Sigma Xi Distinguished Lecturers, 2022–2023

Potential hosts should contact lecturers directly to book events. In making arrangements, hosts should be specific about dates, lecture topic, scope of the lecturer's visit and any special accommodations that may be called for.

Each lecturer has designated his or her topic(s) for three different types of audiences. Where more than one level is shown, the lecture can be adjusted to the needs of the audience:

• P (Public)
  Aimed at presenting scientific issues of general concern to a public audience.

• G (General)
  Intended for a normal Sigma Xi audience of both scientists and other scholars representing a broad range of disciplines.

• S (Specialized)
  Aimed at scientists and students in fields that are closely related to that of the lecturer.

Jump to:

Charles I. Abramson

Oklahoma State University
Regents Professor
Email

1. A Study in Inspiration: The Story of the Neglected African American Scientist Charles Henry Turner (1867-1923) (P, G)
2. Psychology Gone Astray: The Racist and Sexist Literature of Early Psychology (P, G)
3. The Unappreciated Role of Behaviorism in the Interpretation of Psychological Problems of Society in the Context of an Epidemiological Threat (P, G)

Charles I. Abramson is a Regents Professor of Psychology at Oklahoma State University and affiliated with the departments of Integrative Biology and Entomology and Plant Pathology. He received his Ph.D. in experimental-physiological psychology from Boston University. As a comparative psychologist, Abramson has studied over 30 different species of both invertebrates and vertebrates (and plants) in a series of basic and applied research problems. In addition to work on species comparisons, Abramson has made significant contributions to such diverse areas as apparatus design, development of a social insect model of alcoholism, effects of agrochemicals on behavior, application of mathematical models of the learning process, and an analysis of the forgotten and neglected African American scientist Charles H. Turner. This work has taken him to over 25 countries. Abramson has published over 300 articles/book chapters and author/editor of 22 books. His books include Selected papers and biography of Charles Henry Turner (1867-1923), pioneer of comparative animal behavior studies (Edwin Mellen Press), Psychology gone astray: A selection of the racist & sexist literature from early psychological research (Onus Books) and the award-winning Primer of invertebrate learning; The behavioral perspective (American Psychological Association). His contributions to science and education have been recognized at many levels including the Colombian Academy of Exact, Physical and Natural Sciences and the American Psychological Association. He is a member of both the Oklahoma Higher Education Hall of Fame and the Oklahoma Educators Hall of Fame. Abramson’ contributions have been recognized twice by the Oklahoma State Legislature and he is a five-time winner of Psychology Professor of the Year by the Oklahoma Psychological Society. Currently he is the Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Comparative Psychology and serves on many editorial boards.

Richard Alley (American Meteorological Society)

Pennsylvania State University
Evan Pugh University Professor of Geosciences
Email
Website

1. Finding the Good News on Climate and Energy (P, G)
2. Collapsing Cliffs? Ice Sheets and Sea Level (P, G, S)
3. Telling the Good News too - Communicating About Energy and Environment (P, G, S)

Dr. Richard Alley (PhD 1987 Wisconsin; Evan Pugh University Professor, Geosciences, Penn State) studies the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets to help predict future climate and sea-level changes.  He has been honored for research, teaching, and service.  He participated in the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (co-recipient, 2007 Nobel Peace Prize), and provided requested advice to government officials from both major political parties including a US Vice President, multiple Presidential Science Advisors, and committees and members of the US Senate and House.  He has authored or coauthored over 300 refereed scientific papers.  His was presenter for the PBS TV miniseries Earth: The Operators’ Manual, based on his book.  His popular account of climate change and ice cores, The Two-Mile Time Machine, was Phi Beta Kappa’s science book of the year.  He is happily married with two grown daughters, one stay-at-home cat, a bicycle, and a pair of soccer cleats.

David B. Allison

Indiana University–Bloomington School of Public Health
Dean, Distinguished Professor, and Provost Professor
Email
Website

1. The Myriad Contributors to Obesity: Exploring the Roads Less Traveled (P)
2. Errors in Scientific Research: Prevent, Detect, Admit, Correct (G)
3. Living Large: The Effects of Obesity, Body Fat, Food Intake, and Changes Therein on Aging and Longevity (P)

 
His research has ranged from laboratory model organism research to human clinical trials and epidemiology. He has received many awards, including the 2018 Harry V. Roberts Statistical Advocate of the Year Award from the American Statistical Association, the 2009 TOPS Research Achievement Award from The Obesity Society, and the National Science Foundation 2006 Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics, and Engineering Mentoring (PAESMEM). In 2014, he was selected as the Atwater Lecturer by the USDA and the American Society for Nutrition. In 2021, he was named a Sigma Xi Distinguished Lecturer.

 He recently (2020) received $15 million in philanthropic funding to serve as PI of Aegis, a nationally vital COVID-19 immunity study. Dr. Allison is known as a staunch advocate for rigor in research methods and the uncompromising unvarnished truthful communication of research findings.

Steven Austad

University of Alabama at Birmingham
Distinguished Professor
Email
Website 1  
Website 2

1. The 150 Year Old Human: How Soon? How Desirable? (P, G)
2. Methuselah's Zoo: What Nature Can Teach Us About Living Longer, Healthier Lives (P, G)
3. Adam's Curse: Why Women Live Longer Than Men (P, G)

Dr. Austad is Distinguished Professor and Chair of the Department of Biology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and Senior Scientific Director of the American Federation for Aging Research, a New York-based national philanthropic organization.  With an undergraduate degree in English literature and after work experience ranging from New York City taxi driver to lion trainer for the Hollywood film industry, he received his PhD degree in from Purdue University in 1981.  He accepted his first faculty position at Harvard University in 1986.  He subsequently moved to the University of Idaho where he became full professor in 1997.  In 2004, he was recruited to the University of Texas Health Science Center San Antonio in San Antonio, Texas where he became Director of the Barshop Institute for Aging and Longevity before moving to his current position at UAB in 2014.  His research encompasses many aspects of the biology of aging from the molecular to the population level.  His research specialty is the identification and study of nontraditional species – particularly exceptionally long-lived species – for insight into processes of slow aging and in pursuing knowledge of mechanisms of sex differences in aging and its treatment. Dr. Austad’s research has won multiple awards, including the Geron Corporation-Samuel Goldstein Distinguished Publication Award, the Nathan A. Shock Award, the Robert W. Kleemeier Award, the Purdue Outstanding Alumnus Award, the Foundation IPSEN Longevity Prize, and the Irving S. Wright Award of Distinction.  With an abiding interest in communicating science to the general public, he has served on the Scientific Advisory Board of National Public Radio and written more than 150 op-ed columns for newspapers and national electronic and print media.  His trade book Why We Age has been translated into nine languages. His forthcoming book, Methuselah’s Zoo: what nature can teach us about living longer, healthier lives is due for release in fall 2022 by MIT Press.

Supriyo Bandyopadhyay

Website

1. Energy-Efficient Information Processing in Our Energy-hungry World (P, G, S)
2. Tiny Nanomagnets Can Compute With Minimal Energy Cost (G, S)
3. Straintronics: Information Processing and Unconventional Computing with Multiferroic Nanomagnets (G, S)

Brad Barlow

Website

1. Music of the Spheres: Pulsating Stars as Instruments in a Galactic Orchestra (P, G)
2. Finding Type 1a Supernova Progenitors with NASA’s TESS Spacecraft (P, G, S)
3. Determining the Influence of Substellar Objects on Stellar Evolution (P, G, S)

Dr. Brad N. Barlow is an Associate Professor of Astrophysics and Director of the Culp Planetarium at High Point University. Dr. Barlow's research focuses on stellar astrophysics, with an emphasis on pulsating stars, evolved stars, and stellar evolution. Over the past several years, he has received nearly half a million dollars in external research grant funding from institutions like the National Science Foundation and NASA to look for and study some of the most extreme binary star systems in our Galaxy. He and his students are currently focused on using data from NASA's orbiting TESS spacecraft to carry out this work. However, they also frequently travel to Cerro Tololo in the Chilean Andes to use the SMARTS 0.9-meter telescope. Being a musician in addition to a scientist, Dr. Barlow constantly seeks out ways to combine the arts & sciences through a variety of public and educational outreach projects. He recently worked with musicians around the world to help develop Galaxies In Her Eyes, a planetarium opera that tells the story of a young girl named Eden who dreams of going to the stars.  Dr. Barlow received a B.S. in physics from Mississippi State University in 2006, a Ph.D. in physics (astronomy concentration) from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2011, and he was a postdoctoral researcher at the Pennsylvania State University from 2011-2013. He joined the faculty at High Point University in 2013, and lives in Winston-Salem, NC, with his daughters Clare (4 years-old) and Josie (2 years-old), and his wife Jenn. In his spare time, he enjoys running, playing the piano, composing music, and talking to the public about science.

Marcia Bartusiak 

1. Edwin Hubble Discovers the Modern Universe, 1923-24: A Centennial Celebration (P, G) 
2. The Biography of a Black Hole: How an Idea Once Hated by Physicists Came to Be Loved (P, G)
3. Master of the Universe: How Einstein's Theories Overturned Our View of the Cosmos (P, G)

Nikhilesh Chawla

Purdue University
Ransburg Professor in Materials Engineering 
Email
Website

1. Bioinspired Materials: Learning from Nature to Engineer New Materials (P, G)
2. 4D Materials Science: Probing Microstructural Evolution of Materials in Real-Time (P, G, S)
3. Engineering Disasters - Learning from Failure (P, G)

Nikhilesh Chawla is Ransburg Professor in Materials Engineering at Purdue University. He joined Purdue in 2020, after previously serving as Founding Director of the Center for 4D Materials Science and Fulton Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at Arizona State University. Prof. Chawla received his Ph.D. in Materials Science and Engineering from the University of Michigan in 1997.  He was a postdoctoral fellow jointly at Ford Motor Company and the University of Michigan, and a senior development engineer at Hoeganaes Corporation. 

Prof. Chawla’s research is in the area Four-Dimensional (4D) materials science with a particular emphasis on the deformation behavior of advanced materials at bulk and small length scales. He has co-authored close to 280 refereed journal publications and over 500 presentations in these areas.  He has over 13,000 citations to his work. He is the author of the textbook Metal Matrix Composites (co-authored with K.K. Chawla), published by Springer. The 2nd edition of this book was published in 2013.

Prof. Chawla is a fellow of ASM International and past member of The Minerals, Metals, and Materials Society (TMS) Board of Directors. He is the recipient of the University of Michigan, Department of Materials Science and Engineering Distinguished Alumnus Award for 2018, Acta Materialia Silver Medal for 2017, and New Mexico Tech Distinguished Alumnus Award for 2016. In addition, he was named 2016 Structural Materials Division Distinguished Scientist/Engineering Award, as well as the 2016 Functional Materials Division Distinguished Scientist/Engineering Award, both from TMS; 2013 Brimacombe Medalist Award from TMS; 2011 Distinguished Lectureship given by Tsinghua University, China; 2004 Bradley Stoughton Award for Young Teachers, given by ASM International; and the 2006 TMS Young Leaders Tutorial Lecture. He’s also won the National Science Foundation Early Career Development Award and the Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award.

Prof. Chawla is editor of Materials Science and Engineering A published by Elsevier (2020 Impact Factor of 5.2). He also serves on the Editorial Boards of Materials Characterization and Materials Chemistry and Physics.

Mukund Chorghade

THINQ Pharma
Founder, President and Chief Scientific Officer
Email
Website

1. The Wit and Humor of Scientists (P, G)
2. Science Entrepreneurship-A Personal Perspective (P, G)
3. Drug Discovery and Development-An Insider's Perspective (G, S)

Dr. Mukund Chorghade is a serial entrepreneur and Founder, President and Chief Scientific Officer, THINQ Pharma and Ayurvidya Healthcare Innovations. He is the CSO of APINOVO. He provides synthetic chemistry, process and pharmaceutical development expertise to academic laboratories, pharmaceutical and biopharmaceutical companies. His research interests are in Drug Discovery and Development, Process Chemistry Derived Medicinal Chemistry, Traditional Indian and Chinese Medicine derived New Chemical Entities.  The “Chorghade-Dolphin” sterically protected and electronically activated metalloporphyrin catalysts (“chemosynthetic livers”) find utility in drug metabolism, valorization of biomass and environmental remediation. He is a recipient of three “Scientist of the Year Awards” and is on the Scientific Advisory Board of corporations / foundations such as APS, Cogent, Empiriko, HSvj, YewSavin. He is a qualified expert in patent litigation and a Certified CGLP / cGMP professional.

He earned B. Sc. / M. Sc. degrees from the University of Poona, India, and a Ph. D. in organic chemistry from Georgetown University. After postdoctoral research at the University of Virginia and Harvard University, he directed research groups at Dow Chemicals, Abbott Laboratories, CytoMed and Genzyme.  He holds / held Adjunct Research Professor / Visiting Fellow / Visiting Scientist appointments at Caltech, Harvard, MIT, Northeastern, Northwestern, Princeton, Rutgers, Univ. of Chicago, School of Medicine-University of Illinois Urbana, Champaign (USA), University of British Columbia (Canada), Cambridge, Strathclyde, (UK), College de France, Universite’ Louis Pasteur (France), Universities of Mumbai and Poona, ICT, CSIR, KHRC (India), and serves on the Board of Studies at select universities in India. He officiates on the Molecular Maker Laboratory Institute MMLI Education and Workforce Development (EWD) Advisory Board, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.  He is an   elected Fellow of the Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, and Telangana Academies of Sciences.  He is a featured speaker in several international symposia, serves on the Editorial Advisory Board of Journals and   is active in professional chemical societies.  An American Chemical Society Fellow, he was Section Chair of Brazoria (1990), Northeastern Section (2007) and Princeton (2019) and serves on the Board of Directors of PACS.  He is an active participant in ACS’ Career Services / Professional Development / Entrepreneurship and the Small Chemicals Businesses Division.  He was Secretary, Division on Chemistry and Human Health of IUPAC and served on Commissions on Biotechnology, Medicinal Chemistry, and the US National Committee.  He served as Chair of the RSC Committee on Process Chemistry and Technology (2018-20).

Peer Fischer

1. How do Bacteria Swim and How Can This Inspire Nanorobotics? (P, G)
2. Holograms, Actuation and 3D Fabrication with Ultrasound (G, S)

Prof. Peer Fischer directs the Micro Nano and Molecular Systems Lab at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, and he is a Professor at the Institute of Physical Chemistry, Univ. of Stuttgart, Germany. He received a BSc. degree in Physics from Imperial College London and a Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge (1999). He was a NATO Postdoctoral Fellow at Cornell University, and a Rowland Fellow at Harvard where he headed an interdisciplinary research lab for five years from 2004 until 2009. Peer Fischer won a Fraunhofer Attract Award in 2009, in 2011 an ERC Starting Grant and in 2016 he won a World Technology Award in the category hardware. In 2018 he was awarded a prestigious ERC Advanced Grant by the European Research Council. He is a member of the Max Planck – EPFL Center for Molecular Nanoscience and Technology, and the research network on Learning Systems with ETH Zurich. Prof. Fischer is an Editorial Board Member of the journal Science Robotics and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry. He has broad research interests including micro- and nano-robotics, active matter, 3d nanofabrication & assembly, interaction of optical, electric, magnetic, and acoustic fields with matter at small length scales, chirality, biomedical applications and molecular systems engineering.

James Hamilton

University of Wisconsin - Platteville 
Professor
Email
Website

1. The Little Dirty Secret that Kept NASA From Seeing Stars and Planets Clearly: An Unlikely Chemical Journey from the Lab to the Marketplace Through the Hope Diamond to Massive Space Telescopes (P, G)
2. Using Polymers and Metrology in Chemistry and Physics to Clean the Uncleanable, Enable Gravitational Wave Detection, Extend terrestrial Telescope Lifetimes, and Solve Other Vexing Problems (G, S)
3. A Journey From the Lab to the Marketplace: From Nanotechnology to Dark Matter and Energy, From Planetary Protection to Technology to View Uncharted Worlds and Stars With NASA (P, G, S) 

As a Wisconsin Distinguished Professor, James P. Hamilton founded two companies, is the Director of the UW System NCCRD Nano Research Center, and is in the Chemistry department at the University of Wisconsin-Platteville. His research on precision contamination control in aerospace, photonic and astronomical optics has brought him to the summits of most of the large telescope sites in the world, including Hawaii, the Canary Islands, and China. Recent efforts for NASA on an $875k SBIR research contract have led to new planetary protection research involving deep space missions and telescopes.  Following a B.A. and graduate work at the University of Maine-Orono in Natural Products, Inorganic Chemistry, and Surface Science, he completed a Ph.D. at UW-Madison in physical & analytical chemistry specializing in atomic, molecular and optical physics. His research specializes in instrumentation development, nanoparticle thermodynamics, and nanocomposite materials. Lecturing on research and collaborating all over the world, he also raised $4.3 million in investment funds for his companies, Xolve, Inc. and Photonic Cleaning Technologies, the manufacturer of First Contact Polymers, which has sales in 77 countries.  He is a senior member of the American Physical Society, SPIE-The International Society for Optical Engineering, and the AIAA (American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics) as well as a member of the American Chemical Society, Sigma Xi, the Coblenz Society, and Sigma Pi Sigma (Honorary Physics Society).  He also serves on the AIAA Space Settlement Technical Committee and as a coordinator and session chair for conferences like SPIE Optics and Photonics.  He enjoys scuba diving, sailing, skiing, hiking, and fly fishing.  Conversant in French and functional in German, he enjoys traveling and learning about new languages and cultures.

Reyco Henning

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Triangle Universities Nuclear Laboratory
Professor in Physics and Astronomy 
Email
Website

1. Quest for the Nature of the Neutrino (G, S)
2. Taming the Dark Matter Zoo Without Telescopes (P, G, S)
3. Searching for the Rarest Events in the Universe (P, G)

Reyco Henning is a Professor in Physics and Astronomy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. During his career, his research has taken him from building experiments for the International Space Station down to deep underground laboratories around the world. His current research involves studying the nature of matter at its most fundamental level by measuring properties of the elusive neutrino, a type of subatomic particle. Specifically, he is involved with experiments that search for the rarest processes in the universe — neutrinoless double-beta decay — the discovery of which would mean that the neutrino is its own antiparticle and provide clues to the origin of matter in the universe. Another focus of his research is direct searches for dark matter — the dominant but unknown form of matter in the universe. This work involves building detectors to search for axions, a strong candidate for dark matter, using technology also employed in quantum information science.

He has BS degrees in Physics and Mathematics from the University of Denver and a PhD in Physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He did his post-doctoral research at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory before moving to UNC in 2007. He is a co-recipient of the 2016 Breakthrough Prize as member of Sudbury Neutrino Observatory (SNO) Collaboration. In 2013 he led a team of instructors in converting the calculus-based introductory mechanics course at UNC into a more interactive lecture-studio format while also adding modern physics, including relativity, and in 2018 he received UNC’s J. Carlyle Sitterson Award for Teaching First-year Students.  He is an author on more than 50 peer-reviewed publications and has given over 50 invited professional presentations, as well as public talks in venues ranging from gold mines to high-school classrooms to breweries.

Akhlesh Lakhtakia

The Pennsylvania State University
Evan Pugh University Professor and Charles Godfrey Binder Professor of Engineering Science and Mechanics
Email
Website

1. What Can Engineering Scientists Can do to Combat Climate Emergency? (P, G)
2. Biologically Inspired Design for Environment (P, G)
3. Optoelectronic Optimization of Thin-Film Solar Cells with Graded-Bandgap Semiconductor Layers (G, S)

Kristie Macrakis

Georgia Institute of Technology
Professor and Director of Graduate Studies

Email
Website

1. Passing the Global Espionage Torch: How Britain Helped the US Expand its Eavesdropping Capabilities (P, G)
2. Our Machine in Havana: How We Really Found Missiles on Cuba (P, G)
3. Invisible Ink Revealed (S)

Laurie McNeil 

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Bernard Gray Distinguished Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy 
Email
Website

1. OPV, OLED, OFET, Oh my! Photons, Electrons and Phonons in Organic Semiconductors (S)
2. Changing the Climate for Women in Science (G)
3. Good Vibrations: The Interplay of Music and Physics (P)

Laurie McNeil is the Bernard Gray Distinguished Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She earned an A.B. in Chemistry and Physics from Radcliffe College, Harvard University, and a Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. After two years as an IBM Postdoctoral Fellow at MIT (with the late Prof. Millie Dresselhaus) she joined the faculty at UNC-CH in 1984 and has been there ever since, with the exception of sabbatical sojourns at Argonne National Laboratory, DuPont Central Research & Development, and Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. She serves as a Deputy Editor at the Journal of Applied Physics. Prof. McNeil is a materials physicist who uses optical spectroscopy to investigate the properties of semiconductors and insulators. She is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and has held a variety of leadership roles in that organization. She was the inaugural holder of the Kathryn McCarthy Lectureship at Tufts and the Dorothy K. Daspit Lectureship at Tulane and has worked throughout her career to enhance the representation and success of women in physics. As a Chapman Family Fellow and Academic Leadership Fellow at the Institute for the Arts & Humanities at UNC-CH she led the transformation of the teaching of the introductory physics courses in her department to use research-validated, student-centered pedagogy. Together with a colleague in the Department of Music at UNC-CH she teaches a course for first-year undergraduates on the physics of musical instruments. Students in the course build their own unique instruments and give a public performance of their own compositions for ensembles of those instruments.

Steven Richardson

Howard University 
Professor Emeritus of Electrical and Computer Engineering 
Email

1. Using Supercomputers to Design and Understand Novel Molecules and Materials (P)
2. An Introduction to Quantum Computing (G)
3. Using Impurity-Vacancy Color Centers as Single Photon Emitters in Diamond (S)

Steven Richardson is a Professor Emeritus of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Howard University where he is also a co-principal investigator in the National Science Foundation Science and Technology Center for Integrated Quantum Materials. His research interests are in the fields of computational materials science and computational chemistry.  Richardson received his Ph.D. in theoretical condensed matter physics from The Ohio State University in 1983 and was a postdoctoral fellow in the physics department of The University of California at Berkeley (1983-1986). He served as a program director for the Condensed Matter Theory Program of the NSF (1986-1988) and was a senior research scientist at the Eastman Kodak Company in Rochester, NY (1986-1988) before he joined the faculty at Howard University in 1988.

Richardson’s research has resulted in well over 10 million dollars worth of funding to Howard University both as a principal investigator and a co-principal investigator on many government, industrial, and philanthropic research grants. He has been a visiting scientist at the Center for Computational Materials Science of the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, DC (1997-2014), a featured participant for the 2012 series The HistoryMakers: Science Makers, and he was the 2016-2017 Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Visiting Professor of Chemistry at MIT. Richardson has always believed that research and teaching are both synergistic activities and he was selected by his faculty colleagues and former students as the recipient of the 2013 Howard University Faculty Senate Award for Exemplary Teaching. He was a visiting professor at Bradley University, Emory University, Iowa State University, and the University of Lisbon and he has lectured extensively on his research throughout the United States, Europe, Asia, Mexico, and South Africa.  Richardson is currently a Faculty Associate in Applied Physics in the John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University. In 2021, he was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Michael Shur

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Patricia and Sheldon Roberts Professor of Solid State Electronics
Professor of Physics, Applied Physics, and Astronomy 
Email
Website

1. Industrial Face of Nanotechnology (P, G, S)
2. Beyond Sunlight: Smart Light Emitting Diode Lighting (P, G, S)
3. Ultraviolet Light Emitting Diode Saving Lives (P, G, S)

Michael S. Shur received MSEE Degree (with honors) from St. Petersburg Electrotechnical Institute, and PhD. and Dr. Sc. Degrees from A. F. Ioffe Institute. He is Patricia and Sheldon Roberts Professor of Solid State Electronics and Professor of Physics, Applied Physics, and Astronomy at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and co-founder, President and CEO of Electronics of the Future, Inc. He was also a co-founder and Vice-President of Sensor Electronics Technology, Inc. (a leading producer of deep ultraviolet LEDs) and founder of co-founder of several other startups, including Electronics of the Future, Inc. Dr. Shur is Life Fellow of IEEE, APS, ECS, and SPIE, Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors, OSA, IET, MRS, WIF, and AAAS. Dr. Shur is Distinguished Lecturer of IEEE EDS society and Sigma Xi. His awards include St. Petersburg Technical University and University of Vilnius Honorary Doctorates, IEEE EDS Ebers Award, Distinguished Faculty Naval Research Fellowships, William H. Wiley 1866 Distinguished Faculty Award, Rensselaer Outstanding Engineering Professor Award, Institute of Electronic Technology Achievement Medal, ECS Electronic and Photonics Award,  Jefferson Science Fellowship, Recognition Award from iNEER, Tibbetts Award for Technology Commercialization, IEEE Sensors Council Technical Achievement Award, IEEE Donald Fink Best Paper Award, IEEE Kirchmayer Award, the Gold Medal of the Russian Education Ministry, van der Ziel Award, Senior Humboldt  Award, Pioneer Award, RPI Engineering Research Award, Wiley Award, RPI Outstanding Faculty Award, and several Best Paper Awards. Dr. Shur was listed by the Institute of Scientific Information as Highly Cited Researcher. His h-index is 111. The Lithuanian Academy of Sciences elected him its Foreign Member.

Fred H. Smith

1. Visiting the Ancestors – Archaic Africans, Neandertals and the Beginnings of People Like Us (P, G, S)
2. A Night Out with the Neandertals (P, G)
3. The Perplexing Case of the Vindija Neandertals (G, S)

John R. Speakman

1. Why Do We Get Fat? An Evolutionary Perspective (G)
2. Nutrition and Health - Is Anything Safe to Eat? G)
3. Is Less Really More? Calorie Restriction and Lifespan (G)

John R. Speakman FRS FRSE FRSB FRSA FMedSci FRSS is a British biologist working at the University of Aberdeen, Institute of Biological and Environmental Sciences, for which he was Director from 2007 to 2011. He leads the University's Energetics Research Group, which is one of the world's leading groups using doubly labeled water (DLW) to investigate energy expenditure and balance in animals. Between 2011-2020, he was  a '1000 talents' Professor at the Institute of Genetics and Developmental Biology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, in Beijing, China, where he ran the molecular energetics group. In 2020 he moved to the Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences in Shenzhen, China where he is currently co-director of the Center for Energy Metabolism and Reproduction and Head of the Shenzhen Key laboratory of Metabolic Health. 

Speakman was educated at Leigh Grammar School, near Manchester, and then went to the University of Stirling where he was awarded a BSc in Biology and Psychology in 1980 and a PhD in 1984 for research on the energetics of foraging in wading birds. He was subsequently awarded Doctor of Science (DSc) degrees by both the University of Aberdeen in 1996 and University of Stirling in 2009. In 2017, he obtained a BSc in Math and Statistics from the Open University. 

Speakman's work focuses on the causes and consequences of variation in energy balance, and in particular the factors that limit expenditure, the genetic and environmental drivers of obesity and the energetic contribution to ageing. He is an internationally recognized expert in the use of isotope methodologies to measure energy demands and has used these methods on a wide range of wild animals, model species and humans.

During the mid-1980s and early 1990s, Speakman made many contributions to the development of the DLW method, culminating in the book Doubly labelled water: theory and practice, published in 1997 that remains the standard reference work for applications of this methodology in humans and other animals. Since 2018 ,he has been the chairman of the International Atomic Energy Agency doubly-labelled water database management committee, which manages a database of over 7500 measurements of human subjects made using the DLW method. A paper by Pontzer, Yamada and colleagues utilizing this database, on which Speakman was a co-corresponding author, summarized the metabolic rates of humans between 8 days and 96 years old, was published in Science in August 2021.

Speakman is well known for his work on obesity, in particular for criticizing a long-established theory for obesity known as the thrifty gene hypothesis. His alternative hypothesis proposes that the modern distribution of obese phenotypes arose via the release from predation and random genetic drift: the drifty gene hypothesis.^[9][10][11] This idea is controversial and has been criticized by others that support the original thrifty gene hypothesis. A test of the ideas involved searching for signatures of selection at loci linked to body mass index and showed consistent with the ‘drifty’ but not ‘thrifty’ gene ideas there was no evidence of strong selection at these loci.  Since 2018, he has published a series of studies of responses of mice to different diets, disputing the popular carbohydrate insulin model of obesity, This work culminated in a perspective article in Science with co-author Kevin D. Hall (in 2021) highlighting the inadequacies of the carbohydrate insulin model. 

Speakman's group was the first to link genetic variation to differences in food consumption in humans by examining polymorphic variation in the fat mass and obesity associated FTO gene.

With Aberdeen colleague Ela Krol, among others, he has published a series of over 30 papers in the Journal of Experimental Biology, which culminated in a novel hypothesis that animal energy expenditure is limited by the capacity to dissipate body heat. This idea – the "heat dissipation limit hypothesis" (HDL) was published by Speakman and Krol in the Journal of Animal Ecology in 2010. The idea is claimed to have wide implications for our understanding of many aspects of ecophysiology and ecology – such as limits on range distributions, maximum possible sizes of endothermic animals e.g. dinosaurs, Bergmann’s rule, effects of climate change etc. The idea is revolutionary because it shifts the fundamental locus of control over energy expenditure from extrinsic factors outside the animal (e.g. food supply, fractal supply system, uptake capacity), to intrinsic factors inside an animal (heat dissipation capacity). An independent review of studies of energy expenditure concluded that the HDL hypothesis provided a better explanation of the patterns of energy expenditure in endotherms than does the metabolic theory of ecology.

Speakman writes a monthly popular science column for the magazine ‘Newton’ (translated into Chinese by an ex-student Lina Zhang) and has also published three popular science books consisting of the compiled English versions of these articles.

Speakman's peer reviewed publications can be found at Google Scholar, Europe PubMed Central, Scopus, The University of Aberdeen, ResearchGate, and academia.edu.

Jeffrey Toney

1. The Undervalued Currency of Culture in Higher Education (P)
2. Science and Human Rights (G)
3. The Pandemic of Confusion (P)

He has published a wide range of scholarly scientific articles with students as co-authors, with more than 3,400 citations and holds six US patents. He has given invited seminars at academic and professional conferences at Harvard University, Yale University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, George Washington University, University of Virginia and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, among others. He is a member of the Advisory Board for SurgiBox, an MIT-D Lab initiative. He recently received an #SciCommMake award from Sigma Xi, the Scientific Research Honors Society, and Science Talk, for his work in science communication.  He was named a Fellow of Sigma Xi in 2021.

George Veni

National Cave and Karst Research Institute (NCKRI) 
Executive Director
Email
Website

1. The World Below: An Introduction to Caves and Karst (P, G)
2. Sinkholes: Where They Occur, How They Form, and How to Minimize Their Impacts (P, G, S)
3. The Sunless Seas of Karst Aquifers (P, G, S)

Dr. George Veni is the Executive Director of the National Cave and Karst Research Institute (NCKRI) and an internationally recognized hydrogeologist specializing in caves and karst terrains. He received his Master’s degree from Western Kentucky University in 1985 and his Ph.D. from the Pennsylvania State University in 1994. Prior to NCKRI, he owned and served as principal investigator of George Veni and Associates, conducting multidisciplinary environmental karst management studies for more than 20 years. He has conducted karst research throughout the United States and in several other countries. He served as the Executive Secretary of the National Speleological Society’s Section of Cave Geology and Geography for 11 years and President of the Texas Speleological Survey for 13 years. He has chaired 16 international and multidisciplinary karst conferences, been a member of the governing board of the International Union of Speleology since 2002, serving as its Vice President of Administration for 8 years and as its President since 2017, organizing the International Year of Caves and Karst in 2021-2022. He has served as a doctoral committee advisor for geological, geographical, and biological dissertations at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, The University of Texas at Austin, The University of Texas at San Antonio, and Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and Harokopio University in  Greece, taught karst geoscience courses as an adjunct professor for Western Kentucky University for 12 years, and taught karst science and management workshops internationally for NCKRI since 2011. Three cave-dwelling species have been named in his honor. He has published and presented nearly 270 papers, including six books, on hydrogeology, biology, and environmental management in karst terrains.

Jut Wynne

Email
Website

1. Addressing Knowledge Shortfalls in Subterranean Biology (P, G, S)
2. Evolutionary Dynamics of Subterranean-adapted Fauna (P, G, S)
3. Science and Technology Requirements to Explore Caves beyond Earth (P, G, S)

Dr. Jut Wynne is an expeditionary cave scientist and conservation ecologist. He serves as an assistant research professor with the Department of Biological Sciences, Northern Arizona University (NAU) and is a Fulbright Scholar in support of his research on Rapa Nui (Easter Island). Wynne holds a Ph.D. in ecology and an M.S. in environmental science and policy from NAU, and a UNESCO/ Cousteau Graduate Certificate in Ecotechnie from the Free University of Brussels, Belgium. He is editor of the upcoming book, "Diversity and Speciation of Subterranean Fauna" (John Hopkins University Press), has served as a guest writer for Scientific American and Mongabay, and published nearly 100 papers on a range of topics including wildlife-habitat modeling, cave ecology, space science and exploration, and terrestrial and planetary cave detection techniques. In the last 15 years, Wynne has led over 70 expeditions to Belize, Chile, China, Spain, Rapa Nui, Hawai’i, and throughout the American Southwest.

Enrico Zio

MINES ParisTech, PSL Research University, CRC, Sophia Antipolis, France and Energy Department, Politecnico di Milano, Italy 
Professor
Email

1. Risk-informed Decision-Making for Building a Society Resilient to Global Risks Like the Covid-19 Pandemics (P, G, S)
2. The Future of Risk Assessment (S)
3. Machine Learning in Data-Driven Prognostics and Health Management (PHM) for Condition-Based and Predictive Maintenance (S)

Enrico Zio earned an MSc in nuclear engineering from Politecnico di Milano in 1991 and in mechanical engineering from UCLA in 1995; Ph.D. in nuclear engineering from Politecnico di Milano and in probabilistic risk assessment at MIT in 1996 and 1998, respectively.

Currently full professor at the Centre for research on Risk and Crises (CRC) of Ecole de Mines, ParisTech, PSL University, France, full professor and President of the Alumni Association at Politecnico di Milano, Italy,

President of two consulting companies www.aramis3d.com and www.dido-lab.com.

Member of the Board of Directors of www.sogin.it, the Italian company for the management of nuclear plants.

He is IEEE Distinguished Lecturer.

In 2020, he has been awarded the prestigious Humboldt Research Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in Germany, one the world's most prestigious research awards across all scientific disciplines. The Award is given to outstandingly qualified researchers and future leaders from science-related fields (but very seldom awarded to engineers!). The Award is granted in recognition of a researcher's entire achievements to date, to academics whose fundamental discoveries, new theories, or insights have had a significant impact on their own discipline and who are expected to continue producing cutting-edge achievements in the future. Professor Zio has been selected for the Award in light of being a World leading scientist in Risk and Resilience Assessment, Safety Analysis and Reliability Engineering of complex systems and infrastructures, in particular for energy applications. His H-index is 72. He has been one of the pioneers in using artificial intelligence (such as neural networks) and genetic algorithms in reliability engineering and risk assessment, solving key problems related to the safety and reliability of critical systems such as those used in the nuclear, oil and gas, transportation industries. He has promoted the use of computational modeling within various international initiatives.

In 2021, he has been appointed as 4TU.Resilience Ambassador by the 4TU Centre for Resilience Engineering and its backbone – the 4TU-programme DeSIRE (Designing Systems for informed Resilience Engineering), a strategic capacity building research programme of the four Dutch Technical Universities.

Still in 2021, he has been named Fellow of the of the Prognostics & Health Management Society a world recognized scientist in the area of reliability centered, condition based and predictive maintenance.

His research focuses on the modeling of the failure-repair-maintenance behavior of components and complex systems, for the analysis of their reliability, maintainability, prognostics, safety, vulnerability, resilience and security characteristics, and on the development and use of Monte Carlo simulation methods, artificial intelligence techniques and optimization heuristics. He is author and co-author of seven books and more than 500 papers on international journals, Chairman and Co-Chairman of several international Conferences, associate editor of several international journals and referee of more than 20.