those delectable dishes? Cooking and baking incorporate many exciting scientific concepts, and home cooks and pro chefs alike employ scientific-like experimentation to find new and exciting dishes and techniques. Join one of Kansas City’s favorite bakers, Robert Duensing of Best Regards Bakery & Café, to learn about how he uses science and experimentation to deliver his most popular dishes.

The speaker:

Robert Duensing is owner of Best Regards Bakery & Café in Overland Park, KS, along with his wife Cherrie. What started as a gift basket boutique out of their home in the early 90’s quickly grew as Robert discovered his passion and talent for creating recipes. After several years of successful baking with Best Regards, Robert appeared on the Food Network Christmas Cookie Challenge in 2017. With his talent of crafting great tastes, Best Regards Bakery menu now includes everything from biscuits to grilled cheese, and of course plenty of cookies.
Economics and Engineering: Water Systems that Sustain the Heartland October 28, 2020, via Zoom webinar

Session II of the three-session conference, "Water: Access, Supply, and Sustainability"

Water: Access, Supply, Sustainability is an online, multidisciplinary conference exploring complex water related topics and connecting water management issues of vital importance to Kansas City, the Heartland, and, indeed, the world. Through online resources and live sessions, participants will examine how diverse communities are working to provide access to clean water for their members, explore the engineering and economics behind management of our water ways, and learn innovative yet practical approaches for sustaining our fresh water resources.

Moderated by world-renowned oceanographer, Dr. David Gallo, a diverse lineup of speakers including community leaders, scientists, engineers, policymakers, and entrepreneurs will discover connections and provide an interdisciplinary lens through which the future of water can be examined.

Session II participants:

Terry Leeds, Director of KC Water, is a civil engineer with 28 years of experience in the water industry. Terry started his engineering career with Black & Veatch where he worked on water/wastewater projects as a design engineer and project engineer. He has held several different positions in the City, having worked in the Facilities Engineering Division, the Stormwater Engineering Division, and the Capital Improvements Management Office, and as Manager of Kansas City’s Overflow Control Program. Mr. Leeds earned a BS in civil engineering at the University of Missouri-Rolla.

Jon Stephens is President and CEO of Port KC, an organization that exists to grow the economy of Kansas City through advancing transportation, logistics, and revitalization. Jon is an economic development professional who has spent his career focused on utilizing thoughtful development concepts to improve the community. Previous leadership roles include serving as president of one of the largest urban redevelopment districts in America, director of economic development for Kansas City, Kansas, and CEO of VisitKC. As an entrepreneur, he has guided boards and corporations to innovative success.

Amahia Mallea, Associate Professor of History at Drake University, is an environmental historian interested in the relationship between American societies and their lands and resources. She is the author of, A River in the City of Fountains: An Environmental History of Kansas City and the Missouri River (University of Kansas Press, 2018), which examines the city’s decades-long management of the river for often conflicting purposes of commerce (flood control and navigation) and public health (drinking water and sewage). She earned her doctorate in 2006 from the University of Missouri.

Chance Bitner is currently serving as the lead engineer for over $500M of improvements to levees in the Kansas City metropolitan area being conducted by the Kansas City District of the US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) in partnership with the Kaw Valley Drainage District, Unified Government of Wyandotte County and Kansas City, Kansas, and the City of Kansas City, Missouri. Over the last 17 years, he has held positions with USACE including Chief of the Hydrology and Hydraulics Section, Missouri River Recovery Implementation Program Manager, and as a Hydraulic Engineer. Mr. Bitner earned a BS and MS in Civil Engineering at Colorado State University.
Equity and Access: Diverse Communities and the Challenges of Infrastructure October 27, 2020

Session I of the conference, "Water: Access, Supply, and Sustainability"

Water: Access, Supply, Sustainability is an online, multidisciplinary conference exploring complex water related topics and connecting water management issues of vital importance to Kansas City, the Heartland, and, indeed, the world. Through online resources and live sessions, participants will examine how diverse communities are working to provide access to clean water for their members, explore the engineering and economics behind management of our water ways, and learn innovative yet practical approaches for sustaining our fresh water resources.

Moderated by world-renowned oceanographer, Dr. David Gallo, a diverse lineup of speakers including community leaders, scientists, engineers, policymakers, and entrepreneurs will discover connections and provide an interdisciplinary lens through which the future of water can be examined.

Participants:

Conference moderator: Dr. David Gallo, Senior Advisor for Strategic Initiatives and Programs at RMS Titanic Inc. Previously, he was Senior Advisor for Strategic Initiatives at the Center for Climate and Life of the Earth Institute at Columbia University. Prior to that he was Director of Special Projects for 28 years at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, a preeminent, globally recognized scientific laboratory.

Siddhartha “Sid” Roy served as a student leader and communications director of Virginia Tech’s 45-member Flint water research team, leading part of a scientific and humanitarian battle alongside Flint residents to uncover environmental injustice and a public health crisis. Dr. Roy earned his bachelor’s of technology in chemical engineering from Nirma University in India and master’s and doctoral degrees in environmental engineering and civil engineering respectively from Virginia Tech.

Gary White is co-founder and CEO of Water.org and WaterEquity, where he leads the organizations to create and execute market-driven solutions to the global water crisis. Gary’s entrepreneurial vision drives innovations in the way water and sanitation projects are delivered and financed, innovations that now serve as a model in the water and sanitation sector.

Emma Robbins is director of the Navajo Water Project, which provides infrastructure for Navajo families to access running water in New Mexico, Utah and Arizona. According to the project, Native American households face barriers to accessing running water, including about 30 percent of families on the Navajo reservation that do not have running water. Robbins joined the project after growing up in an area with a high concentration of water poverty. She is a Diné artist and uses her work to raise awareness about the need for clean water across all Native American nations. She is also an Aspen Institute Health Communities Fellow. 

Tracy Streeter joined Burns & McDonnell in 2018 in a new role where he provides consulting and project development support for water resource agencies and municipalities with public water utilities. Streeter served 33 years in positions related to Kansas water resource management, including 14 years as director of the Kansas Water Office (KWO), where he was responsible for water resource management and planning, drought declarations, and other state-wide management issues. During his tenure at KWO, Streeter served as chairman of the Governor’s Drought Response Team, and in 2013 was appointed to co-lead the development of a 50-Year Water Vision for Kansas.
Astronomy: What’s Up in the Sky for 2021 October 21, 2020, via Zoom webinar

The year 2021 promises some great stargazing opportunities, with chances to see comets, dying stars, galaxies, and, of course the planets! Dan Johnson, long-time amateur astronomer, member of the Astronomical Society of Kansas City, and volunteer instructor at the Powell Observatory, explains what you can expect to see in the night sky with a small telescope in the coming year.

The speaker:

Dan Johnson is a long-time amateur astronomer. He grew up in Central Kansas at the edge of suburbia where you could look up and see the Milky Way. He received his first telescope in the fifth grade, and that’s where his love of astronomy began. Dan moved to Kansas City after graduating from Kansas State University and joined one of the largest astronomy societies in the country, the Astronomical Society of Kansas City (ASKC), where he volunteered at Kansas City’s Powell Observatory in the early 1990s. Today, he owns one of the largest private telescopes in Kansas City and is currently a volunteer instructor at Powell Observatory.
Our Freshwater Future How to Build Water Security in a Changing World October 29, 2020, via Zoom webinar

Session III Keynote Address of the three-session conference, "Water: Access, Supply, and Sustainability"

Water: Access, Supply, Sustainability is an online, multidisciplinary conference exploring complex water related topics and connecting water management issues of vital importance to Kansas City, the Heartland, and, indeed, the world. Through online resources and live sessions, participants will examine how diverse communities are working to provide access to clean water for their members, explore the engineering and economics behind management of our water ways, and learn innovative yet practical approaches for sustaining our fresh water resources.

Moderated by world-renowned oceanographer, Dr. David Gallo, a diverse lineup of speakers including community leaders, scientists, engineers, policymakers, and entrepreneurs will discover connections and provide an interdisciplinary lens through which the future of water can be examined.

The speaker:

A leading authority and prolific author on international water issues, Sandra Postel has been hailed for her “inspiring, innovative and practical approach” to promoting the preservation and sustainable use of freshwater. From 2009-2015 she served as Freshwater Fellow of the National Geographic Society. She is also co-creator of Change the Course, a national water stewardship initiative awarded the 2017 US Water Prize for restoring billions of gallons of water to depleted rivers and wetlands. She is the author of Replenish: The Virtuous Cycle of Water and Prosperity; Pillar of Sand: Can the Irrigation Miracle Last?; and Last Oasis: Facing Water Scarcity, which appears in eight languages and was the basis for a PBS documentary. She has served as a commentator on CNN’s Futurewatch, and has also appeared on CBS’s Sunday Morning, ABC’s Nightline, NPR’s Science Friday, BBC’s Planet Earth, Leonardo DiCaprio’s documentary, The 11th Hour, and National Geographic Channel’s Breakthrough series.
Communicating with Robots: Towards Complex Language in Partially Observed Environments October 15, 2020, via Zoom webinar

Robots can act as a force multiplier for people, whether a robot assisting an astronaut with a repair on the International Space station, a UAV taking flight over our cities, or an autonomous vehicle driving through our streets. Existing approaches use action-based representations that do not capture the goal-based meaning of a language expression and do not generalize to partially observed environments.

The aim of Professor Stefanie Tellex's research program is to create autonomous robots that can understand complex goal-based commands and execute those commands in partially observed, dynamic environments. I will describe demonstrations of object-search in a POMDP setting with information about object locations provided by language, and mapping between English and Linear Temporal Logic, enabling a robot to understand complex natural language commands in city-scale environments.

These advances represent steps towards robots that interpret complex natural language commands in partially observed environments using a decision theoretic framework.

Speaker Bio:

Stefanie Tellex is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Brown University. Her group, the Humans to Robots Lab, creates robots that seamlessly collaborate with people to meet their needs using language, gesture, and probabilistic inference, aiming to empower every person with a collaborative robot. She completed her Ph.D. at the MIT Media Lab in 2010, where she developed models for the meanings of spatial prepositions and motion verbs. Her postdoctoral work at MIT CSAIL focused on creating robots that understand natural language. Her work has been featured in the press on National Public Radio, BBC, MIT Technology Review, Wired and Wired UK, as well as the New Yorker. She was named one of Wired UK’s Women Who Changed Science In 2015 and listed as one of MIT Technology Review’s Ten Breakthrough Technologies in 2016.
The Seasonal Curse of Artificial Intelligence October 1, 2020, via Zoom webinar

Forbes estimates that artificial intelligence (AI) will become a 150 trillion-dollar industry by 2025. This is an impressive feat for any technology, yet alone an eighty-year-old research field. In this talk I will discuss two challenges that threaten to hold AI back from reaching the next level. First, as AI is integrated into critical real-world applications like smart cars, healthcare, agriculture, and security & defense, how can we trust it? Specifically, I will discuss the emerging and important field of explainable AI (XAI). Second, are we overly optimistic about state-of-the-art AI? Current generation machine learning and pattern recognition algorithms have made impressive leaps in performance across application domains by exploiting correlations in Big Data. As we identify weaknesses and limitations in current AI, will we once again fall victim to the seasonal curse of AI?

The speaker:

Dr. Derek Anderson is an associate professor in electrical engineering and computer science at the University of Missouri. Dr. Anderson directs the Mizzou information and data fusion laboratory (MINDFUL) and he is a co-leader of the MUIDSI data-driven agriculture and natural resources (DDAgNR) initiative. Professor Anderson’s research is information fusion in computational intelligence for signal/image processing, computer vision, and geospatial applications. Anderson has focused on artificial intelligence, machine learning, computational intelligence, and pattern recognition for approximately twenty years. He has published over a 150 works (journals, conference proceedings, and book chapters), he was the program co-chair of FUZZ-IEEE 2019, he is an associate editor for the IEEE Transactions on Fuzzy Systems (an IEEE AI journal), vice chair of the IEEE CIS fuzzy systems technical committee (FSTC), and an Area Editor for the International Journal of Uncertainty, Fuzziness and Knowledge-Based Systems. He received a PhD in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Missouri in 2010. He was previously the Robert D. Guyton Chair in electrical and computer engineering at Mississippi State University.
How Do I Become a Computer Scientist? September 25, 2020, via Zoom webinar

Presented by the Linda Hall Library in partnership with the UMKC School of Computing and Engineering

Are you a student thinking about a career as a computer scientist? Do you want to see a cutting edge augmented and virtual reality lab? If so, join us for an opportunity to get academic and career advice from Dayveon Ross, co-founder and President of ShotTracker and Sherry Lumpkins , Principal Consultant at Blue Symphony LLC. You’ll also have a chance to learn about UMKC’s School of Computing and Engineering programs and see their state-of-the-art AR/VR lab.
Why Prairie Matters: New Relevancies of a Vanishing Landscape September 16, 2020, via Zoom webinar

At the time of statehood, at least 15 million acres of tallgrass prairie blanketed Missouri—about a third of the state. Today, there are fewer than 60,000 scattered prairie acres remaining in the state. This presentation focuses on the history, beauty, and conservation of Missouri’s prairies, and on facets of a new “tallgrass prairie economy,” which uses an ancient ecosystem as a model for new, sustainable landscapes that benefit people in many ways.

The speaker:

As executive director for the Missouri Prairie Foundation, Carol Davit oversees fundraising, strategic planning, communications, advocacy, the Grow Native! program, and administration, and has also edited the Missouri Prairie Journal since 1996. Davit has worked for more than 20 years in the conservation and environmental fields in communications, development, administration, and leadership capacities. She has worked for private, nonprofit conservation groups and in municipal and state government. She is the chair of the Conservation Federation of Missouri’s Grasslands Committee and of the MPF’s/Grow Native! Missouri Invasive Plant Task Force. Davit has bachelor’s and master’s degrees in interdisciplinary studies.
Art and Science: Two Sides of the Same Coin September 12, 2020, via Zoom webinar

Art and science are two sides of the same coin, each seeking to understand and describe the world around us; by bringing these two fields together we all have the opportunity see and experience the world around us in new and richer ways. This program will explore how art and science overlap and complement one another, highlighting how artists experiment much like scientists do, how scientists employ their creativity much like artists do, and how bringing these two disciplines together advances efforts in both.

The speaker:

Mark M. Miller, owner of Miller Medical Illustration, creates illustrations for a diverse group of national and international clients, such as the Stowers Institute for Medical Research, depicting a wide range of medical, biological, scientific, and veterinary subjects. Born and raised in Kansas City, Missouri, an early interest in both art and medicine led him to combine a BFA in Fine Art and pre-medicine at the University of Missouri, Columbia, where he graduated with honors, and an MA in Medical and Biological Illustration from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine Department of Art as Applied to Medicine.
Show Me Frank Lloyd Wright August 19, 2020, via Zoom webinar

Many consider Frank Lloyd Wright to be America’s greatest architect. His “organic architecture” helped popularize open floor plans, light-filled rooms, and connections to nature, all still in demand today. In Missouri, Wright worked with forward-thinking families to design four unique houses; he also butted heads with building authorities while constructing a controversial church. Who were these Missourians on the cutting edge of architectural design, and why do Wright’s creations remain relevant nearly sixty years after his death? This talk will help you see Missouri’s buildings with new eyes.

The speaker:

Kelly Johnston is a Missouri native, raised on a farm near Warrensburg. He earned degrees from the University of Central Missouri and Indiana University. He has been a software developer and a cartographer, and he taught mapping at the University of Virginia. He grew up immersed in architecture and building as he worked alongside his father, a master carpenter who built their family home. Recently retired from Virginia, Johnston and his wife moved back to Missouri, where they restored a historic home, now listed on the National Register. He leads tours of the Frank Lloyd Wright house at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art and has visited 50 Frank Lloyd Wright buildings around the world.
Science Headlines: COVID-19 Vaccines—Progress Toward Prevention September 1, 2020, via webinar

With well over 22 million cases and 700,000 deaths globally, the world desperately awaits a vaccine that can finally put an end to the COVID-19 pandemic. One of the most promising vaccines, developed by researchers at Oxford University and funded by AstraZeneca, moved into Phase 3 clinical trials in August at 100 sites nationwide, including in Kansas City at the University of Kansas Medical Center and Children’s Mercy Hospital.

The speaker:

Dr. Barbara Pahud is an infectious disease specialist and Associate Professor of Pediatrics at University of Missouri- Kansas City and Children’s Mercy Hospital, where she also serves as Associate Director of the NIH’s Vaccine Treatment and Evaluation Unit. Dr. Pahud is co-primary investigator alongside Dr. Mario Castro of the Phase 3 clinical trials of the COVID-19 vaccine AZD1222. She received her medical degree from La Salle University in Mexico City, Mexico and holds a Master of Public Health degree from Columbia University in New York. She completed her residency in pediatrics at Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn, New York and has completed fellowships at University of California, San Francisco and the Centers for Disease Control in collaboration with Stanford University Medical Center.
How Do I Become an Inventor and Entrepreneur? August 28, 2020, via Zoom webinar

Are you a student thinking about a career as an inventor and entrepreneur? Do you want to know what the real Shark Tank is like? Inventor Joe Pippins, creator of the Fishing Caddy, discusses the invention process and answers students' question about how to become a successful inventor.

The speaker:

As an entrepreneur and inventor, Joe Pippins has experienced many obstacles including being homeless and losing a parent, mentor, and brother. Despite this, Joe has navigated and successfully completed several big box retail partnerships and dedicated his career to helping other entrepreneurs bring their products to market with an honest and productive process. With experience in nearly all facets of product launch, from obtaining a USPTO approved patent, to packaging design, and coordinating domestic and international manufacturing, he now serves as a consultant and speaker guiding other start up companies to success. Joe’s work has been featured in over 500 publications, including the Kansas Business Journal, Wall Street Select, Miami Herald, Black Enterprise Magazine, Small Business Magazine, and many more.
Making Space: Pioneering Women in Aerospace August 25, 2020, via Zoom webinar

The year 2020 marks the 100th anniversary of the 19th amendment’s ratification. To acknowledge this important anniversary, physicist Emily Martin from the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum and Allison Devers, a writer and rare book dealer specializing in women authors, explore the history of women in aviation and also discuss their own groundbreaking careers.

The speakers:

Dr. Emily Martin is a research physical scientist in the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum’s Center for Earth and Planetary Studies. Emily’s research interests are in planetary surface processes and tectonic deformation across our solar system, especially the icy bodies of the outer solar system. Developing a better understanding of how planetary surfaces deformed tells us about their histories and what they have experienced. Of particular interest is the evolution of subsurface oceans on Saturn’s moon Enceladus and other icy satellites. Many of these moons had or have liquid water oceans under their brittle water-ice lithospheres making them prime targets for understanding the habitable potential of the outer solar system. Much of Emily’s work relies on images taken by the Voyager, Galileo, Cassini, and Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecrafts. Emily received her BA in physics from Wheaton College in 2006, where she first began exploring the icy satellites. She subsequently obtained her MS from Northwestern University in Earth and planetary science in 2009, and her PhD in geological sciences from the University of Idaho in 2014.

A. N. Devers is a writer, arts journalist and critic, and rare book dealer based in London (specializing in women authors, she has worked with LHL frequently). Her first book, Train, is forthcoming from Bloomsbury. The International Contributing Editor of A Public Space, she has written for The New Yorker, New Republic, Lapham’s Quarterly, Lenny, Los Angeles Times, Longreads, The Paris Review, Prospect, Salon, Slate, Fine Books, and The Washington Post, among other publications.
Seeing DNA with X-ray Vision August 8, 2020, via Zoom webinar

Dr. Amy Whitaker, Postdoctoral Research Scholar at the University of Kansas Medical Center guides participants through a broad overview of DNA, including what exactly it is, how it was discovered, what it looks like in 3D, how it manages to contain all of the genetic information that makes us into unique individuals, and how the code written by DNA is translated to physical characteristics in the human body. She then explores how DNA can become damaged, disrupting the genetic code and potentially leading to devastating diseases like cancer. She also discusses specialized repair systems that scour the DNA for damage in an effort to repair it before it can cause disease, highlighting her current scientific research at The University of Kansas Medical Center.

The speaker:

Dr. Amy Whitaker received her Bachelor of Science in chemistry from the University of St. Thomas in her hometown of Houston, Texas. While completing her undergraduate studies, she worked in a clinical position at the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, where she first became exposed to cancer research. This experience motivated her to attend graduate school at Texas A&M University, where she obtained her Ph.D. in Biochemistry and Biophysics. After graduating in 2015, Amy moved to Kansas City to work as a postdoctoral fellow in the Laboratory of Genome Maintenance and Structural Biology under Associate Professor Dr. Bret Freudenthal.
Science Headlines: Return to Play—Sports in the Time of Coronavirus August 4, 2020, via Zoom webinar

Epidemiologist Dr. Zach Binney and infectious disease doctor Gretchen Snoeyenbos Newman, MD, explore the science issues surrounding return to play of sports during the COVID-19 pandemic. Whether you are an athlete, parent, coach, or simply a fan, this is a must-watch program for anyone concerned (and excited) about the return of live sports.

The panelists:

Zach Binney, PhD, is an epidemiologist and Assistant Professor of Quantitative Theory and Methods at Oxford College of Emory University in Atlanta. He got his MPH and PhD in epidemiology at Emory, as well. He worked in palliative and end of life care for several years before shifting his focus to sports injuries and athlete health during his doctorate, where he wrote his dissertation on NFL injuries.

Dr. Binney’s research sits at the intersection of sports, statistics, and public health. He also consults for sports groups (including NFL, MLB, and NBA teams), pharmaceutical companies, and media organizations.

Gretchen Snoeyenbos Newman, MD, is an infectious disease doctor and Assistant Professor of Medicine at Wayne State University in Detroit.  She went to medical school and completed her residency in Internal Medicine at Emory University in Atlanta. She did her fellowship in Infectious Disease at University of Washington in Seattle where her research focused on assessment of online curricula and teaching.

Since the start of the pandemic, she has focused on online education of clinicians and the community addressing COVID-19.  Dr. Snoeyenbos Newman is a founder and editor of covid-101.org, a community-focused website providing quick, simple, doctor-reviewed answers to common COVID questions. She was the Associate Editor of COVID Treatment (https://covid.idea.medicine.uw.edu/), a website focused on providing up-to-date information and teaching slide decks on the most promising COVID treatments. 
Science Interactive: Past Plagues in the Time of Coronavirus: The Ottoman Experience This online program was presented live on June 15, 2020 for Linda Hall Library President's Circle members.

We are currently experiencing one of the most disruptive pandemics in modern history. The COVID-19 pandemic that broke out late last year and quickly spread across the globe has resulted in more than six million confirmed cases to date and nearly four hundred thousand deaths. Where we stand now, how many it will infect or kill worldwide, how long it will continue, and when—if ever—life will go back to normal are still uncertain. What we know for sure is that this is a pivotal moment and that we are experiencing a historic event that will transform our societies both profoundly and irreversibly. As we wade into this new age of pandemics, it is critical to rethink how we write the history of pandemics. With a conviction that the past helps us to understand the present and the present should help us to rethink the past, I turn to the legacy of past plagues. In this presentation, I will take stock of the lasting legacies of past plagues because they continue to shape the way we think about new pandemics. With a focus on the Ottoman experience of plague, I will address persistent problems, such as European exceptionalism, triumphalism, and epidemiological orientalism that are not only ubiquitous in plague studies, but also staples of public opinion about pandemics, past and present.

Speaker bio:

Nükhet Varlık is Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University–Newark and the University of South Carolina. She is a historian of the Ottoman Empire interested in disease, medicine, and public health. She is the author of Plague and Empire in the Early Modern Mediterranean World: The Ottoman Experience, 1347–1600 (2015) and editor of Plague and Contagion in the Islamic Mediterranean (2017). Her new book project, “Empire, Ecology, and Plague: Rethinking the Second Pandemic (ca.1340s-ca.1940s),” examines the six-hundred-year Ottoman plague experience in a global ecological context. In conjunction with this research, she is involved in developing the Black Death Digital Archive and contributing to multidisciplinary research projects that incorporate perspectives from palaeogenetics (ancient DNA research in particular), bioarchaeology, disease ecology, and climate science into historical inquiry. She is the Editor of the Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association (JOTSA)
Modeling the Sources and the Topics of Pliny’s Natural History July 30, 2020, via Zoom webinar

Pliny’s Natural History, published in Venice in 1472, is the oldest scientific book in Library’s collection. The book is a large-scale encyclopedia containing more than 1.1 million words from the first century CE that provides a snapshot of scientific knowledge in the Roman Empire with sections devoted to topics such as math, geography, geology, zoology, botany, anthropology, and an important overview of the history of Greek art.

For this presentation, Dr. Jeff Rydberg-Cox discusses the nature of Pliny’s work, how other scholars and editors have tried to make this massive work more manageable, and then talks about the ways that network analysis and other quantitative approaches can help us understand the sources that Pliny used when writing his work.

The speaker:

Jeff Rydberg-Cox, the Library’s first-ever Scholar-in-Residence, is a Curators’ Distinguished Professor in the Department of English, director of the Classical and Ancient Studies program, director of the First Semester Experience program, and an Affiliated Faculty member in the Department of Computer Science at UMKC. He received his BA from Colorado College in Classics, History, and Politics. He holds an MA and PhD from the Committee on the Ancient Mediterranean World at the University of Chicago. Prior to joining UMKC, he served as Assistant Editor for Language and Lexicography at The Perseus Project; based at Tufts University. He has received grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Science Foundation, the European Commission, and the National Library of Medicine. His research and publications focus on digital humanities and the computation analysis of ancient Greek texts. Professor Rydberg-Cox regularly teaches courses on ancient literature, digital humanities, and representations of the ancient world in film.
How Do I Become a Forensic Scientist? June 24, 2020, via Zoom webinar

Are you a high school or college student thinking about a career as a crime scene investigator or forensic scientist? Do you want to know what the real CSI is like? Forensic scientist Lindsey Schissel offers academic and career advice and answers students' questions about coursework, internships, college programs, and more.

The speaker:

Lindsey Schissel is a Forensic Technician in the Biology/DNA section of the Johnson County Sheriff’s Office Crime Lab. In this role she examines evidence, performs DNA testing, and testifies in court when necessary. Her favorite thing about forensics is that it is all about using science to help find the truth. She is a May 2019 graduate of Drake University with a BS in biochemistry, cell and molecular biology and a BA in chemistry. In her free time, Lindsey enjoys baking and watching Nebraska sports.
A Chance Encounter: The Pechell Family and Their Interest in the Stars
Science Matters Lunch & Learn: Behind the Scenes at the Kansas City Zoo July 15, 2020, via Zoom webinar

Kansas City Zoo CEO Randy Wisthoff provides a behind the scenes look at the role of zoos in scientific research and conservation efforts, as well as their response to the Coronavirus Pandemic.

Randy Wisthoff has served as Executive Director/CEO of the Kansas City Zoo since 2003. Before taking this position, he served at the Henry Doorly Zoo in Omaha, Nebraska for 26 years. He’s worked as an animal keeper with elephants, gorillas, and orangutans before moving into zoo management. Under Randy’s leadership, the Kansas City Zoo celebrated a milestone achievement of welcoming more than one million visitors through its gates in 2016. In 2019 Randy was recognized as Nonprofit Professional of the Year by Nonprofit Connect. He is a Professional Fellow with the Association of Zoos and Aquariums, Conservation Ambassador for the Missouri Department of Conservation, and board member with the Zoo Conservation Outreach Group.
Replication, Education, and Open Science July 11, 2020, via Zoom webinar

Dr. Jordan Wagge discusses the open science framework and how it is driving better science, particularly in the field of psychology, which has been particularly impacted by the replication crisis. She also explores the shift toward larger distributed lab networks and how students and educators can get involved in the advancement of science.

The speaker:

Dr. Jordan Wagge is an Associate Professor of Psychology at Avila University. She holds a PhD in Experimental Psychology from Miami University and teaches courses in cognition, research methods, and cultural psychology at both the undergraduate and graduate level. She is Executive Director of the Collaborative Replications and Education Project, serves on the Executive Committee for the Research Advisory Committee for Psi Chi (the national honor society in psychology), and is an ambassador for the Center for Open Science (osf.io). She is the head of Avila’s Cognition Lab.
Science Headlines: The Future of Commercial Spaceflight July 7, 2020, via Zoom webinar

Phil McAlister from NASA Headquarters provides an insider’s look at the partnerships between the space agency and private companies and what it means for future space missions.

The speaker:

Phil McAlister is Director of the Commercial Spaceflight Division at NASA Headquarters where he oversees NASA’s Commercial Crew Program. This program is re-establishing U.S. human access to space through a new and innovative partnership whereby the private sector is responsible for the development of the human space transportation systems and NASA is a buyer of crew transportation services to the International Space Station.

Prior to this assignment, Mr. McAlister oversaw the successful Commercial Cargo Program, which facilitated the development of the SpaceX Dragon and Orbital Sciences Antares cargo transportation systems. He also served as the Executive Director for the “Review of U.S. Human Spaceflight Plans Committee” (also known as the Augustine Committee). In 2010, he earned NASA’s Exceptional Service Medal.

Prior to NASA, he was a Director at Futron Corporation where he managed a division that performed aerospace business analysis and technology assessments. Before joining Futron, he served as a Senior Manager during a ten-year career at TRW Corporation. Phil has a BS in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Maryland, an MS in Systems Engineering from George Mason University, and an MBA degree from Averett University.
How Do I Become a Meteorologist? June 26, 2020, via Zoom webinar.

Are you a junior high or high school student fascinated by weather and curious to know what it takes to become a meteorologist? FOX4 Kansas City meteorologist Alex Countee discusses his career path and answers students' questions about coursework, internships, college programs, and more.
Science Matters Brown Bag Lunch and Learn: Tools for Thinking About Risk During the Pandemic This program was presented live via Zoom on June 17, 2020 12:00-1:00 CDT.

About the Science Matters Brown Bag Series:
Science Matters Brown Bags are monthly programs co-sponsored by the Linda Hall Library and the Kansas City Public Library. They will focus on science-related topics that impact Kansas Citians.

The program:
Using one of the universe’s most complex systems- the human brain- each of us makes tens of thousands of decisions every day. Each choice involves fascinating and complex cognitive processes such as attention, perception, and memory that occur at lightning speed and often without our even noticing. During a time of heightened risk and sometimes overwhelming information, such as the current pandemic, that decision making process is pushed to extremes. Dr. Tim Pleskac, Professor of Psychology at the University of Kansas, will present what we know about the psychology of decision making and what that can tell us about how people think about and perceive risk in the current pandemic.

The speaker:
Tim Pleskac is a Professor of Psychology where he directs the KU Behavioral Science Laboratory. He studies how people make judgments and decisions; how these processes shape behavior at the individual, group, and organizational level; and how we can help people make better judgments and decisions. He investigates these questions with computational modeling and methods from the behavioral and neurosciences. His work is well recognized, winning the Young Investigator Award from the Society for Judgment and Decision Making, the Scientific Recognition Award from the European Association for Decision Making, and the National Science Foundation’s CAREER award. He is also the author of Taming Uncertainty, published by MIT Press in 2019.

When he is not at his desk, you can find him running, biking, rowing, or out in the woods fishing or hunting. In a parallel world, he owns a bike shop somewhere in the Midwestern U.S.
Second Saturday Conversation: Reintegrating Animals on the Farm This online program was presented live on June 13, 2020.

Can science help us learn how to increase food production while also caring for the planet with sustainable agricultural practices? The answer is yes! Integrated crop-livestock systems not only increase food production, but also provide dramatic benefits for the soil and environment. Research has provided insights into a number of techniques through which farmers and growers can reduce environmental risks, increase production, and realize economic benefits as well. Farmer Dan, site manager at the Westport Commons Farm at Cultivate KC will explore this exciting frontier and help viewers understand their role as consumers in supporting sustainable agriculture.

Speaker Bio:

Dan Krull is Farm Manager at Westport Commons Farm and Volunteer Coordinator for Cultivate KC. He is a father as well as a herpetologist and environmental consultant. He installs native plant landscapes and is an on-camera talent working on both commercial and documentary projects. He has studied self-sufficient agricultural systems his whole life, with a particular passion for soils and ecosystem-based farming. He serves on the board of the Manheim Park Garden Conservancy and is their planning and operations co-chair. An animal husbandry expert, Dan has bred snakes in captivity for over 20 years. He loves to fish, hunt, hike, and camp and is a fairly good singer.
Rendering the Invisible Visible: Student Success in Exclusive Excellence STEM Environments This online program was presented June 8, 2020 at 7:00PM CDT in partnership with Sigma Xi.

Despite efforts to diversify the academic pipeline, persistence of underrepresented and minoritized African American, Latinx, and Native American/Pacific Islander students in STEM undergraduate & PhD programs continues to be a challenge. The often-discordant cultures and practices of academic institutions, particularly historically white colleges and universities (HWCU), negatively impact opportunities for these high-achieving STEM students to thrive. Experiences of negative biases, micro-aggressions, or benign indifference can compromise student success in ways that replicate inequities found in society. For decades, countless programs and initiatives have focused on addressing student deficits with marginal impact.

This talk will refocus our attention on the pivotal and often invisible roles that academic institutions, STEM disciplines, and faculty-communities play in contributing to inequitable student outcomes. Our discussion will render the invisible visible by examining institutional, STEM-discipline, and faculty-community biases inherent in academic and STEM cultures, practices, and policies. The talk will conclude with thoughts on how faculty and departments may ensure equitable and impactful academic experiences for high-achieving yet marginalized students.

The Speaker:

Dr. Robbin Chapman is Associate Dean of Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging at the Harvard Kennedy School, and Adjunct Associate Professor of Education at the Graduate School of Education, University of Pennsylvania. She previously served as Associate Provost and Academic Director of Diversity and Inclusion, and Lecturer in Education at Wellesley College, and Assistant Associate Provost for Faculty Equity at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Dr. Chapman earned her SM and PhD degrees in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where she conducted research at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and the MIT Media Laboratory. She earned her BS in computer science at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York. Her research interests include design and use of computational tools for learning in public spaces, and frameworks and technologies for supporting scholar activism.

Dr. Chapman is serving a two-year term (2018-2020) as Sigma Xi Distinguished Lecturer, appointed by the Sigma Xi International Honor Society of Science and Engineering.
Different Objectives: Archival collections at the Royal Astronomical Society that led to printed works at the Linda Hall Library Online program presented June 5, 2020 by Linda Hall Library and the Royal Astronomical Society.

Join the Linda Hall Library and the Royal Astronomical Society for a series exploring connections between our respective collections. Hosted as a four part conversation between the Society’s Librarian, Sian Prosser, and the Library’s Vice President for Special Collections, Jason W. Dean, this series will introduce the two organizations to attendees, highlight astronomical notable items in our collections, discuss the connection of archival material to published material, and discuss in depth the Pechell family and the material both institutions hold regarding that family.

In this session, Sian and Jason will talk about the relationships between manuscript observations and their eventual printed publications. Specifically, they will focus on the connections between the archival collections of the Herschel family at the Society and their printed works at the Library.

Speakers Bios:
Sian Prosser has been Librarian and Archivist at the Royal Astronomical Society since 2014, having previously worked at the Brotherton Library, University of Leeds, and at University of Warwick library. After studying for a languages degree at the University of Glasgow and an MA in Medieval Studies at the University of Leeds, Sian worked in logistics and export before joining the French department of the University of Sheffield for an Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded PhD on French medieval manuscripts. Sian completed her MA in Library and Information Studies at University College London in 2011, and returned there for the Certificate of Higher Education in Astronomy, graduating in 2019.

Jason W. Dean is Vice President for Special Collections at the Linda Hall Library. Prior to coming to the Library, Jason was Director of Special Collections & Archives at Southwestern University. He has previously held positions at the University of Arkansas and Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. He earned an undergraduate degree in history from Hardin-Simmons University and his MS in Library and Information Science from Syracuse University. Jason has also completed coursework at Rare Book School at the University of Virginia. He is a member of the Grolier Club, and a past Institute of Library and Museum Services-Rare Book School fellow.
Science Headlines: The Race to End the Pandemic—COVID-19 Vaccine Trials in Kansas City With thousands of deaths across the globe and the world in the midst of an economic shutdown, the race is on to create a COVID-19 vaccine, and a medical research lab in Kansas City has become ground zero for coronavirus vaccination testing.

In April, Inovio Pharmaceuticals became the second U.S. company to begin human trials for a COVID-19 vaccine. The trials involve 80 healthy volunteers at two sites, one in Philadelphia and the other in Kansas City at the Center for Pharmaceutical Research, an AMR company. The novel DNA-based vaccine, created by Inovio researchers at their San Diego lab soon after China published the virus’ genetic code, is designed to trigger an immune response to COVID-19. Results of the trials are expected later this summer. If successful, a sufficient supply of vaccine doses is possible by the end of the year for further trials and emergency use.

Join Dr. Laurent Humeau, Chief Scientific Officer at Inovio, and Dr. John Ervin, Medical Director and Principal Investigator at the Center for Pharmaceutical Research, for an insider’s look at the COVID-19 vaccine trials underway in Kansas City that could end the pandemic and save countless lives.

Speaker Bios:
Laurent Humeau, PhD, is Chief Scientific Officer at Inovio Pharmaceuticals, where he oversees the company’s pipeline of innovative concepts from early-stage discovery and development through clinical application and patient monitoring. Dr. Humeau holds a Ph.D., summa cum laude, from Denis Diderot/Paris 7 University and a MS degree from Pierre & Marie Curie/Paris 6 University, Paris, France.

John E. Ervin, MD, founded the Center for Pharmaceutical Research in 1986 and serves as Medical Director and Principal Investigator. During his career, he has conducted over 730 phase I through IV clinical trials. Dr. Ervin earned his undergraduate degree at the University of Notre Dame and received his medical degree from the University of Kansas School of Medicine.
Things that Give You Stars in Your Eyes: Digitized collection highlights Join the Linda Hall Library and the Royal Astronomical Society for a series exploring connections between our respective collections. Hosted as a four part conversation between the Society’s Librarian, Sian Prosser, and the Library’s Vice President for Special Collections, Jason W. Dean, this series will introduce the two organizations to attendees, highlight astronomical notable items in our collections, discuss the connection of archival material to published material, and discuss in depth the Pechell family and the material both institutions hold regarding that family.

In this discussion, Sian and Jason will choose items from each institution that they find impressive and explore connections between their digitized collections. They will also discuss best practices for accessing digital collections.

Sian Prosser has been Librarian and Archivist at the Royal Astronomical Society since 2014, having previously worked at the Brotherton Library, University of Leeds, and at University of Warwick library. After studying for a languages degree at the University of Glasgow and an MA in Medieval Studies at the University of Leeds, Sian worked in logistics and export before joining the French department of the University of Sheffield for an Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded PhD on French medieval manuscripts. Sian completed her MA in Library and Information Studies at University College London in 2011, and returned there for the Certificate of Higher Education in Astronomy, graduating in 2019.

Jason W. Dean is Vice President for Special Collections at the Linda Hall Library. Prior to coming to the Library, Jason was Director of Special Collections & Archives at Southwestern University. He has previously held positions at the University of Arkansas and Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. He earned an undergraduate degree in history from Hardin-Simmons University and his MS in Library and Information Science from Syracuse University. Jason has also completed coursework at Rare Book School at the University of Virginia. He is a member of the Grolier Club, and a past Institute of Library and Museum Services-Rare Book School fellow.
Overlapping Collections Across the Atlantic Join the Linda Hall Library and the Royal Astronomical Society for a series exploring connections between our respective collections. Hosted as a four part conversation between the Society’s Librarian, Sian Prosser, and the Library’s Vice President for Special Collections, Jason W. Dean, this series will introduce the two organizations to attendees, highlight astronomical notable items in our collections, discuss the connection of archival material to published material, and discuss in depth the Pechell family and the material both institutions hold regarding that family.

This session will introduce the two organizations and their histories to our audience. Sian and Jason will discuss the founding and purpose of each institution, their historical collections, and current collecting focuses. They will also highlight how their collections can be used today to inspire exploration in astronomical science for all.

Sian Prosser has been Librarian and Archivist at the Royal Astronomical Society since 2014, having previously worked at the Brotherton Library, University of Leeds, and at University of Warwick library. After studying for a languages degree at the University of Glasgow and an MA in Medieval Studies at the University of Leeds, Sian worked in logistics and export before joining the French department of the University of Sheffield for an Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded PhD on French medieval manuscripts. Sian completed her MA in Library and Information Studies at University College London in 2011, and returned there for the Certificate of Higher Education in Astronomy, graduating in 2019.

Jason W. Dean is Vice President for Special Collections at the Linda Hall Library. Prior to coming to the Library, Jason was Director of Special Collections & Archives at Southwestern University. He has previously held positions at the University of Arkansas and Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. He earned an undergraduate degree in history from Hardin-Simmons University and his MS in Library and Information Science from Syracuse University. Jason has also completed coursework at Rare Book School at the University of Virginia. He is a member of the Grolier Club, and a past Institute of Library and Museum Services-Rare Book School fellow.
The Science of Happiness Just as we are all dreaming about our next vacation, many people believe that happiness is a vacation destination…”One day I will be happy.” Based on the work by Dr. Laurie Santos at Yale University, as well as other leaders in the study of happiness, we will take a brief look at the contagion, rewards & myths of happiness. Join us to begin the journey to happiness.

The Speaker:
Sondra Wallace is a servant, thoughtful and collaborative leader with over 20 years of experience in the Educational Community. She has an unwavering focus to meet social & emotional learning and wellness needs of our youth, educators and community, one human at a time. Building positive, healthy and trusting relationships with youth has always been at the heart of Sondra’s work. She is a certified Sources of Strength trainer and currently the Mental Health Coordinator for Jewish Family Services of Greater Kansas City.

Sondra and her husband, Spencer, have 2 kids: Alex, a freshman at K-State and Aleah, a sophomore at Olathe South HS and 2 dogs.
The Power of Our Fork We’ve known for decades that burning fossil fuels is a significant contributor to climate change, but what about the agriculture sector? Can our food choices also help stop climate change? Come learn what the data says about agriculture’s impact on the planet, and what you can do about it.

The Speaker:
Sarina Farb is a Kansas City-based science teacher and sustainable living advocate. After conducting her own molecular biology research in high school and winning numerous awards for it, including the Linda Hall Library Shipman Award and a spot in the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair, Sarina became hooked on science. She attended Grinnell college where she earned degrees in biochemistry and policy studies. While at Grinnell she also became involved in environmental education and the intersection of science, policy, and ethics. Today Sarina teaches chemistry and AP Environmental Science at St. Teresa’s Academy and writes, speaks, and creates educational YouTube videos in her free time.
Sharks – Emperors of the Deep: The Ocean’s Most Mysterious, Most Misunderstood, and Most Important Guardians From the Jaws blockbuster movie series to Shark Week, we are conditioned to see sharks as terrifying cold-blooded underwater predators. But as William McKeever, founder of Safeguard the Seas, reveals, sharks are evolutionary marvels essential to maintaining a balanced ecosystem. We can learn much from sharks, he argues, and our knowledge about them continues to grow. The first book to reveal in full the hidden lives of sharks, Emperors of the Deep, examines four species—Mako, Tiger, Hammerhead, and Great White—as never before, and includes fascinating details such as:

· Sharks are 50-Million Years older than trees
· Sharks have survived 5 Extinction level events, including the one that killed off the Dinosaurs
· Sharks have electroreception, a sixth sense that lets them pick up on electric fields generated by living things
· Sharks can dive 4,000 Feet below the surface; Sharks account for only 6 human fatalities per year, while humans kill 100 Million Sharks per Year

McKeever goes back through time to probe the shark’s pre-historic secrets and how it has become the World’s most feared and most misunderstood predator, and takes us on a pulse-pounding tour around the world and deep under the water’s surface, from the frigid waters of the Arctic Circle to the coral reefs of the tropical Central Pacific, to see sharks up close in their natural habitat. He also interviews ecologists, conservationists, and world-renowned shark experts, including the founders of Greenpeace’s Rainbow Warrior, the head of the Massachusetts Shark Research Program, and the self-professed “last great shark hunter.”

At once a deep-dive into the misunderstood world of sharks and an urgent call to protect them, Emperors of the Deep celebrates this wild species that hold the key to unlocking the mysteries of the ocean–if we can prevent their extinction from climate change and human hunters.

The speaker:
William McKeever is an author and documentary filmmaker. His book, Emperors of the Deep, is in bookstores and focuses on raising awareness to the plight of sharks and educating the reader on recent scientific discoveries about the importance of them to the marine ecosystem. The book also makes a call for regulatory action to save them. The publisher is Harper Collins. The book has received strong reviews across the country and on Amazon. Conservation groups have also embraced the book and Greenpeace, for example, calls it a “must-read”.

He also is the producer/writer/director of a shark documentary film of the same name. The film exposes the threats that sharks face around the world and explains why society needs to change how it views these animals. Through interviews with scientists around the world and exciting shark video footage, the viewer sees sharks in a new light. This exciting 80-minute length film will be in distribution in 2020.

Due to his writing and film work, he was awarded the 2020 Pegasus Foundation’s Wings Award, which recognizes individuals for their outstanding achievements in animal welfare and habitat protection. Past honorees include Dr. Jane Goodall and Dr. Denise Herzig, of The Wild Dolphin Project, and Andrew Rowan of Humane Society International.
The Sixth (Modern) Mass Extinction – A Geologic Perspective Earth is currently experiencing an accelerating biodiversity crisis that could rival past mass extinctions in terms of rate, magnitude, and selectivity. What lessons does the fossil record offer for how ecosystems will respond to massive loss of biodiversity? In this talk, I compare the intensity and ecological selectivity of past mass extinction events to the current biodiversity crisis. Both on land and in the ocean, the strongly selective removal of large-bodied animals across many taxonomic groups is unique to the current diversity crisis and appears to be a signature of human influence on the biosphere. The geologic record provides many past examples of climate warming, ocean acidification, and sea level change that can help to inform projections of future environmental conditions. However, it does not contain a biodiversity crisis with a similar pattern of extinction, adding to the challenge of forecasting future ecosystem function.

The Speaker:
Dr. Jonathan Payne is Professor and Chair of Geological Sciences at Stanford University. He also holds a courtesy appointment in Biology, is a Member of Stanford’s interdisciplinary biosciences institute Bio-X, and is an Affiliate of the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment. His research addresses the relationship between environmental change and biological evolution in the fossil record, with a focus on mass extinction events and long-term trends in the ecological structure of marine ecosystems. Dr. Payne received a BA in geosciences from Williams College and a PhD in Earth and planetary sciences from Harvard University.
Science Fact vs. Science Fictions- Misinformation in the Time of COVID-19 Misinformation, disinformation, and conspiracy theories surrounding the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic have emerged on a scale rarely, if ever, seen before. Further compounding these issues are the sheer amount of information and the rapid pace at which it is delivered online and in other media. In this two-part workshop, Linda Hall Library staff and invited guest speakers will help the audience build skills to more confidently and successfully navigate information and resources, examine how and why misinformation occurs and what scientists and technicians are doing to address it, and learn steps each of us can take in our daily lives to support a more accurately informed community.

Part 2 of the series will examine the challenges of delivering reliable information to the public, with attention paid to the roles of popular media, institutions such as libraries, and online channels such as social media. Guest speakers from diverse fields will share their experience navigating resources and delivering information to the public and discuss how they see disinformation impacting their work and the audiences they serve.

The Speakers:
Alex Knapp is a Senior Editor at Forbes, where he manages coverage of healthcare and science topics. He writes about a wide variety of topics related to the intersection of science and business, including healthcare, the commercial space industry, and quantum computing. He also edits the Forbes 30 Under 30 Science and Healthcare lists as well as the Forbes Europe 30 Under 30 list for Industry & Manufacturing.

Kimberly Carter is the Head of Public Services at Linda Hall Library. She graduated with a Master’s in Library Science from the School of Library and Information Science at the University of Missouri-Columbia. Her previous work experience includes the libraries at the Veterans’ Administration Medical Center, Trinity Lutheran Hospital, and MRIGlobal (formerly Midwest Research Institute). Kim has worked at Linda Hall since 2017.

Irina Raicu is the Director for the Internet Ethics Program at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University. She is a Certified Information Privacy Professional (U.S.) and was formerly an attorney in private practice. Her work addresses a variety of issues including data ethics, social media’s impact on friendship and family, the digital divide, and disinformation online.

Ashley Carlson recently joined the Linda Hall Library as the new coordinator for public programming. Before coming to the library, she worked for the University of Kansas providing research development and training for advanced scholars. She holds undergraduate and graduate degrees in creative and performing arts and completed her MS in Psychological Research focusing on science communication and the science-society interface. Her work focuses on advancing communication, engagement, and impact in STEM and broader scholarly communities.
Science Fact vs. Science Fiction – Misinformation in the time of Covid 19: Part 1 Misinformation, disinformation, and conspiracy theories surrounding the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic have emerged on a scale rarely, if ever, seen before. Further compounding these issues are the sheer amount of information and the rapid pace at which it is delivered online and in other media. In this two-part workshop, Linda Hall Library staff and invited guest speakers will help the audience build skills to more confidently and successfully navigate information and resources, examine how and why misinformation occurs and what scientists and technicians are doing to address it, and learn steps each of us can take in our daily lives to support a more accurately informed community.

Part 1 of the series will focus on examining how misinformation occurs, including elements of human psychology that contribute to the spread of misinformation and difficulties debunking false ideas once they are learned. Further discussion will consider the challenges misinformation presents for public health and how scientists, information professionals, and technologists are working to address reliability and accessibility of information for the public.

The Speakers:
Dr. Jordan Wagge is an Associate Professor of Psychology at Avila University. She holds a PhD in Experimental Psychology from Miami University and teaches courses in cognition, research methods, and cultural psychology at both the undergraduate and graduate level. She is Executive Director of the Collaborative Replications and Education Project, serves on the Executive Committee for the Research Advisory Committee for Psi Chi (the national honor society in psychology), and is an ambassador for the Center for Open Science (osf.io). She is the head of Avila’s Cognition Lab.

Lise Saffran is the Director of the University of Missouri Master of Public Health Program where she teaches in the new Graduate Certificate in Public Health Communication. A graduate of the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health and the Iowa Writers Workshop she is also co-Chair if the Health Humanities Consortium. Recent publications include a research study on authenticity in science communication in the journal PLoS One and a commentary on art and climate change in The Lancet

Ashley Carlson recently joined the Linda Hall Library staff as the new coordinator for public programming. Before coming to the library, she worked for the University of Kansas providing research development and training for advanced scholars. She holds undergraduate and graduate degrees in creative and performing arts and completed her MS in Psychological Research focusing on science communication and the science-society interface. Her work focuses on advancing communication, public engagement, and impact in STEM and broader scholarly communities.
Survival by Degrees – 389 Bird Species on the Brink Visit lindahall.org to learn more about our public programs and future livestream events.

This livestream program took place on Thursday, April 16, 2020 at 7:00pm CDT.

In October 2019, the National Audubon Society released a groundbreaking report, Survival by Degrees: 389 Bird Species on the Brink, addressing how climate change will affect birds and the places they live. Audubon scientists took advantage of 140 million observations, recorded by birders and scientists, to describe where 604 North American bird species live today—an area known as their “range.” They then used the latest climate models to project how each species’ range will shift with climate change. Additionally, Audubon assessed how nine climate change-related threats could further put species and places at risk. The findings are dire, two-thirds of North American bird species are at risk from climate change range shifts. Further, no species will escape from climate change, with birds also facing multiple coincident threats. The good news is that our science also shows that, if we take action now, we can help improve the changes for the majority of species at risk. Learn about the science behind the findings and the impact on birds in your community.

The Speaker:

Dr. Brooke Bateman is a Senior Scientist, Climate at the National Audubon Society. Brooke leads the climate science team at Audubon, collaborating with scientists, volunteers, and Audubon’s Climate Initiative team to develop research focused on climate and the conservation of birds and the places they need today and in the future. In this role she led a team of scientists in developing the 2019 birds and climate change report, Survival by Degrees. Brooke is also the director of Climate Watch, where she works with community volunteers to understand how climate change currently affects birds in North America. Her research focus is on spatial ecology and conservation, emphasizing the effect that extreme weather events and climate change have on biodiversity. Brooke works closely with on-the-ground practitioners and stakeholders to link climate research to on-the-ground conservation and management actions.

Before joining the Audubon science team in 2016, Brooke conducted postdoctoral research on the influence of climate and weather on birds and marsupials with James Cook University, The University of Tasmania, and CSIRO (Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation) in Australia. She also served as postdoctoral associate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and, later as an assistant scientist, on a NASA project researching how extreme weather events affect birds. Brooke received her PhD in Zoology and Tropical Ecology at James Cook University in Australia in 2010, a Graduate Diploma of Research Methods from James Cook University in 2006, and a BS, cum laude, from Boston College in 2003. Brooke enjoys hiking, drawing, yoga, and birding with her daughter. Her favorite bird is the Common Loon.
Monarch Butterfly Conservation Visit lindahall.org to learn more about our public programs and future livestream events.

This livestream program took place on Wednesday, April 15, 2020 at 12:00pm CDT. Co-sponsored by the Linda Hall Library and Kansas City Public Library.

The monarch butterfly is one of the most iconic species in North America and a central part of efforts to protect pollinators. Angie Babbit from KU’s Monarch Watch will share strategies researchers are using to better understand monarchs’ epic migration between Mexico and Canada and how the public can participate in efforts to preserve and protect the butterfly.

The Speaker:
Angie Babbit received her master’s degree in biology from Emporia State University, and her bachelor’s in environmental studies from the University of Kansas. She began working for Monarch Watch in 2014 and handles much of the communications with the public about monarchs and milkweed. She is also a mother, photographer, printmaker and advocate for the tall grass prairie ecosystem.
Apollo 13- NASA's Most Successful Failure Visit www.lindahall.org to learn more about our public program and future livestream events.

About this program:

This livestream lecture took place on Monday, April 13, 2020 at 3:00pm CDT.

April 13, 2020 marked the 50th anniversary of the oxygen tank explosion in Apollo 13‘s service module. Relive the harrowing mission and learn about what led to NASA’s most successful failure with Jim Remar, President and CEO of the Cosmosphere. The Cosmosphere, a Smithsonian-affiliated museum in Hutchinson, Kansas, is home to the Apollo 13 command module, Odyssey, on permanent loan from the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. The Cosmosphere spent 12 years restoring the spacecraft back to its original, post-flight condition and it is now on public display in their Apollo Gallery in the Hall of Space Museum.

The Speaker:

A recognized expert in the areas of museum administration, Jim Remar joined the Cosmosphere as curator in 2000. After eight years at the Cosmosphere, he joined the team at Gregory, Inc as Vice President of Operations. In 2012, Remar returned to the Cosmosphere as President/COO where he was responsible for all operations of the organization, including SpaceWorks, the department of the Cosmosphere responsible for the restoration of artifacts as well as the fabrication of exhibitry and high-fidelity replicas. The Cosmosphere’s governing board named Mr. Remar CEO of the organization in January 2018. He received his bachelor’s degree in history and political Science from Washburn University; his master’s degree in museum studies with a minor in history from the University of Nebraska, and his mini-MBA from Wichita State University.
Deep-time Insight into Earth’s Future
Science Forum 2020: Sports Concussions ** watch future Linda Hall Library lectures live at new.livestream.com/lindahall **

February 25, 2020, in the Main Reading Room of the Linda Hall Library.

In this presentation, moderator Steve Kraske leads a discussion and audience Q&A session with a panel of experts on a variety of concussion-related topics.

Moderator: Steve Kraske, Associate Teaching Professor, University of Missouri-Kansas City, and host of “Up to Date,” a daily talk show on public radio KCUR-FM in Kansas City.

Panelists:

Margaret “Meg” Gibson, MD, a physician for the Sports Medicine Center at Children’s Mercy Hospital, Kansas City, and head team physician for the UMKC Athletics Department.

John Cagle, PhD, Senior Manager of Advanced Concepts, VICIS, Inc.

Tim Grunhard, former Kansas City Chiefs and coach at Bishop Miege High School and at the University of Kansas.

Video produced by The VideoWorks.
Women on the Nile in the "Golden Age" of Travel February 6, 2020, in the Main Reading Room of the Linda Hall Library.

Kathleen Sheppard, Associate Professor in the History and Political Science Department, Missouri S&T

The lecture:

People have been traveling to Egypt for millennia, but the “Golden Age” of tourism for Westerners began in the mid-19th century. Many travelers are well-known to us because they were already famous, such as Ulysses S. Grant, Theodore Roosevelt, and Mark Twain. Others became famous because of their archaeological work, such as Theodore Davis, Lord Carnarvon, and Howard Carter. We have their diaries, letters, postcards, and more to chronicle their memories. Because many of the travelers were men, we focus much more on them than on women who took holidays on the Nile. Their experience was different than that of their male counterparts. In this talk, I will focus on many of these women and their experiences traveling to Egypt. When should they go? Who should they travel with? What could they do and see? What could they expect to find? And the evergreen question: What should they pack? Join us for an adventure up and down the Nile during the Golden Age of travel.

The speaker:

Kathleen Sheppard is Associate Professor in the History and Political Science Department at Missouri S&T (formerly UM-Rolla). Her work focuses on the history of Egyptology, and women in the field. Her first book, The Life of Margaret Alice Murray (2013) is a biography of the first university-trained woman Egyptologist in Britain. Her second book, ‘My Dear Miss Ransom…’ (2018) is an edited collection of the letters of Caroline Ransom Williams, the first woman to earn her PhD in Egyptology in the US. Sheppard grew up in Blue Springs and sorely misses the Royals and good barbecue.

Video produced by The VideoWorks.
A Nightwatchman’s Journey: The Road Not Taken ** watch future Linda Hall Library lectures live at new.livestream.com/lindahall **

November 7, 2019, in the Main Reading Room of the Linda Hall Library.

David H. Levy is one of the most successful comet hunters in history. He has discovered 22 comets, nine of them using his own backyard telescopes. With Eugene and Carolyn Shoemaker at the Palomar Observatory in California he discovered Shoemaker-Levy 9, the comet that collided with Jupiter in 1994. That episode produced the most spectacular explosions ever witnessed in the solar system. Levy is currently involved with the Jarnac Comet Survey, which is based at the Jarnac Observatory in Vail, Arizona, but which has telescopes planned for locations around the world.

Dr. Levy is the author or editor of 35 books and other products. He won an Emmy in 1998 as part of the writing team for the Discovery Channel documentary, Three Minutes to Impact. As the Science Editor for Parade Magazine from 1997 to 2006, he was able to reach more than 80 million readers, almost a quarter of the population of the United States. A contributing editor for Sky and Telescope Magazine, he writes its monthly “Star Trails” column, and his “Nightfall” feature appears in each issue of the Canadian magazine, Skynews.

Video produced by The VideoWorks of Roeland Park, Kansas.
Surveying the Anthropic Sublime October 10, 2019, in the Main Reading Room of the Linda Hall Library.

The speakers:

Celebrated landscape photographer and bookmaker Michael Light focuses on the environment and how contemporary American culture relates to it. For the last sixteen years, Light has aerially photographed over settled and unsettled areas of American space, pursuing themes of mapping, vertigo, human impact on the land, and various aspects of geologic time and the sublime. A private pilot and Guggenheim Photography Fellow, he is currently working on an extended aerial survey of the arid Western states. The fourth volume in a multi-volume series of this work published by Radius Books, Lake Lahontan/Lake Bonneville, was released this August.

Light is also known for his archival books and exhibitions. His 1999 book, FULL MOON, used lunar geological survey imagery made by the Apollo astronauts to show the moon both as a sublime desert and an embattled point of first human contact, while his 2003 book, 100 SUNS, focused on the politics and landscape meanings of military photographs of U.S. atmospheric nuclear detonations from 1945 to 1962.

Light has exhibited globally, and his work has been collected by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Getty Research Institute, The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The New York Public Library, the Brooklyn Museum, the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, and the Hasselblad Center in Sweden, among others. Twenty-five separate editions of his seven books have been published worldwide.

Jane Aspinwall, Associate Curator of Photography at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, has worked with the Hallmark Photographic Collection since 1999 and was the first member of the Photography department at the Nelson-Atkins after the Hallmark collection was gifted in 2005. Previous to this appointment, she served as the curatorial assistant of Photography and worked in the American Art department of the Nelson-Atkins. Aspinwall received a master’s degree in 2001 in art history from the University of Missouri-Kansas City. She also holds a master’s degree in business administration with an emphasis in arts management received in 1992 from the University of Missouri-Columbia.

Aspinwall was contributor to the book and a co-organizer of the exhibition Developing Greatness: Origins of American Photography, 1839-1885, one of the inaugural exhibitions held in the museum’s Bloch Building in 2007. She was also co-author and exhibition co-curator of Timothy O’Sullivan: The King Survey Photographs. She has curated numerous exhibitions at the Nelson-Atkins, including: In the Public Eye: Photography and Fame; Restoration: Shana and Robert ParkeHarrison; Hide & Seek: Picturing Childhood (co-curated); Exploring Egypt: 19th Century Expeditionary Photography; Heavens: Photographs of the Sky & Cosmos; and Timothy O’Sullivan: The King Survey Photographs (co-curated).

Video produced by The VideoWorks of Roeland Park, Kansas.
Analog Computation in a Digital World: Understanding the Place of a Bygone Technology in Contemporary Science August 8, 2019, in the Main Reading Room of the Linda Hall Library.

The lecture:

Analog computers were once the dominant computing machines in engineering and science, but have now been almost completely replaced by digital computers. While there are practical reasons for preferring digital computers over analog, there are theoretical reasons to rehabilitate our understanding of analog computation. Neuroscientists and cognitive scientists, for example, routinely explain the workings of our minds by appealing to the computations that the brain performs. But, because these computations seem to be analog, rather than digital, we need to know more about what “analog” means.

In this lecture, Dr. Corey Maley will discuss how research into the history of analog computers allows us to understand computation in a non-digital way. While the history of digital computation is well-understood, the history of analog computation has received very little attention. He will also show how this broader understanding of computation helps make sense of contemporary claims about the computational nature of the mind and brain.

The speaker:

Corey Maley is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Kansas. He completed his PhD in philosophy at Princeton University, and his BS and BA at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. He focuses on two areas of research: the role of computation in scientific explanation, and the nature of moral emotions such as guilt and shame.

Video produced by The VideoWorks of Roeland Park, Kansas.
Everything You Want to Know About Vaccines (But Were Afraid to Ask) ** watch future Linda Hall Library lectures live at new.livestream.com/lindahall **

June 20, 2019, in the Main Reading Room of the Linda Hall Library.

The lecture:

Dr. Barbara Pahud will discuss the issues of vaccinations locally, nationally, and globally. She will examine the truths and myths, and everything you need to know to stay up-to-date and be able to tell fake news from true science. Topics will include: What’s in a vaccine? Do we still need to immunize against polio if we don’t have cases in the U.S.? Why do we have so many measles lately? And was “X” caused by a vaccine and how can doctors tell?

The speaker:

Barbara Pahud, MD, is Associate Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Medicine and Associate Director of NIH’s Vaccine Treatment and Evaluation Unit (VTEU) at Children’s Mercy Hospital. She is an active investigator for the CDC’s New Vaccine Surveillance Network (NVSN), and a principal investigator in multiple industry-sponsored clinical trials involving drugs and vaccines for children. Dr. Pahud’s research focuses on clinical trials, vaccine safety, immunization implementation, vaccine education, and promotion of research in underserved areas. She received her medical degree from Universidad La Salle School of Medicine and an MPH from Columbia University.

Video produced by The VideoWorks of Roeland Park, Kansas.
Comprehending a Cube: Eighteen Months of Living with Euclid ** watch future Linda Hall Library lectures live at new.livestream.com/lindahall **

May 21, 2019, in the Main Reading Room of the Linda Hall Library.

The lecture:

In 2012, Russell Maret began work on a book inspired by Euclid’s Elements of Geometry. The book that resulted in 2014, Interstices & Intersections or, An Autodidact Comprehends a Cube, consists of one proposition from each of the 13 books of Euclid. In response to these propositions, Maret wrote 13 companion texts, prior to designing the typefaces in which the texts would be printed. He then illustrated both his and Euclid’s texts, and proceeded to print the book by hand. In this talk, Russell will discuss the process of the books making within the context of historical editions of Euclid’s Elements.

The speaker:

Russell Maret is a letter designer and letterpress printer working in New York City. He began printing in San Francisco as a teenager before apprenticing with Peter Koch in Berkeley and Firefly Press in Somerville, Massachusetts. He set up his own press at the Center for Book Arts, New York in 1993 and has been printing and publishing ever since. In 1996 Russell began teaching himself to design letterforms, leading to a twelve year study of letterforms before he completed his first typeface in 2008. In 2009 Russell was awarded the Rome Prize in Design from the American Academy in Rome. In 2011, he began working to convert some of his type designs into new metal typefaces for letterpress. Since then he has produced four metal typefaces and four suites of metal ornaments. He is a Master Lecturer in the MFA Book Arts & Printmaking Department of University of the Arts in Philadelphia and the current North American Chair of the Fine Press Book Association. He has been the printer in residence of the Press in Tuscany Alley, San Francisco (1990); Artist in Residence at the Center for Book Arts, NYC (1996); and a trustee of the American Printing History Association. Russell’s books and manuscripts are in public and private collections throughout the world.

Video produced by The VideoWorks of Roeland Park, Kansas.
Return to the Moon and On to Mars ** watch future Linda Hall Library lectures live at new.livestream.com/lindahall **

May 9, 2019, in the Main Reading Room of the Linda Hall Library.

The lecture:

NASA is going back to the Moon and on to Mars for long-term human exploration and utilization. Alicia Dwyer Cianciolo, an aerospace engineer at NASA Langley Research Center, will discuss how recent work at NASA to develop human landers at Mars is influencing new lunar lander vehicle designs. The goal is to develop and utilize technologies that will increase sustainability and lower costs on future missions.

The speaker:

Alicia Dwyer Cianciolo is an aerospace engineer at the NASA Langley Research Center, located in Hampton, Virginia. She specializes in developing simulations to analyze vehicle flight through different atmospheres in the solar system. Primarily focusing on Mars over the past 17 years, she has worked on several missions to the planet. Most recently, as a member of the Entry, Decent and Landing Team, she helped to successfully land InSight on November 26, 2018. Currently, she works to analyze entry technologies that will enable human exploration of both the Moon and Mars. She holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Physics from Creighton University and a Master of Science degree in Mechanical Engineering from The George Washington University.

Video produced by The VideoWorks of Roeland Park, Kansas.
Roving Down the Road Towards Understanding the Habitability of Mars ** watch future Linda Hall Library lectures live at new.livestream.com/lindahall **

April 11, 2019, in the Main Reading Room of the Linda Hall Library.

The lecture:

Mars preserves sedimentary rocks whose attributes comprise at least a partial record of past conditions occurring on the planet. Moreover, it is relatively accessible to exploration as a result of its reasonable proximity to the Earth. Over the past ~15 years, several rover missions have leveraged these attributes towards the goal of understanding whether Mars was ever habitable.

The Mars Exploration Rovers Spirit and Opportunity landed in 2004 and emphasized understanding the role of water in shaping the surface at landing sites in Gusev crater and Meridiani Planum, respectively. The Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity landed in 2102 in Gale crater and more directly probed whether habitable environments ever occurred there.

The results of these prior rover missions together with orbital studies of Mars using various remote sensing assets informed the selection of the landing site for the Mars 2020 rover. Once on the ground in Jezero crater, the 2020 rover will explore ancient lake and river delta deposits on a mission to further establish the past habitability of Mars.

The speaker:

Dr. John A. Grant, III served as co-chair for the science community process for selecting the landing sites for the Spirit, Opportunity, and Curiosity rovers and is currently co-leading the process for selecting the landing site for the Mars 2020 rover. He joined the Smithsonian in the fall of 2000 as a geologist at the Center for Earth and Planetary Studies at the National Air and Space Museum.

On Spirit and Opportunity, Dr. Grant serves as a Science Operations Working Group Chair responsible for leading day-to-day science planning of the rovers, whereas on Curiosity he is a Long Term Planner focused more on achieving strategic goals for the mission. He is also a co-investigator on the High Resolution Camera (HiRISE) and is the Science Theme Lead for Landscape Evolution and Future Landing Sites.

Dr. Grant received a BS in geology, magna cum laude, from the State University of New York College at Plattsburgh and a Master’s and PhD in geology from the University of Rhode Island and Brown University, respectively. He is the 2017 recipient of the G. K. Gilbert award given by the Planetary Geology Division of the Geological Society of America for outstanding contributions to the solution of fundamental problems in planetary geology.

Video produced by The VideoWorks of Roeland Park, Kansas.
The Science of Apollo ** watch future Linda Hall Library lectures live at new.livestream.com/lindahall **

March 28, 2019, in the Main Reading Room of the Linda Hall Library.

About the program:

Best-selling author and space historian Andrew Chaikin in conversation with a panel of experts on the science of Project Apollo. Participants include Gerry Griffin, Lead Flight Director for Apollos 12, 15, and 17, and the third director of the Johnson Space Center; Clive Neal, Professor of Planetary Geology at the University of Notre Dame and chair of NASA’s Lunar Exploration Analysis Group; and geologist and Apollo 17 astronaut Harrison Schmitt.

Video produced by The VideoWorks of Roeland Park, Kansas.
The Missouri Hyperloop: 2019 Path Forward and Coalition Updates ** watch future Linda Hall Library lectures live at new.livestream.com/lindahall **

February 21, 2019, in the Main Reading Room of the Linda Hall Library.

The program:

The members of the Missouri Hyperloop Coalition (University of Missouri System, Virgin Hyperloop One, Black & Veatch, Olsson & Associates, Missouri Innovation Center, MODOT, various Missouri Chambers of Commerce, KC Tech Council, etc.) were brought together to provide the engineering analysis and project feasibility investigation for a hyperloop corridor conceptually routed along Missouri’s historic I-70 corridor.

More than a year of planning, travel, team formation, and engineering analysis resulted in the Missouri Hyperloop Coalition producing the Missouri Hyperloop Feasibility Study and announcing results in October 2018. Dozens of interviews, thousands of articles, and millions of mentions in social media platforms resulted as product of the feasibility study’s conclusions that Missouri’s I-70 corridor presents a compelling value proposition for what could be the first commercial hyperloop in the United States—and potentially the world.

In this presentation, moderator Steve Kraske leads a discussion of the Missouri Hyperloop Feasibility Study, as well as an in-depth Q&A session with audience members. Joining Mr. Kraske are Missouri Hyperloop Coalition members (including Virgin Hyperloop One) who assessed the feasibility of the Missouri hyperloop. In particular, panel members summarize ongoing Missouri Hyperloop Coalition discussions about local, state, and federal-level momentum that is building behind the prospect of making Missouri the first in the US with a commercially operational hyperloop.

Moderator:

Steve Kraske, Associate Teaching Professor of Journalism at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and host of “Up to Date” on KCUR.

Panelists:

Ismaeel Babur, Senior Civil Engineer, Virgin Hyperloop One, Los Angeles, California

Jeff McKerrow, PE, PTOE, Multimodal Transportation Leader, Olsson Associates, Kansas City, Missouri

Drew Thompson, Project Manager, Data Systems, Black & Veatch, Kansas City, Missouri

Ryan Weber, President, KC Tech Council, Kansas City, Missouri

Diana Zhou, Director of Project Strategy, Virgin Hyperloop One, Los Angeles, California

Video produced by The VideoWorks of Roeland Park, Kansas.
Air Power and the Great War ** watch future Linda Hall Library lectures live at new.livestream.com/lindahall **

January 24, 2019, in the Main Reading Room of the Linda Hall Library.

The lecture:

The effects of air power on World War I were immense. Explore these impacts with historian and World War One Historical Association’s former president, Steve Suddaby, for a discussion on how air innovations influenced land and sea battles’ outcomes. Presented in partnership with the National WWI Museum and Memorial.

The speaker:

Steve Suddaby is a four-time winner of the Thornton D. Hooper Award for Excellence in Aviation History. In the last 25 years, Steve has focused his research on the aerial bombing campaigns of WWI. He and his father Allen have published the English translation of the history of French aerial bombing under the title French Strategic and Tactical Bombardment Forces of World War I. Steve is a retired national security analyst.

Video produced by The VideoWorks of Roeland Park, Kansas.
Matt Stinemetze
Threatened Plants and Imperiled Grasslands: Conserving Regional Plant Diversity ** watch future Linda Hall Library lectures live at new.livestream.com/lindahall **

November 5, 2018, in the Linda Hall Library Auditorium.

Presented by the Westport Garden Club.

The speaker:

Dr. Quinn Long is Director of the Missouri Botanical Garden's Shaw Nature Preserve. His work focuses on the conservation and restoration of rare plant species and natural communities, particularly grassland, savannah, and woodlands in the Midwestern and Southeastern United States. Dr. Long is broadly interested in examining how natural (e.g., fire) and anthropogenic (e.g., fragmentation) disturbances influence plant communities and populations, with an emphasis on applied research that facilitates restoration and land management. Examples of applied research areas of interest to land managers include identifying ecological references to guide restorations, enhancing the diversity of degraded natural communities and low diversity restorations, and determining optimal strategies for the control of invasive species. He is also a restoration practitioner with over 15 years of firsthand experience restoring natural communities and controlling invasive species. He has a BS is biology from the University of Missouri and a PhD is Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from the University of Kansas.

Video produced by The VideoWorks of Roeland Park, Kansas.
The Plate Tectonics History of the World, as Seen in Northern Scotland ** watch future Linda Hall Library lectures live at new.livestream.com/lindahall **

June 21, 2018, in the Main Reading Room of the Linda Hall Library.

The program:

Science indicates that in the almost unfathomable depths of geologic time, the tectonic plates of the earth’s crust have skated far and wide over the globe. Throughout earth’s history, plates have been driven into massive collisions with one another by the earth’s internal heat in convection currents over a thousand miles deep. In those collisions, the rocks of the plates have been deformed, compressed, metamorphosed, eroded, and deformed again and again. The rocks of northern Scotland preserve vivid, visible evidence of more collisions than almost anywhere else in the world, making it one of the best places to follow Sir Charles Lyell’s favorite dictum (of about 1830), “Go and see.” The three-billion year history of the collisions seen in the rocks there (and at other key localities of the world) can be correlated with the magnificent ballet of the movement of the plates through much of geologic time.

The speaker:

Bill Shefchik was a geologist at Burns & McDonnell Engineering Company in Kansas City for over 36 years. During that time, he worked on over 500 projects—power plants, large dams, airports, bridges, water treatment plants, wastewater treatment plants, factories, railroads, solar farms, wind farms, sanitary landfills, and hazardous waste sites.

A specialty was engineering geology in conditions of unstable ground, including severe karst environments, abandoned underground mines, fault zones, and ground fissure zones in areas of significant groundwater withdrawal in the desert southwest. He also designed and implemented major groundwater remediation well fields, which have caused the cleanup of over 8 billion gallons of contaminated groundwater. He also contributed to investigation and groundwater cleanup at several dozen contaminated industrial sites and several petroleum refineries.

Mr. Shefchik provided conceptual design and oversight expertise to the structural backfilling of numerous abandoned underground mines, most of which occurred beneath sensitive surface infrastructure, such as railroads, highways, and streets. For the last fifteen years of his career, he served as a geology expert witness on behalf of over 25 clients, providing technical analysis and support, plus testimony in several dozen depositions, in mediation attempts, and in court. Mr. Shefchik, now retired, has Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in geology from the University of Wisconsin—Milwaukee.
Escape from Gravity ** watch future Linda Hall Library lectures live at new.livestream.com/lindahall **

October 4, 2018, the Main Reading Room of the Linda Hall Library.

The event:

Erik Lindbergh’s lifelong quest to Escape From Gravity has ranged from aviation to sports, a second chance at life, dreams of spaceflight and beyond.

An avid pilot, Erik holds commercial, instrument, flight instructor, and glider ratings. In 1996, he helped launch the XPRIZE Foundation in St. Louis. In 2002 Erik retraced his grandfather’s epic 1927 New York to Paris solo flight, raising over a million dollars and 500 million pre-social media impressions for XPRIZE. This 9-year “overnight success” story helped to jump-start the private spaceflight industry and is detailed in the New York Times bestselling book: How to Make a Space Ship by Julian Guthrie.

In 2011 Erik awarded the Lindbergh Prize for Quietest Aircraft at the NASA Green Flight Challenge and, inspired by the potential for aviation, created Powering Imagination to help accelerate the development of the electric aircraft industry and inspire the next generation of innovators. After nearly a decade working on this industry, Erik and his partners have started a new company called VerdeGo Aero to build electric vertical take off and landing (eVTOL) personal air taxis which will transform the way people move around the planet.

Erik’s story is one of triumph over adversity. He won the Washington state gymnastics championship at age 11 and excelled in water-skiing, and alpine and telemark ski racing during his teens. After climbing and skiing Mount Rainier at age 21, he was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis and by age 30 was completely disabled. Total knee replacements and a breakthrough biotechnology drug gave him a second chance at living a physically active life. Inspired by nature, he is an expert mountain biker and backcountry skier and has been creating unique furniture and sculpture designs for over 25 years.

Video produced by The VideoWorks of Roeland Park, Kansas.
Fly Girls: How Five Daring Women Defied All Odds and Made Aviation History ** watch future Linda Hall Library lectures live at new.livestream.com/lindahall **

September 25, 2018, in the Main Reading Room of the Linda Hall Library.

The lecture:

The untold story of five women who fought to compete against men in the high-stakes national air races of the 1920s and 1930s–and won.

Between the world wars, no sport was more popular, or more dangerous, than airplane racing. Thousands of fans flocked to multi-day events, and cities vied with one another to host them. The pilots themselves were hailed as dashing heroes who cheerfully stared death in the face. Well, the men were hailed. Female pilots were more often ridiculed than praised for what the press portrayed as silly efforts to horn in on a manly, and deadly, pursuit.

Fly Girls recounts how a cadre of women banded together to break the original glass ceiling: the entrenched prejudice that conspired to keep them out of the sky. O’Brien weaves together the stories of five remarkable women: Florence Klingensmith, a high-school dropout who worked for a dry cleaner in Fargo, North Dakota; Ruth Elder, an Alabama divorcee; Amelia Earhart, the most famous, but not necessarily the most skilled; Ruth Nichols, who chafed at the constraints of her blue-blood family’s expectations; and Louise Thaden, the mother of two young kids who got her start selling coal in Wichita. Together, they fought for the chance to race against the men–and in 1936 one of them would triumph in the toughest race of all.

Fly Girls, like Hidden Figures and Girls of Atomic City, celebrates a little-known slice of history wherein tenacious, trail-blazing women braved all obstacles to achieve greatness.

The author:

Keith O’Brien is an award-winning journalist, a former reporter for The Boston Globe, a regular contributor to National Public Radio and Politico, and a critically acclaimed author of books about dreams, Americana, and where the two meet. He has written for The New York Times Magazine and reported stories for This American Life. He was a 2017 finalist for the PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sports Writing. He lives in New Hampshire.

Video produced by The VideoWorks of Roeland Park, Kansas.
“It’s Alive!” You’ve Seen the Movie, Now Let’s Consider the Book: Understanding Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein ** watch future Linda Hall Library lectures live at new.livestream.com/lindahall **

August 16, 2018, in the Main Reading Room of the Linda Hall Library.

The program:

If your knowledge of the Frankenstein story begins and ends with the movies, you are missing out. Mary Shelley’s novel, Frankenstein, is at once more frightening than any of its filmed versions, and also a deeply personal account of what it means to be ‘human.’ After reading this book, you could come away wondering who was the real monster. Join Library President Lisa Browar and UMKC’s Professor Jennifer Phegley in a lively conversation about Frankenstein.

The speakers:

Lisa Browar was appointed President of the Linda Hall Library of Science, Engineering and Technology in July 2008. Prior to accepting this position, she was University Librarian at The New School in New York City from 2002 until July 2008. Lisa holds a BA in English from Indiana University, an MA in English and American Literature from the University of Kansas, an MLS from Indiana University, and an Executive MA in Philanthropic Studies from Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis. She began her career as Assistant Curator of the Yale Collection of American Literature at Yale University’s Beinecke Library, and proceeded to become the Curator of Special Collections at Vassar College, the Assistant Director for Rare Books and Manuscripts at The New York Public Library, and the Director of the Lilly Library at Indiana University. Lisa is a member of the Grolier Club and the University Club. She has served as both secretary and chair of the Rare Books and Manuscripts Section (RBMS) of the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) and was appointed to the New York State Historical Records Advisory Board by Governor Mario Cuomo. She was co-editor of the ACRL journal, RBM: A Journal of Rare Books, Manuscripts, and Cultural Heritage, for six years, and has published and lectured widely on topics concerning literary biography, manuscript curatorship, and the history of the publishing industry.

Jennifer Phegley is Professor and Associate Chair of English at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, where she teaches nineteenth-century literature and culture. Professor Phegley is the author of Courtship and Marriage in Victorian England (Praeger 2012) and Educating the Proper Woman Reader: Victorian Family Literary Magazines and the Cultural Health of the Nation (The Ohio State University Press 2004). She co-edited Transatlantic Sensations (Ashgate 2012), Teaching Nineteenth-Century Fiction (Palgrave 2010), and Reading Women: Literary Figures and Cultural Icons from the Victorian Age to the Present (University of Toronto Press 2005). She is currently working on a book about the publishing partnerships of John Maxwell and Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Sam and Isabella Beeton called Magazine Mavericks: Marital Collaborations and the Invention of New Reading Audiences in Mid-Victorian England, for which she was awarded both the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals’ Curran Fellowship (2013) and a Harry Ransom Research Center Fellowship (2015). Professor Phegley earned a BA in English and history from Texas State University and an MA and PhD in English from The Ohio State University.

Video produced by The VideoWorks of Roeland Park, Kansas.
From Drones to Flying Cars: New Frontiers in Human-Technology Interaction ** watch future Linda Hall Library lectures live at new.livestream.com/lindahall **

September 13, 2018, in the Main Reading Room of the Linda Hall Library.

The lecture:

This talk will discuss how artificial intelligence (AI) is changing transportation systems, including drones, driverless cars, and flying cars. Where and why humans will be needed as operators and supervisors in these systems will be illustrated, as well as how you can know if your job will one day be threatened by AI and robots.

The speaker:

Mary “Missy” Cummings is a professor in the Duke University Pratt School of Engineering, the Duke Institute of Brain Sciences, and Director of the Humans and Autonomy Laboratory and Duke Robotics.

A naval officer and military pilot from 1988-1999, she was one of the U.S. Navy’s first female fighter pilots. Dr. Cummings received her BS in mathematics from the U.S. Naval Academy, an MS in space systems engineering from the Naval Postgraduate School, and a PhD in systems engineering from the University of Virginia.

Her research interests include human supervisory control, human-unmanned vehicle interaction, human-autonomous system collaboration, human-robot interaction, human-systems engineering, and the ethical and social impact of technology.

Video produced by The VideoWorks of Roeland Park, Kansas.
Charles Rennie Mackintosh: The Frank Lloyd Wright of Scotland ** watch future Linda Hall Library lectures live at new.livestream.com/lindahall **

June 7, 2018, in the Main Reading Room of the Linda Hall Library.

The lecture:

On the occasion of the 150th anniversary of his birth, Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s reputation as an architect and designer stands higher than it ever did during his lifetime. Like Wright, his direct American contemporary, Mackintosh and his designer wife, Margaret Macdonald, transformed buildings and interior architecture, turning from the claustrophobic stuffiness of Victorian clutter to elegant, simple, dramatic designs that have extraordinary contemporary appeal. Tony Jones, Nerman Family President at Kansas City Art Institute, was previously Director of the Glasgow School of Art ( designed by Mackintosh ), tells the astonishing and rather tragic tale of his work and life.

The speaker:

Tony Jones, ᴄʙᴇ, is the Nerman Family President of the Kansas City Art Institute. He is an internationally known arts administrator, broadcaster, educator, exhibition curator and historian of art, architecture and design, as well as a consultant on higher education and the arts. A citizen of both Britain and the United States, he was educated at Goldsmith’s College in London and the Newport College of Art in Wales as a sculptor, painter, and art historian. He came to the U.S. for postgraduate study as a Fulbright Scholar. He was appointed president of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1986, serving in that capacity until 1991, when he took a position as director of the Royal College of Art in London. He returned to SAIC in 1996 and served as president until 2012, when he was named chancellor and president-emeritus.

Conferred the title Commander of the British Empire by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth in 2003, Professor Jones holds a Master of Fine Arts degree from Tulane University in New Orleans, six honorary doctorates, and an array of international honors. He was conferred the Austrian Knight’s Cross for services to education in Europe, elected an honorary member of the American Institute of Architects, and received the Distinguished Service Award of the American Lawyers for the Arts. He is a former two-term national chairman of the Association of Independent Colleges of Art and Design, a consortium of which KCAI is a member. In 2011, an historic landmark building in downtown Chicago was named Jones Hall in his honor.

In addition to numerous books and articles, Jones has scripted and hosted several television series and radio programs for the BBC. Jones is also president of the Sir James Dyson Educational Foundation in America, co-chair of the Royal College of Art Foundation, and international ambassador of the National Foundation for the Advancement of the Arts.

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One Tool to Rule Them All: CRISPR and Emerging Biotechnologies ** watch future Linda Hall Library lectures live at new.livestream.com/lindahall **

May 10, 2018, in the Main Reading Room of the Linda Hall Library.

The lecture:

New gene editing technologies like CRISPR have enabled exciting advances in science and health and led to a wealth of related emerging biotechnologies, from gene drives to the next generation of chimeric animal models. But some applications of CRISPR are raising ethical and other concerns, and are presenting interesting policy challenges to our current oversight system for research in the life sciences. What can we learn from previous experiences with emerging biotechnologies and how can we adapt our current policy framework to the gene editing technologies of today and tomorrow?

The speaker:

Dr. Carrie Wolinetz is Associate Director for Science Policy and Director of the Office of Science Policy (OSP) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). As leader of OSP, she advises the NIH Director on science policy matters of significance to the agency, the research community, and the public, on a wide range of issues including human subjects protections, biosecurity, biosafety, genomic data sharing, regenerative medicine, the organization and management of NIH, and the outputs and values of NIH-funded research. She has a BS in animal science from Cornell University and a PhD in animal science from The Pennsylvania State University, where her area of research was reproductive physiology.

Video produced by The VideoWorks of Roeland Park, Kansas.
The TVs of Tomorrow: How RCA’s Flat-Screen Dreams Led to the First LCDs ** watch future Linda Hall Library lectures live at new.livestream.com/lindahall **

April 5, 2018, in the Main Reading Room of the Linda Hall Library.

The lecture:

In 1968, a team of scientists and engineers from RCA announced the creation of a new form of electronic display that relied upon an obscure set of materials known as liquid crystals. At a time when televisions relied on bulky cathode ray tubes to produce an image, these researchers demonstrated how liquid crystals could electronically control the passage of light. One day, they predicted, liquid crystal displays would find a home in clocks, calculators—and maybe even a television that could hang on the wall. Half a century later, RCA’s dreams have become a reality, and liquid crystals are now the basis for a multibillion-dollar global industry. Yet the company responsible for producing the first LCDs was unable to capitalize upon its invention.

In his new book, The TVs of Tomorrow, Benjamin Gross explains this contradiction by examining the history of flat-panel display research at RCA from the perspective of the chemists, physicists, electrical engineers, and technicians at the company’s central laboratory in Princeton, New Jersey. Drawing upon laboratory notebooks, internal reports, and interviews with key participants, Gross reconstructs the development of the LCD and situates it alongside other efforts to create a thin, lightweight replacement for the television picture tube. He shows how RCA researchers mobilized their technical expertise to secure support for their projects. He also highlights the challenges associated with the commercialization of liquid crystals at RCA and Optel—the RCA spin-off that ultimately manufactured the world’s first LCD wristwatch. The TVs of Tomorrow is a detailed portrait of American innovation during the Cold War, which confirms that success in the electronics industry hinges upon input from both the laboratory and the boardroom.

The speaker:

Benjamin Gross is Vice President for Research and Scholarship at the Linda Hall Library. He was previously a research fellow at the Chemical Heritage Foundation and consulting curator of the Sarnoff Collection at the College of New Jersey. He earned a BA in history from Yale University and a PhD in the history of science from Princeton University.

Video produced by The VideoWorks of Roeland Park, Kansas.
The Glass Universe: How the Ladies of the Harvard Observatory Took the Measure of the Stars
Unfolding ‘The Deepest Mysteries of Creation’ with CRISPR Gene-editing Technology ** watch future Linda Hall Library lectures live at new.livestream.com/lindahall **

March 15, 2018, in the Main Reading Room of the Linda Hall Library.

The lecture:

Like the protagonist of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, scientists have long sought to unravel the hidden laws of nature and harness their knowledge to create new forms of life. The 20th century witnessed the birth of molecular genetics–the field of biology focused on DNA and its role in heredity, genetic variation, and disease–and culminated in completion of the Human Genome Project, which decoded all 3 billion letters of the human genome. But until recently, the ability to go one step beyond reading DNA and rewrite DNA, directly in living organisms, remained elusive. Now, with a revolutionary technology called CRISPR that was discovered in a most unexpected way, we have entered a new era of precision genetic manipulation, in which diseases and cancers could be erased in patients, but so too could heritable genetic changes be engineered in human embryos. What will we choose to do with this awesome power?

The speaker:

Samuel Sternberg is a protein-RNA biochemist and CRISPR expert. Dr. Sternberg’s doctoral research in the laboratory of Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator Dr. Jennifer Doudna focused on the mechanism of DNA targeting by RNA-guided bacterial immune systems (CRISPR—Cas9) and on the development of these systems for genome engineering applications.

Dr. Sternberg’s work has been published in the journals Nature, Science, and Cell, and has been covered in The New York Times, Science News, The Scientist, and various other news outlets. He is also the co-author, along with Jennifer Doudna, of A Crack in Creation, a popular science book about the discovery, development, and applications of CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing technology. In 2018, he started his own research laboratory at Columbia University as assistant professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics.

Sam received his B.A. in biochemistry from Columbia University in 2007, graduating summa cum laude, and his Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley in 2014.

Video produced by The VideoWorks of Roeland Park, Kansas.
Natural and Unnatural Earthquake Hazard in the Heartland: Facts and Fictions ** watch future Linda Hall Library lectures live at new.livestream.com/lindahall **

September 14, 2017, in the Main Reading Room of the Linda Hall Library.

The lecture

It has long been recognized that the North American mid-continent experiences infrequent but potentially large earthquakes. Because seismic waves travel especially efficiently in the region, large earthquakes moreover have an especially long reach compared to earthquakes of comparable magnitude in the west. The 1811-1812 New Madrid earthquake sequence, centered in the boot heel region of Missouri, has posed an especially enduring enigma, generating considerable lore and legend over the years. Since 2009 a new concern has emerged: the risk from so-called induced earthquakes associated with oil production and wastewater injection. In some regions, the numbers of induced earthquakes has far surpassed the number of natural earthquakes. High numbers of felt earthquakes in previously quiet areas has led naturally to concern about the possibility of a larger induced event than those yet seen. In this talk, Susan Hough will present an overview of our current understanding of hazards associated with both natural and unnatural earthquakes in the heartland.

The speaker

Susan Hough is a seismologist at the United States Geological Survey in Pasadena, California, and scientist-in-charge of the office. She has served as an editor and contributor for many journals and is a contributing editor to Geotimes Magazine. Dr. Hough has written numerous articles for mainstream publications such as the Los Angeles Times and she is the author of five books, including Earthshaking Science: What We Know (and Don’t Know) About Earthquakes. She graduated from the University of California, Berkeley and is a University of California, San Diego alumna, earning her Ph.D. in geophysics from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

Video produced by The VideoWorks of Roeland Park, Kansas.
Extreme Storm Chasing ** watch future Linda Hall Library lectures live at new.livestream.com/lindahall **

September 14, 2017, in the Main Reading Room of the Linda Hall Library.

Having intercepted over 1,000 tornadoes and a dozen powerful hurricanes since he started chasing 20 years ago, Reed Timmer is well-known as the most successful and extreme storm chaser in the world, and is one of the few people in existence to document both an F5 tornado, and the most devastating hurricane in U.S. history (Hurricane Katrina).

Reed’s hands-on experience with a vast assortment of hazardous weather and natural disasters, as well as his extensive education in the science of meteorology, have made him one of the world’s most respected experts on severe weather forecasting, safety, and survival. Reed is a strong advocate for extreme weather and disaster education, and conducts storm spotter seminars for the National Weather Service, emergency managers, and the general public. In 2015, he completed his Ph.D. in meteorology at the University of Oklahoma.

As a star on Discovery Channel’s Storm Chasers in 2008, Reed became the first person in history to capture high-definition video inside a tornado. The eight episode series had a record 19 million viewers during the 2008 season, and was one of the highest rated shows on Discovery Channel. Reed has also appeared on all major news networks, including Good Morning America with Diane Sawyer, CNN with Wolf Blitzer, CBS, NBC, and The Weather Channel.

Reed is CEO of Weather Fusion, LLC, offering forensic meteorology and consulting services, and extreme weather media. His tornado, hurricane, and blizzard footage has been licensed to over 100 production companies and television networks since 1997, and has been seen by 100s of millions of people worldwide on television, internet, and mobile video devices. He is also the lead meteorologist for WarningAware.com, an extreme weather customized alerts company, and also storm chaser for Accuweather.

Video produced by TheVideoWorks of Roeland Park, Kansas.
An Evening with Sara Paretsky ** watch future Linda Hall Library lectures live at new.livestream.com/lindahall **

August 29, 2017, in the Main Reading Room of the Linda Hall Library.

Sara Paretsky is a writer of great courage and intellect. Her work has revolutionized a genre where all too often women have been portrayed as either vamps or victims.

In 1982 she wrote Indemnity Only and first introduced the world to V.I. Warshawski, a female detective who is empowered and independent. Since that first novel Sara has written fifteen more best-selling Warshawski novels.

Called “passionate” and “electrifying,” V.I. reflects her creator’s own dedication to social justice. Sara is a devoted advocate for those on society’s margins. Moving to Chicago from rural Kansas in 1966 Sara worked as a community organizer on Chicago’s South Side during the turbulent race riots of that year. More recently she has mentored teens in Chicago’s most troubled schools, and she works closely with literacy and reproductive rights groups.

Not only has Sara’s own work broken barriers but she has also helped open doors for other women. In 1986 she created Sisters in Crime, a worldwide organization to support female crime writers, which earned her Ms. Magazine’s Woman of the Year award. She is also the recipient the British Crime Writers’ Association’s prestigious Cartier Diamond Dagger and the Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America.

Video produced by The VideoWorks of Roeland Park, Kansas.
Total Eclipse of the Sun: A Once in a Lifetime Event ** watch future Linda Hall Library lectures live at new.livestream.com/lindahall **

June 15, 2017, in the Main Reading Room of the Linda Hall Library

The lecture:

The last time the Kansas City area saw a total eclipse of the Sun was in 1806, nearly a century before cars began using roads. On August 21, 2017—just a few months from now—the area will see a total eclipse of the Sun. This lecture will describe how Nature’s finest spectacle happens, how incredibly rare it is, and how best to enjoy it. Not to worry if you sleep through it; the next total solar eclipse in Kansas City will be on June 17, 2672!

The speaker:

David H. Levy is one of the most successful comet discoverers in history. He has discovered 22 comets, nine of them using his own backyard telescopes. With Eugene and Carolyn Shoemaker at the Palomar Observatory in California he discovered Shoemaker-Levy 9, the comet that collided with Jupiter in 1994. That episode produced the most spectacular explosions ever witnessed in the solar system. Levy is currently involved with the Jarnac Comet Survey, which is based at the Jarnac Observatory in Vail, Arizona but which has telescopes planned for locations around the world.

Video produced by The VideoWorks of Roeland Park, Kansas.
The Art of Invisibility: Kevin Mitnick in Conversation with Jeff Lanza ** watch future Linda Hall Library lectures live at new.livestream.com/lindahall **

May 4, 2017, in the Main Reading Room of the Linda Hall Library.

There is no one like Kevin Mitnick. Once one of the FBI’s Most Wanted because he hacked into 40 major corporations just for the challenge, Kevin is now a trusted security consultant to the Fortune 500 and governments worldwide. Kevin and The Global Ghost Team™ now maintain a 100 percent successful track record of being able to penetrate the security of any system they are paid to hack into using a combination of technical exploits and social engineering. As CEO and chief “white hat” hacker at one of the most advanced boutique security firms in the world, Kevin mentors leaders, executives, and staff on both the theory and practice of social engineering, topics on which he is the leading global authority. Kevin also helps consumers—from students to retirees— learn how to protect their information and themselves from harm, using understandable terms and a friendly approach. Kevin’s insights on current events are highly sought, leading to hundreds of media appearances on CNN, CNBC, Al Jazeera, FOX News, CBC, BBC, Radio Moscow, Tech TV, National Public Radio, Playboy, Good Morning America, and 60 Minutes—to name just a few. He has also been called before Congress (both the House and the Senate) to testify on security matters affecting the United States.

Jeff Lanza was an FBI Special Agent for over 20 years. He investigated corruption, fraud, organized crime, cyber crime, human trafficking, and terrorism. He appears regularly on the Fox News Channel and has informed the public on other national programs including the Today Show, Good Morning America, Dateline, and Larry King Live, among others. He is passionate about keeping people and organizations safe from risk and has presented to thousands around the globe. His clients include Morgan Stanley Smith Barney, Nationwide, Citigroup, the Young Presidents Organization, American Century, Hallmark, H & R Block, The Society of Human Resource Management, Edward Jones, Standard and Poor’s, Oppenheimer, U.S. Bank, Wells Fargo, and others. Prior to his career as an FBI agent, Jeff was employed by Xerox Corporation as a computer systems analyst. He has an undergraduate degree in Criminal Justice from the University of New Haven and a MBA from the University of Texas.

Video produced by The VideoWorks of Roeland Park, Kansas.
From Galileo to Laudato Si’: Why Science Needs Faith ** watch future Linda Hall Library lectures live at new.livestream.com/lindahall **

This program was presented is partnership with Rockhurst University.

March 29, 2017, in the Main Reading Room of the Linda Hall Library.

The lecture:

Logic and reason must always start with assumptions, and the assumptions behind science are, at their root, religious assumptions. Our core beliefs not only determine how we expect the universe to work; they also and just as importantly supply the motivation for the science we do, and indeed they determine why we as individuals choose to be scientists. The nature of how we understand this relationship, however, has changed radically from the time of Galileo, when science was still being invented; and that change continues to this day, as can be seen in the way Pope Francis has blended science and faith in his recent encyclical Laudato Si’.

The speaker:

Brother Guy Consolmagno SJ is Director of the Vatican Observatory and President of the Vatican Observatory Foundation. At the Vatican Observatory since 1993, his research explores connections between meteorites, asteroids, and the evolution of small solar system bodies, observing Kuiper Belt comets with the Vatican’s 1.8 meter telescope in Arizona, and applying his measure of meteorite physical properties to understanding asteroid origins and structure. Along with more than 200 scientific publications, he is the author of a number of popular books including Turn Left at Orion (with Dan Davis), and most recently Would You Baptize an Extraterrestial? (with Father Paul Mueller, SJ). He also has hosted science programs for BBC Radio 4, been interviewed in numerous documentary films, appeared on The Colbert Report, and for more than ten years he has written a monthly science column for the British Catholic magazine, The Tablet. Dr. Consolmagno’s work has taken him to every continent on Earth; for example, in 1996 he spent six weeks collecting meteorites with a NASA team on the blue ice regions of East Antarctica. He has served on the governing boards of the Meteoritical Society; the American Astronomical Society Division for Planetary Sciences (of which he was chair in 2006-2007); and IAU Commission 16 (Planets and Satellites). In 2000, the small bodies nomenclature committee of the IAU named an asteroid, 4597 Consolmagno, in recognition of his work. In 2014 he received the Carl Sagan Medal from the American Astronomical Society Division for Planetary Sciences for excellence in public communication in planetary sciences.
A native of Detroit, Michigan, he earned undergraduate and masters’ degrees from MIT, and a Ph. D. in Planetary Science from the University of Arizona; he was a postdoctoral research fellow at Harvard and MIT, served in the US Peace Corps (Kenya), and taught university physics at Lafayette College before entering the Jesuits in 1989.

Video produced by The VideoWorks of Roeland Park, Kansas.
Death, Forensic Science, and Reuniting Families ** watch future Linda Hall Library lectures live at new.livestream.com/lindahall **

March 16, 2017, in the Main Reading Room of the Linda Hall Library

Lori Baker is an associate professor of anthropology at Baylor University, specializing in molecular and forensic analysis of skeletal remains. She is the Founder and Executive Director of the International Consortium for Forensic Identification, Reuniting Families Project. She also works internationally on the recovery and identification of remains of victims of human rights violations and assisted in the establishment of Mexico’s Missing Nationals Abroad database. Dr. Baker has been an invited speaker in many national and international venues such as at the Peace Palace in The Hague as part of the International Commission on Missing Persons Conference and Amnesty International. She has performed forensic DNA analysis of over 350 skeletal cases from 2003 to 2012 of missing persons for the U.S., Mexico, Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Peru, and Honduras, resulting in the identification of over 70 individuals. She has acted as a consultant to the Attorney General of the Mexican State of Chihuahua, the Washington Office on Latin America, the U.S. Agency for International Development, and the Truth Commissions in Peru and Panama. Dr. Baker’s work has been featured in Discovery Magazine, National Geographic, NPR, The Washington Post, USA Today, MSNBC, The Wall Street Journal, and other media outlets. She has a BA and MA in anthropology from Baylor University and a PhD in anthropology from the University of Tennessee.

Video produced by The VideoWorks of Roeland Park, Kansas.
The Future is Now: Self-driving Vehicles Are a Reality November 3, 2016, in the Main Reading Room of the Linda Hall Library
The lecture

Nissan has achieved the technological advancements necessary to begin to make the fiction of autonomous cars a reality. The automaker’s goal is to have commercially viable autonomous-drive vehicles on the road by 2020. Dr. Maarten Sierhuis, leader of Nissan’s research efforts to develop autonomous vehicles, will discuss his company’s roadmap for bringing AVs to market, as well as how his team is researching the human-centered development of the self-driving cars.

The speaker

Maarten Sierhuis is Director of the Nissan Research Center in Silicon Valley, leading the center’s research efforts in the areas of autonomous driving, connected cars, and human-machine interaction. Dr. Sierhuis has more than 25 years of experience in artificial intelligence research and setting research strategy. He was previously the director of the Knowledge, Language and Interaction group at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC); a senior scientist for over a decade in the Intelligent Systems Division at NASA Ames Research Center; and founder and CTO of the startup, Ejenta, a San Francisco-based startup developing an intelligent agent platform with applications in healthcare, insurance and government.

Dr. Sierhuis has a PhD in artificial intelligence and cognitive science from the University of Amsterdam and an engineering degree in informatics from The Hague University, the Netherlands.

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Rust Never Sleeps: Road Trip in Search of Solutions to America’s Infrastructure Crisis ** watch future Linda Hall Library lectures live at new.livestream.com/lindahall **

September 22, 2016, in the Main Reading Room of the Linda Hall Library

About the lecture:

The Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways is marked by its iconic red-white-and-blue shields—the same ones marking I-70 in Missouri and Kansas. The Interstate System, as it is known to most, was the world’s largest civil planning, engineering, and construction endeavor when it was launched in 1956. The engineering marvel modernized the United States more than any civil project before or since.

Join best-selling author and award winning journalist Dan McNichol in a lively discourse on how the superhighway network has been transforming the nation since its inception. McNichol contemplates how “Ike’s Grand Plan” continues as a model for planning, delivering, and financing mega infrastructure projects. McNichol walks us through the false starts, the high hopes, and the reality of President Eisenhower’s vision. Having authored The Big Dig, McNichol shares his insights into the “last mile” of the original construction of the roughly 47,000 mile system built in Boston. The Central Artery/Third Harbor Tunnel Project delivered what is arguably the world’s most complex tunneling system.

In closing, McNichol shares how President Eisenhower’s vision may lead us to building a network of high-speed trains.

About the speaker:

Best-selling author and award-winning journalist Dan McNichol is a nationally-recognized expert on the U.S. Interstate System. His published books, articles, and thought-leadership work focus on mega construction projects in the U.S. and around the world. His writing and work have appeared in the New York Times, USA Today, and Engineering News Record, and he is a frequent contributor to ABC World News, CBS News, CNN, Fox News, BBC, China Central Television, TV Tokyo, MSNBC, PBS’s The NewsHour, National Geographic Channel, Discovery Channel, History Channel, and NPR.

Video produced by The VideoWorks of Roeland Park, Kansas.
The Dancing Bees: Karl von Frisch and the Discovery of the Honeybee Language ** watch future Linda Hall Library lectures live at new.livestream.com/lindahall **

September 8, 2016, in the Main Reading Room of the Linda Hall Library

About the lecture:

The bees are dying. And what normally goes unremarked comes into stark relief – humans depend on these insects for much of their food supply, and that which threatens the insects also very much threatens our species. But this isn’t the first time humans have made a concerted effort to solve the bees mysterious dying. During WWII, a bee plague devastated central European bee populations and Germany, especially, was waging a war of attrition that critically centered on food.

The situation was so dire that a scientist by the name of Karl von Frisch would be able to successfully argue to keep his research position, despite having been declared one-quarter Jewish by the Nazi government. He re-trenched his work in an effort to help solve the mystery of the dying bees. And he would do some of his most important work during the period – he discovered the honeybee dance language – with funding from the Nazi Ministry of Food and Agriculture. But in the face of such dazzling insect and scientific accomplishment, the dire situation from which these findings arose is all but forgotten. It all started with the dying bees.

About the speaker:

Tania Munz is Vice President for Research and Scholarship at the Linda Hall Library. Previously, she was a lecturer at Northwestern University and a research scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. She holds a PhD in the history of science from Princeton University.

Video produced by The VideoWorks of Roeland Park, Kansas.
Isambard Kingdom Brunel: A Victorian Frank Lloyd Wright ** watch future Linda Hall Library lectures live at new.livestream.com/lindahall **

May 3, 2016, in the Main Reading Room of the Linda Hall Library

About the lecture:

Americans need little introduction to their favorite architect, but they may not know Isambard Kingdom Brunel, the Englishman who changed the world. His first project, the oldest tunnel in the London subway, changed the shape of our cities. His last project, the Great Eastern steamship, changed the pattern of world trade. Everything Brunel did, by land or by sea, he did with flare and showmanship worthy of Frank Lloyd Wright. Both worked beyond the parameters of established practice. Like Frank Lloyd Wright, Brunel was flamboyant as well as prolific. Like him, he was stylish, cutting a figure as a man of fashion, a collector and patron of the arts.

In his lecture, Robert Hulse will introduce us to this extraordinary Victorian Englishman and discuss the remarkable similarities he shares with the 20th-century American architect, both of whom challenged the way we think about buildings and cities.Isambard Kingdom Brunel is Britain’s most famous engineer. He built the biggest ship in the world three times. He built the fastest railway in the world, a hundred bridges, the first river tunnel, and said ‘I wish to be the first engineer and an example to all future ones’. Frank Lloyd Wright designed more than a thousand structures, many of them in Chicago, and many of them award-winning. He introduced a new school of architecture, and when asked his profession, said ‘I am the World’s Greatest Living Architect’.

About the speaker:

Robert Hulse, MA, is Director of London’s Brunel Museum, housed in Brunel’s original Thames Tunnel engine house and winner of The Queen’s Award in 2010. He is co-author of The Brunels’ Tunnel, with a foreword by Michael Palin. Mr. Hulse has worked in education and museums for 20 years. He has taught at London University and City University; lectured at Chiba University, Tokyo, the Royal Institution of Great Britain and Tel Aviv University. He worked with the Greater London Authority to organize the first public walks through the Thames Tunnel in 145 years. He is now working with Brunel Museum Trustees on an exciting new project to build a visitor center in Brunel’s Grand Entrance Hall. The museum was recently awarded the Freedom of the Ancient Metropolitan Borough of Bermondsey, thus bestowing on Robert twin rare privileges: he is now permitted access to any of the river-steps of the Thames… and may drive sheep across London Bridge.

Video produced by The VideoWorks of Roeland Park, Kansas.
Explore & Create: From the Beginnings of Computer Games to Private Space Flight ** watch future Linda Hall Library lectures live at new.livestream.com/lindahall **

March 22, 2016, in the Linda Hall Library Main Reading Room

Dr. Richard Garriott de Cayeux is a founding father of the videogame industry. He is credited with the creation of the now ubiquitous term “avatar” for one’s virtual self, and the entire category of massively multiplayer games, where players connect together in a vast virtual world, often referred to as MMORPG’s. He authored the famed and very successful Ultima Series and has built three leading gaming companies: Origin Systems (sold to Electronic Arts), Destination Games (sold to NCsoft) and most recently Portalarium, where he is building “Shroud of the Avatar,” the successor to his previous works. He has been inducted into the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences Hall of Fame and received the Lifetime Achievement Award at the Game Developers Choice Awards.

As a principal shaper of commercial human spaceflight, Richard co-founded Space Adventures which remains the only company to arrange space flights for private citizens. He is the sixth private astronaut to have lived aboard the International Space Station, and as the son of a NASA astronaut he became the first second-generation astronaut. He remains a key leader in civilian and commercial space as an investor and Board member of institutions such as the X-Prize Foundation, Space Adventures, Planetary Power, Planetary Resources and Escape Dynamics.

Video produced by The VideoWorks of Roeland Park, Kansas.
IceCube: Seeing the Universe in Neutrinos from the Earth’s South Pole ** watch future Linda Hall Library lectures live at new.livestream.com/lindahall **

October 22, 2015, in the Main Reading Room of the Linda Hall Library

Dr. Naoko Kurahashi Neilson is an assistant professor of physics at Drexel University

About the lecture:

The Universe has been studied using light since the dawn of astronomy, when starlight captured the human eye. The IceCube Neutrino Observatory proposes to observe the Universe in a new way, using neutrinos (small elementary particles) as the messenger. IceCube is an enormous observatory that is buried deep under the surface at the geographic South Pole. This talk will explain the extreme astrophysics we study, at extreme energies, in an extreme location.

About the speaker:

Dr. Naoko Kurahashi Neilson is an assistant professor of physics at Drexel University, where her research interest is in experimental neutrino astroparticle physics. She obtained her Ph.D. by “listening” for very high energy neutrinos that originated from outside our galaxy in the ocean in the Bahamas. She decided that she had had enough of tropical sun, and joined the IceCube experiment, a neutrino observatory operating at the geographical South Pole. There, she is interested in resolving galactic and extragalactic astrophysical sources that emit neutrinos. Her current research focus is to analyze data from the completed IceCube detector to resolve sources spatially, particularly in the southern sky. She has a B.A. in physics from the University of California, Berkeley, and a Ph.D. in physics/applied physics from Stanford University.

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Writing the Same Book Over Almost Sixty Years: A Record of a Nightwatchman’s Journey Under the Night Sky ** watch future Linda Hall Library lectures live at new.livestream.com/lindahall **

David H. Levy, astronomer and author

Since David Levy accidently happened to see a shooting star during the summer of 1956, he has kept an observing record, or log. Session number one was a partial eclipse of the Sun on October 2, 1959, but the log includes earlier sessions stretching back to July 4, 1956, and forward to well over eighteen thousand sessions. His record includes the comets, eclipses, exploding suns, and especially the friendships that have come from so many years of skywatching. In this lecture, with slides and music, Mr. Levy shares some of these experiences as he prepares to hand over the observing logs to the Linda Hall Library.

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NASA's Asteroid Redirect Mission ** watch future Linda Hall Library lectures live at new.livestream.com/lindahall **

May 14, 2015, in the Main Reading Room of the Linda Hall Library.

Steve Stich, Director of Exploration Integration and Science, NASA’s Johnson Space Center

Is this NASA’s most daring mission yet? Called the Asteroid Redirect Mission, NASA’s plan involves capturing a relatively small asteroid using a robotic spacecraft and placing it into orbit around the moon where astronauts can visit the asteroid using NASA’s new Orion spacecraft.

The technology and skills used to get astronauts safely to and from the asteroid will help NASA get to Mars. Just as the Mercury and Gemini projects helped the Apollo missions reach the moon, the Asteroid Redirect Mission will pave the way for a trip to the Red Planet, expected to take place sometime in the 2030s.

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Ocean Exploration March 19, 2015, in the Linda Hall Library Main Reading Room.

Dr. David Gallo, Director of Special Projects, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

About the lecture: Are we taking the oceans for granted? David Gallo, oceanographer and Director of Special Projects at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, thinks we are, and he is becoming increasingly outspoken about the relationship between humanity and the sea. He feels strongly that we need to recognize the oceans’ critical role in providing the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the food we eat. Dr. Gallo is personally committed to conveying the excitement and importance of ocean exploration to the public-at-large.

Dr. Gallo has participated in expeditions to all of the world’s oceans and was one of the first scientists to use a combination of robots and submarines to explore the deep seafloor. Most recently he co-led an expedition to create the first detailed and comprehensive map of the RMS Titanic and he co-led the successful international effort to locate the remains of Air France flight 447. He is presently involved in planning an international expedition to locate and document the wreckage of Ernest Shackleton’s ship, HMS Endurance.

Dr. Gallo received bachelors and masters degrees in geological science from the State University of New York at Albany and a Ph.D. in oceanography from the University of Rhode Island.

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Everest Expedition with Dr. Bruce Johnson and Conrad Anker ** watch future Linda Hall Library lectures live at new.livestream.com/lindahall **

April 21, 2015, in the Linda Hall Library Main Reading Room.

Dr. Bruce Johnson, Professor of Medicine and Physiology, Mayo Clinic.
Conrad Anker, Professional mountain climber and author.

What do extreme athletes who can summit the peaks of Mt. Everest have in common with people with heart failure? The answer is: more than you might think. Researchers at Mayo Clinic say climbers or anyone exposed to extreme altitudes suffer some of the same physiological changes as heart failure patients. In 2012, they teamed up with National Geographic, The North Face, Montana State University, and a group of extreme climbers to ascend the slopes of that mountain. One of their goals: to discover more about the body as it responds to high altitude in hopes of developing new ways to treat disease.

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American Medicine and the Panama Canal: Miasmas, Mosquitoes, and Malaria ** watch future Linda Hall Library lectures live at new.livestream.com/lindahall **

December 4, 2014, in the Linda Hall Library Main Reading Room.

Dr. Enrique Chaves, University of Kansas Medical Center.

Theodore Roosevelt appointed William Gorgas in 1904 as Chief Sanitary Officer in charge of the sanitation in Panama. Armed with recent knowledge that the mosquito was the vector for yellow fever and malaria, Gorgas converted Panama from a pesthole to a healthy place and made possible the completion of the Panama Canal in 1914.

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Tropical Deep Reefs: Exploring the Underexplored ** watch future Linda Hall Library lectures live at new.livestream.com/lindahall **

Tuesday, October 28, 2014, in the Linda Hall Library Main Reading Room.

Dr. Carole Baldwin, Research Zoologist, Smithsonian Institution National Museum of Natural History

The Smithsonian’s Deep Reef Observation Project is a multidisciplinary Smithsonian project exploring the diversity of tropical deep reefs off the coast of Curaçao in the southern Caribbean. Deep reefs are natural extensions of shallow water reefs, but, because they lie beyond SCUBA diving depths, deep reefs are underexplored ecosystems worldwide.

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Discovering Fossils in Panama: A Once in a Century Opportunity ** watch future Linda Hall Library lectures live at new.livestream.com/lindahall **

Thursday, October 16, 2014, in the Linda Hall Library Main Reading Room.

Dr. Bruce MacFadden, Curator and Professor of Vertebrate Paleontology, Florida Museum of Natural History and the University of Florida

The Panama Canal is currently being expanded on a scale not seen since the original excavations one hundred years ago. A team of scientists from the U.S. and Panama, led by Dr. Bruce MacFadden, are capitalizing on these new digs, uncovering important fossil deposits that have revealed a new understanding of ancient biodiversity.

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The Panama Canal Watershed: Science, Commerce, and Sustainability ** watch future Linda Hall Library lectures live at new.livestream.com/lindahall ** 
 
September 18, 2014, in the Linda Hall Library Main Reading Room 
 
Dr. Jefferson Hall, Staff Scientist, Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute 
 
The Panama Canal depends on a supply of fresh water, but the state of the Canal watershed reflects a global competition for land, water, and all of the goods and services that provide for a growing population. The Smithsonian’s reforestation work in Panama to protect its valuable watershed is at the intersection of science, commerce, policy, and nature. 
 
Video produced by The VideoWorks of Roeland Park, Kansas.
Saving American Orchids ** watch future Linda Hall Library lectures live at new.livestream.com/lindahall ** 
 
Thursday, June 12, in the Linda Hall Library Main Reading Room. 
 
Dr. Dennis Whigham, Senior Botanist, Smithsonian Environmental Research Center. 
 
With nearly 60 percent of the 250 orchids native to North America considered threatened or endangered, botanist Dennis Whigham and his team have established the North American Orchid Conservation Center, the first organization to integrate native orchid ecology, conservation, and education. 
 
Video produced by The VideoWorks of Roeland Park, Kansas.
Big-Ship Ready: The Post-Panamax Era ** watch future Linda Hall Library lectures live at new.livestream.com/lindahall ** 
 
Tuesday, May 20, in the Linda Hall Library Main Reading Room 
 
Geraldine Knatz, Executive Director (retired), Port of Los Angeles 
 
The current Panama Canal expansion project is a game-changer: the immense post-Panamax containerships will alter global trade routes. Are we ready for a new definition of “big?” Dr. Geraldine Knatz discusses the state of readiness of U.S. ports, the competitive issues between the east and west coasts, and what it means for Kansas City. 
 
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Rails Across Panama: From '49ers to 40-foot Containers ** watch future Linda Hall Library lectures live at new.livestream.com/lindahall ** 
 
About this lecture: 
 
May 8, 2014 in the Linda Hall Library Main Reading Room. 
 
Peter Hansen, editor, Railroad History; and Michael Haverty, Former Chairman, President, and CEO, Kansas City Southern Railway 
 
Before the Panama Canal, there was the Panama Railroad—and the canal could not have been built without it. Mile for mile, it may be the most historic railroad on earth: A shortcut for gold-seeking ‘49ers; the means by which California gold went east; and a key player in the Panamanian revolution of 1903, which set the stage for American involvement with the canal. Reborn in the 21st century as the Panama Canal Railway, it is a joint venture between Kansas City Southern Railway and Mi-Jack Products, North America’s leading intermodal terminal operator. 
 
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The Panama Canal Expansion Project ** watch future Linda Hall Library lectures live at new.livestream.com/lindahall ** 
 
About this lecture: 
 
April 8, 2014, in the Main Reading Room of the Linda Hall Library. 
 
Alberto Alemán Zubieta, CEO, Panama Canal Authority, 1996-2012 
 
In 2007, the Panama Canal Authority began an ambitious $5 billion expansion project to add a third set of locks, an undertaking nearly equal in scope to the original building of the canal. Alberto Alemán provides an insider’s view of the massive engineering project scheduled for completion in 2015. 
 
Video produced by The VideoWorks, Inc. of Roeland Park, Kansas.
Aesthetic Preference for Colors ** watch future Linda Hall Library lectures live at new.livestream.com/lindahall ** 
 
About this lecture: 
 
November 21, 2013, in the Main Reading Room of the Linda Hall Library. 
 
Color preference is an important aspect of human behavior, but little is known about why people like the colors they do. Dr. Stephen Palmer, Professor of Psychology and Cognitive Science at the University of California, Berkeley, seeks to provide an answer. He presents an interdisciplinary approach to aesthetic experience in vision using human color preferences as the focus, discussing what colors people prefer, why they prefer them, and how such preferences vary across gender, cultures, and social subcultures. 
 
Video produced by The VideoWorks of Roeland Park, Kansas.
Listening to Colors: Life with Extra Senses ** watch future Linda Hall Library lectures live at http://new.livestream.com/lindahall ** 
 
About this lecture: 
 
November 7, 2013, in the Linda Hall Library Main Reading Room. 
 
Neil Harbisson is an artist best known for his ability to hear and perceive colors outside the range of human vision. Neil was born with achromatopsia, a condition that only allows him to see the world in black and white. At the age of 20, he had an electronic eye (‘eyeborg’) installed in his head that allows him to ‘listen’ to colors. In this lecture, Neil talks about his personal relationship with cybernetics and how technology changed his perception of life. 
 
Video produced by The VideoWorks of Roeland Park, Kansas.
Reweaving the Rainbow ** watch future Linda Hall Library lectures live at http://new.livestream.com/lindahall ** 
 
About this lecture: 
 
October 10, 2013, in the Main Reading Room of the Linda Hall Library. 
 
Dr. Jay Neitz, Bishop Professor of Ophthalmology and Color Vision Researcher, University of Washington. 
 
Jay Neitz’s goal in life is to cure colorblindness. Working alongside his wife, Maureen, he seeks to understand how the human visual system operates by studying the entire process of seeing, from genes to behavior. He will explore how and why we see color, the evolution of color vision, and experiments using gene therapy with primates as a potential treatment for human vision disorders. 
 
Video produced by The VideoWorks of Roeland Park, Kansas.
Next-Gen Paleontology: 3D Printed Dinosaurs ** watch future Linda Hall Library lectures live at http://new.livestream.com/lindahall ** 
 
About this lecture: 
 
September 12, 2013, in the Linda Hal Library Main Reading Room. 
 
Dr. Kenneth Lacovara, Associate Professor, Department of Biodiversity, Earth & Environmental Science, Drexel University 
 
According to Dr. Kenneth Lacovara, “technology in paleontology hasn’t changed in about 150 years. We use shovels and pickaxes and burlap and plaster. It hasn't changed—until right now.” Dr. Lacovara will share his pioneering work in using laser scans and 3D printing technology to create and test scale models of fossil bones for educational use, museum display, and for testing hypotheses about how dinosaurs moved and behaved. 
 
Video produced by The VideoWorks of Roeland Park, Kansas.
Using Nuclear Techniques to Analyze Art ** watch future Linda Hall Library lectures live at http://new.livestream.com/lindahall ** 
 
About this lecture: 
 
May 9, 2013, in the Main Reading Room of the Linda Hall Library. 
 
Philippe Collon, Associate Professor of Physics, University of Notre Dame. 
 
Art forgery is big business with museum reputations and millions of dollars at stake. Physicist Philippe Collon discusses recent advances in nuclear science that enable his team of scientists to analyze pottery glazes, determine the origins of clay, detect the age of inks, and to penetrate multiple layers of paint without damaging the artwork or artifact. 
 
Video produced by The VideoWorks of Roeland Park, Kansas.
The Half-Life of Facts: Why Everything We Know has an Expiration Date ** watch future Linda Hall Library lectures live at http://new.livestream.com/lindahall ** 
 
About this lecture: 
 
April 25, 2013, in the Main Reading Room of the Linda Hall Library. 
 
Dr. Samuel Arbesman, Senior Scholar, Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation. 
 
Facts change all the time. Smoking has gone from doctor recommended to deadly. We used to think that Pluto was a planet. In short, what we know about the world is constantly changing. The Half-life of Facts is a riveting journey into the counterintuitive fabric of knowledge, helping us find new ways to measure the world while accepting the limits of how much we can know with certainty. 
 
Video produced by The VideoWorks of Roeland Park, Kansas.
The Age of Edison: Electric Light and the Invention of Modern America ** watch future Linda Hall Library lectures live at http://new.livestream.com/lindahall ** 
 
About this lecture: 
 
March 12, 2013, at the Linda Hall Lbrary. 
 
Dr. Ernest Freeberg is Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at the University of Tennessee. 
 
In The Age of Edison, Freeberg weaves a narrative that reaches from Coney Island and Broadway to the tiniest towns of rural America, tracing the progress of electric light through the reactions of everyone who saw it. It is a quintessentially American story of ingenuity, ambition, and possibility, in which the greater forces of progress and change are made visible by one of our most humble and ubiquitous objects. 
 
Video produced by The Video Works of Roeland Park, Kansas.
Math, Myth, and the Measure of Maya Time ** watch future Linda Hall Library lectures live at http://new.livestream.com/lindahall ** 
 
October 22, 2012, in the Main Reading Room of the Linda Hall Library. 
 
William Saturno, Assistant Professor of Archaeology at Boston University. 
 
Much has been made this year of the approaching “end-date” of the Maya calendar and its implications for our own society’s future. Keeping track of the passage of time was very important to the ancient Maya and as a result they developed a complex series of calendars to assist them in that endeavor. 
 
In this lecture, Dr. Saturno examines the Maya calendar and present aspects of both the mythology and astronomy at the root of its complex cycles. Though the Maya have long been noted for their accomplishments in mathematics and their astronomical proficiency, most of what we know about their astronomy, and the precision of their understanding of the movement of the sun, moon, and planets, comes from studies painted bark paper documents dated to only a century or two before Spanish contact. 
 
Dr. Saturno presents a source several centuries earlier, a Classic Period wall painting accompanied by numerical tables that appear to have functioned much like those found in astronomical tables from around the time of contact. These represent the earliest such tables yet found but more importantly give us our first look at the scholarly practices that were part of the foundation of royal power. 
 
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What Time is it Anyway?: Clocks, Timescales, and How the World Decides What Time It Is ** watch future Linda Hall Library lectures live at http://new.livestream.com/lindahall ** 
 
About this lecture: 
 
September 27, 2012, in the Main Reading Room of the Linda Hall Library. 
 
"What Time is it Anyway?: Clocks, Timescales, and How the World Decides What Time It Is" 
Christopher Ekstrom, Chief of Advanced Clock Development, U.S. Naval Observatory. 
 
Video produced by The Video Works of Roeland Park, Kansas.
Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America ** watch future Linda Hall Library lectures live at http://new.livestream.com/lindahall ** 
 
About this lecture: 
 
September 13, 2012, in the Main Reading Room of the Linda Hall Library. 
 
Richard White is the Margaret Byrne Professor of American History at Stanford University. In this lecture, Dr. White discusses his latest book, Railroaded, that is an “original, deeply researched history [that] shows the transcontinentals to be pivotal actors in the making of modern America. But the triumphal myths of the golden spike, robber barons larger than life, and an innovative capitalism all die here. Instead we have a new vision of the Gilded Age, often darkly funny, that shows history to be rooted in failure as well as success.”
Breaching Mountains, Crossing Deserts: Building the First Transcontinental Railroad ** watch future Linda Hall Library lectures live at http://new.livestream.com/lindahall ** 
 
About this lecture: 
 
June 14, 2012, in the Linda Hall Library Main Reading Room. 
 
Kyle Wyatt, Curator of History and Technology, California State Railroad Museum 
 
The Transcontinental Railroad was built by hand during the 1860s with minimal mechanization. Using double jack hand drilling for blasting and picks and shovels to load horse carts for cuts and fills, the mammoth task that was expected to take fifteen years was finished in eight. On May 10, 1869, the eyes of the nation turned towards Promontory Summit in Utah as telegraphers announced the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad. 
 
Kyle Wyatt, Curator of History and Technology at the California State Railroad Museum (CSRM), is a prolific author and speaker on the history of U.S. railroads. Prior to joining CSRM, he was Curator of History at the Nevada State Railroad Museum. Mr. Wyatt holds a B.A. and M.A. in history from the University of the Pacific. 
 
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The Pleistocene Meets Middle Earth: The Significance of the Indonesian Hobbits in Human Evolution ** watch future Linda Hall Library lectures live at http://new.livestream.com/lindahall ** 
 
About this lecture: 
 
May 10, 2012, at the Linda Hall Library 
 
Matthew Tocheri, Paleoanthropologist at the Human Origins Program, Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History 
 
Dr. Tocheri provides an overview of the scientific debates behind the controversial human species, Homo floresiensis, the so-called ‘hobbits’ of human evolution. 
 
First discovered in 2003, these small-bodied and small-brained hominins are thought to have gone extinct approximately 17,000 years ago on the Indonesian island of Flores. Are the ‘hobbits’ a new species previously unrecognized on the human family tree? Or are they modern humans who suffered from a genetic disease? 
 
Dr. Tocheri believes the wrist bones provide the answer to these questions. In this presentation, he leads a fascinating journey from the caves of Flores, Indonesia, to his laboratory where 3D laser scans of hobbit wrist bones showed that they were nothing at all like wrist bones found in modern humans and Neanderthals. More importantly, the findings supported the conclusion that hobbits are indeed a branch of early human and not deformed modern humans. 
 
Dr. Tocheri also discusses the on-going excavations on Flores that are aimed at learning more about this enigmatic member of the human family tree and its relationship to our own species, Homo sapiens. 
 
Video produced by The VideoWorks of Roeland Park, Kansas.
Neanderthal Genome Project: New Insights into Human Evolution ** watch future Linda Hall Library lectures live at http://new.livestream.com/lindahall ** 
 
About this lecture: 
 
May 3, 2012, at the Linda Hall Library 
 
Richard Edward Green, Assistant Professor of Biomolecular Engineering, University of California-Santa Cruz. 
 
Dr. Green spoke at the Library on "Recent Human Evolution as Revealed by Ancient Hominin Genomes" as part of the Relatively Human Lecture Series. 
 
Dr. Green has helped pioneer the use of advanced sequencing technology to study ancient DNA extracted from fossil bones. As a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, he coordinated the Neanderthal Genome Project. 
 
A paper on the Neanderthal genome published in May 2010 earned him the Newcomb Cleveland Prize for the outstanding paper published in the journal Science. A subsequent paper published in the December 2010 issue of Nature described a previously unknown group of human relatives, called “Denisovans.” 
 
This draft sequence yields important new insights into the evolution of modern humans and helps scientists identify features in our genome that define the basis of human uniqueness. 
 
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Cro-Magnon: How the Ice Age Gave Birth to the First Modern Humans ** watch future Linda Hall Library lectures live at http://new.livestream.com/lindahall ** 
 
About this lecture: 
 
March 29, 2012, at the Linda Hall Library 
 
Brian M. Fagan, Best-selling author and Professor Emeritus of Archaeology, University of California, Santa Barbara 
 
Brian Fagan takes us on a journey into the late Ice Age world of the Cro-Magnons, the first full modern Europeans, who arrived in their homeland before 40,000 years ago. Who were these people? Where did they originate? And what made them different from earlier, more archaic human beings who lived alongside them? Professor Fagan explores the complex and still mysterious relationship between the incoming Cro-Magnons and their Neanderthal neighbors, who became extinct about 30,000 years ago. Was it climate change, brain power, superior technology, or sheer overwhelming numbers that marginalized the Neanderthals? The lecture ends with a brief look at the remarkable cave art of the late Ice Age, the earliest known artistic tradition in the world.
Pandora Radio & the Music Genome Project: What Musicology & Science Reveal About Our Musical Tastes ** watch future Linda Hall Library lectures live at http://new.livestream.com/lindahall ** 
 
About this lecture: 
 
November 2, 2011, at the Linda Hall Library. 
 
Pandora Radio services 94 million American listeners, delivering them automatically and individually a steady stream of songs and tracks that match their musical preferences. In this talk, Dr. Nolan Gasser, the Chief Musicologist Emeritus of Pandora Radio and Architect of the Music Genome Project, discusses the innovative Pandora experience, as well as the broader story of how musicology and science (mathematics, physics, aural biology, neuroscience) combine to influence why we love the music we do. 
 
 
Nolan Gasser is a critically acclaimed composer, pianist, and musicologist - most notably, the architect of Pandora Radio’s Music Genome Project. His original works have been performed in such prestigious venues as Carnegie Hall, the Kennedy Center, Alice Tully Hall, La Salle Pleyel in Paris, and the Rose Bowl, among many others.
The Economics of Climate Change Robert Mendelsohn, Edwin Weyerhaeuser Davis Professor of Forest Policy; Professor of Economics; and Professor, School of Management, Yale University
Climate Change: Picturing the Science Gavin Schmidt, NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, New York, New York
Disruptive Innovation: The Story of the First Digital Camera ** watch future Linda Hall Library lectures live at http://new.livestream.com/lindahall ** 
 
About this lecture: 
 
October 26, 2011, at the Linda Hall Library. 
 
Steve Sasson, former Kodak engineer and inventor of the digital camera, discusses the creation of the first digital camera prototype in 1975 and how the concept was demonstrated within the company during the following year. He also shares the little known technical developments that occurred over this time period and his observations about how to deal with disruptive innovation within the corporate environment. 
 
Steve Sasson joined Eastman Kodak Company in 1973 as an electrical engineer working in an applied research laboratory. He engaged in a number of early digital imaging projects. Among these was the design and construction of the first digital still camera and playback system in 1975. Sasson received a B.S. and Master's degree in electrical engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He is a member of the National Inventors Hall of Fame and in 2009 he was awarded the National Medal of Technology and Innovation at a White House ceremony. 
 
Video produced by The Video Works of Roeland Park, Kansas.
The Man Who Invented the Computer ** watch future Linda Hall Library lectures live at http://new.livestream.com/lindahall ** 
 
About this lecture: 
 
October 19, 2011 at the Linda Hall Library 
 
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jane Smiley discusses her new book "The Man Who Invented the Computer: The Biography of John Vincent Atanasoff, Digital Pioneer." 
 
Video produced by The VideoWorks of Roeland Park, Kansas.
The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined ** watch future Linda Hall Library lectures live at http://new.livestream.com/lindahall ** 
 
About this lecture: 
 
October 12, 2011 at the Linda Hall Library. 
 
Steven Pinker is the Harvard College Professor and Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. 
 
Drawing from psychology, history, brain science, war studies, game theory, complexity theory, and popular culture, Dr. Pinker explores where violence comes from, why it has been so common over the course of history, and how we have been slowly bringing it under control.
The Crime of Reason and the Closing of the Scientific Mind ** watch future Linda Hall Library lectures live at http://new.livestream.com/lindahall ** 
 
About this lecture: 
 
May 4, 2011 at the Linda Hall Library. 
 
Robert Laughlin received the 1998 Nobel Prize in Physics. He is the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of Physics at Stanford. 
 
A variety of trends in legislation, patents, and advertising restrict or even criminalize the use of knowledge. One stark example: the work of a medical researcher being halted by fee demands from the owner of a gene patent. And the stakes are being raised by the influence of the Internet, technology, and fast-advancing research in genetics. Indeed, control of the Internet (regularly at issue in legal battles about music and video piracy) and debates over the ethics of cloning are examples brimming with relevance and alarm in daily life. At issue is the conflict between the needs of our society to be safe and to be economically prosperous on the one hand, and a human right that you thought you had on the other, which is the right to better yourself by learning. But there's no such civil right, there's no such law. 
 
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Nuclear Safety: America's Approach April 21, 2011 at the Linda Hall Library. 
 
A conversation with Michael Chesser, Chairman & CEO, Great Plains Energy and KCP&L, and Matt Sunseri, President & CEO, Wolf Creek Nuclear Operating Corporation
GFP: Adventures in Nontranslational Research ** watch future Linda Hall Library lectures live at http://new.livestream.com/lindahall ** 
 
About this lecture: 
 
April 26, 2011, at the Linda Hall Library. 
 
Martin Chalfie received the 2008 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. He is the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Biological Sciences at Columbia University, where he is also Chair of the Department of Biological Sciences. 
 
Green Fluorescent Protein (GFP) allows scientists to look at the inner workings of cells. GFP can be used to tell where genes are turned on, where proteins are located within tissues, and how cell activities change over time. 
 
The discovery and development of GFP also provide a very nice example of how scientific progress is often made: through accidental discoveries, the willingness to ignore previous assumptions and take chances, and the combined efforts of many people. The story of GFP also shows the importance of basic research on non-traditional organisms. 
 
Video produced by The VideoWorks of Roeland Park, Kansas.
Celebrating the Experiment ** watch future Linda Hall Library lectures live at http://new.livestream.com/lindahall ** 
 
About this lecture: 
 
April 19, 2011 at the Linda Hall Library. 
 
Kary Mullis received the 1993 Nobel Prize in chemistry for his invention of the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) while working at the Cetus Corporation in San Diego. 
 
Science is a process of trial and error. It always has been. Its strength lies in the fact that mistakes eventually are discovered for what they are, and in the long run, unlike any other global institutions, art, politics, religion, science comes through with the goods. We have been showered by the benefits of this process for the last three hundred years such that average individuals are now in possession of things that kings would have gone to war for in the 17th Century. 
 
What non-scientists and scientists alike do not always understand is that the process often follows false leads that take fifty to a hundred years to repair. Due to the rapidity with which scientific findings are spread in today's world, mistakes, which are a natural and integral part of the process, cause disruptions and misapplication of global resources. In this last century untested paradigms are often and inappropriately the subject of great public concern. 
 
Video produced by The VideoWorks of Roeland Park, Kansas.
The Future of Cell Phone Innovation Dan Hesse, CEO, Sprint Nextel Corporation
The Future of Nuclear Energy Marv Fertel is president and chief executive officer of the Nuclear Energy Institute. He has 35 years of experience consulting for electric utilities on issues related to designing, siting, licensing and managing both fossil and nuclear plants. He has worked in executive positions with such organizations as Ebasco, Management Analysis Company and Tenera. In November 1990, he joined the U.S. Council for Energy Awareness as vice president of Technical Programs. With the formation of NEI in 1994, he became NEI's vice president of Nuclear Economics and Fuel Supply. 
 
Mr. Fertel was named senior vice president and chief nuclear officer in 2003. In that role, he was responsible for leading NEI's programs related to ensuring an effective and safety-focused regulatory process. He directed industrywide efforts to ensure adequate security is provided at nuclear power plants and to address generic technical issues related to commercial nuclear facilities. He also led NEI's activities related to the long-term management of used nuclear fuel, including achieving success in the U.S. government's program for the storage and ultimate disposal of used nuclear fuel.
Bringing Star Power to Earth: Is Fusion Energy in Our Future? ** watch future Linda Hall Library lectures live at http://new.livestream.com/lindahall ** 
 
About this lecture: 
 
October 6, 2010, at the Linda Hall Library. 
 
Jeff Wisoff is deputy director of the National Ignition Facility and Photon Science directorate at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Prior to joining LLNL, Dr. Wisoff was a NASA astronaut and a veteran of four Space Shuttle missions. 
 
At Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, researchers are developing a fusion-based system known as Laser Inertial Fusion Energy, or LIFE, to address this challenge. LIFE builds upon technology advances achieved in the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at LLNL, which is now operational and rapidly progressing toward the demonstration of fusion ignition. 
 
Video produced by The VideoWorks of Roeland Park, Kansas.
The New Face of Nuclear Research Since the advent of nuclear science as a discipline, nuclear-related advances have revolutionized the technical and public domains. Although these advances have always been able to stand on their own merits, in a historical context, their acclaim has been maximized when they have played a supporting role integrated into another discipline. The roles that nuclear science has played in the military, commercial power, and health care domains are examples of this principle. Nowadays, as fields of technology expand in new ways (e.g., materials science, supercomputing), the role of nuclear science has changed from being a supporting cast member to being a lead, with other fields in a supporting role. Dr. Williams highlights the areas of nuclear science research where this transition has already taken place and identifies the areas of research where this transition is imminent. He gives particular attention to the practical utility of this research in the technical and public domains, and in doing so, presents the new face of nuclear research. 
 
Dwight Williams is a Senior Science Advisor at the U.S. Department of Energy. He also serves as a Research Affiliate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is a Discovery Channel/Science Channel television personality. Prior to his current positions, he served as a Visiting Professor of Nuclear Science and Engineering at MIT and a Chief Engineer/Principal Nuclear Physicist at the U.S. Department of Defense. 
 
This lecture was given at the Linda Hall Library, Kansas City, Missouri on October 20th 2010
The Bomb's Early Light ** watch future Linda Hall Library lectures live at http://new.livestream.com/lindahall ** 
 
About this lecture: 
 
October 13, 2010, at the Linda Hall Library. 
 
Richard Rhodes is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author or editor of twenty-three books including The Making of the Atomic Bomb, which won a Pulitzer Prize in Nonfiction, a National Book Award, and a National Book Critics Circle Award. 
 
The Manhattan Project, conceived as a race to beat Nazi Germany to the atomic bomb, devised a way to release essentially unlimited energy. That breakthrough, unique in human history, transformed international politics, made world-scale war suicidal, and continues to threaten and challenge relations between nation-states down to the present day.
The Paradoxes of Time Travel ** watch future Linda Hall Library lectures live at http://new.livestream.com/lindahall ** 
 
About this lecture: 
 
May 19, 2010, in the Main Reading Room of the Linda Hall Library. 
 
Science fiction has introduced us all to the idea of traveling into the past - but is it really possible? 
 
Sean Carroll talks bout how time travel would possibly work in the context of Einstein's theory of general relativity, including the hypothetical idea of wormholes connecting distant regions of space. Dr. Carroll also explores the logical structure of time travel, and what it implies about predestination and free will. In the end, time travel is probably not possible, but by taking the idea seriously we help understand how the universe works. 
 
Dr. Carroll is a Senior Research Associate in Physics at the California Institute of Technology. His most recent book is "From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time", a popular book on cosmology and the arrow of time. He is a contributor to the blog Cosmic Variance. 
 
Video produced by The Video Works of Roeland Park, Kansas.
When Will We find the Extraterrestrials? ** watch future Linda Hall Library lectures live at http://new.livestream.com/lindahall ** 
 
About this lecture: 
 
May 10, 2010, at the Linda Hall Library 
 
Seth Shostak is Senior Astronomer at the SETI Institute. 
 
New technologies for use in the search for extraterrestrial biology suggest that, despite the continued dearth of hard evidence for life elsewhere or signals from other societies, there is good reason to expect that success might not be far off - that within a few decades we might find evidence of sophisticated civilizations. 
 
Why this is so, what contact would tell us, and what such a discovery would mean, are the subject of this talk on the continuing efforts to establish our place in the universe of thinking beings. 
 
Video produced by The Video Works of Roeland Park, Kansas.
Exoplanets and the Search for Habitable Worlds ** watch future Linda Hall Library lectures live at http://new.livestream.com/lindahall ** 
 
About this lecture: 
 
May 5, 2010, at the Linda Hall Library. 
 
Sara Seager is the Ellen Swallow Richards Associate Professor of Planetary Science and Associate Professor of Physics at MIT. 
 
For thousands of years people have wondered, "Are we alone?" With over 400 planets discovered to orbit nearby stars, the existence of "exoplanets" is firmly established. Professor Seager will present highlights of recent exoplanet discoveries and discuss when we might find another Earth and what kinds of signs of life we are looking for. 
 
Video produced by The Video Works of Roeland Park, Kansas.
Star Struck! Sidereal Messages from Galileo to Herschel ** watch future Linda Hall Library lectures live at http://new.livestream.com/lindahall ** 
 
April 22, 2010 at the Linda Hall Library 
 
Opening lecture for the exhibition “Thinking Outside the Sphere: Views of the Stars from Aristotle to Herschel,” which was on view from April 22 to September 18, 2010, 
 
William B. Ashworth, Jr. is associate professor of history at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, and consultant for History of Science at the Linda Hall Library.
Dr. Wes Jackson - The Land Institute ** watch future Linda Hall Library lectures live at http://new.livestream.com/lindahall ** 
 
About this lecture: 
 
March 24, 2010 at the Linda Hall Library. 
 
Dr. Wes Jackson is Pesident of the Land Institute. 
 
Soil erosion is as old as agriculture, some 11,000 years old. In our time, with rapid doubling of human population as we approach the end of the fossil fuel epoch, humanity will one day know that soil is more important than oil and that the soils across the planet are under siege. 
 
Dr. Jaskcon argues that we can solve this centuries old problem by perennializing the landscape which means to perennialize the major crops responsible for 70 percent of our calories and grown on some 70 percent of our agricultural acreage.
Lone Eagles: America's First Orbital Spaceflights September 23, 2009, at the Linda Hall Library. 
 
Mercury 7 astronaut Commander Scott Carpenter (USN, ret.) with novelist Thomas Mallon and historian Kris Stoever. 
 
About the lecture: 
 
"Godspeed, John Glenn." So intoned Scott Carpenter on the morning of February 20, 1962, as his friend and colleague roared into space aboard Friendship 7. Carpenter himself would follow with his own solo flight aboard Aurora 7 three months later. 
 
Along with Glenn, Scott Carpenter was among the nation's original seven astronauts, selected fifty years ago. The only Americans who would ever go into space alone, the men of Project Mercury faced a staggering array of engineering and biological uncertainties. The booster rockets that were to get them to space kept blowing up during tests, and some aeromedical experts doubted that the astronauts' lungs and hearts would be able to sustain the gravitational pressures of launch. 
 
And yet, over the next four years, Project Mercury enjoyed spectacular success, setting America on an accelerated course toward the moon and turning its original seven astronauts into enduring legends of the Cold War. 
 
On September 23, 2009, the Linda Hall Library hosted a rare conversation with Commander Carpenter about Project Mercury and his own solo spaceflight.

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