Oct. 30: Nobel Symposium
UD faculty experts to explain 2014 Nobel laureates' prize-winning work
3:44 p.m., Oct. 21, 2014--University of Delaware faculty members with expertise in each of the six areas of study that won this year's Nobel Prizes will discuss the significance of the winners’ work from 7-9 p.m., Thursday, Oct. 30, in the Interdisciplinary Science and Engineering Laboratory (ISE Lab).
The program, which is free and open to the public, is designed for non-specialists, with students, staff, faculty and community members encouraged to attend.
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The annual event will consist of six short talks and an opportunity for the audience to ask questions. Sponsored by the College of Arts and Sciences, the lecture will be held in ISE Lab’s first-floor atrium.
The series of talks is held each year as a way to give interested members of the UD community and the public more in-depth information about the Nobel laureates’ research than is found in general news stories about the prizes, said Doug Doren, the college’s acting deputy dean and senior associate dean for the natural sciences.
“Our faculty speakers do research in areas that are closely connected to the work being recognized, and they bring their personal insights to the talks,” he said.
This year’s speakers and their topics, as described by the Nobel Prize organization in announcing the honorees, are:
Bruno Thibault, professor of French, and Deborah Steinberger, associate professor of French, both in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, will discuss the Nobel Prize in Literature, awarded this year to the French author Patrick Modiano “for the art of memory with which he has evoked the most ungraspable human destinies and uncovered the life-world of the occupation.”
Amy Griffin, associate professor of psychological and brain sciences, will speak about the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, given to John O’Keefe, May-Britt Moser and Edvard I. Moser “for their discoveries of cells that constitute a positioning system in the brain.”
Michael Arnold, associate professor of economics and director of the UD Honors Program, will describe the work done by Jean Tirole, awarded this year’s Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel “for his analysis of market power and regulation.”
Josh Zide, associate professor of materials science and engineering, will speak about the Nobel Prize in Physics, given to Isamu Akasaki, Hiroshi Amano and Shuji Nakamura “for the invention of efficient blue light-emitting diodes which has enabled bright and energy-saving white light sources.”
Ismat Shah, professor of materials science and engineering and of physics and astronomy, will discuss the Nobel Peace Prize, awarded jointly this year to Malala Yousafzai and Kailash Satyarthi “for their struggle against the suppression of children and young people and for the right of all children to education.”
Jeffrey Caplan, director of the Delaware Biotechnology Institute’s Bioimaging Center with a secondary appointment in the Department of Biological Sciences, will speak about the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, given to Eric Betzig, Stefan W. Hell and William E. Moerner “for the development of super-resolved fluorescence microscopy.”