Honors Thematic Focus website
Welcome, COD Students! Check out the calendar and list of resources for upcoming Honors Thematic Focus events. In the calendar, click on the event to view additional event information as well as links to associated supplemental resources, such as books and articles, online videos and bibliographies.
When viewing events on the calendar, be sure to click on upcoming months to view all events scheduled for the semester!
Stem Speakers Series: Neal Sales-Griffin, CEO at CodeNow
Friday, Sept. 15, 7pm – 9pm, HSC 1234
Neal Sales-Griffin is the CEO of CodeNow, a Y Combinator-backed nonprofit that hosts coding workshops for students from low-income backgrounds in six cities across the US. Before heading CodeNow, Sales-Griffin was the CEO of The Starter League, an institution determined "to teach everyone to code," with an innovative curriculum and strong alumni connections. He also serves as a coordinator to the non-profit International Game Developers Association (IGDA®) and is a faculty member for the Northwestern University Farley Center for entrepreneurship and Innovation. Sales-Griffin lends his mentorship to the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship.
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COD Faculty Panel Discussion. Topic: Communication
Thursday, Sept. 21, 1-3 p.m.
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Friday, Oct. 6, , 7-9 p.m.
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STEM Speaker Series Pauline Gagnon - Gigantic tools to explore the smallest particles
Friday, Nov. 3, 7-9 p.m. HSC1234
I was born in Chicoutimi in Quebec, Canada in 1955. As a young kid, I dreamt of understanding what were the fundamental constituents of matter. After teaching physics for a few years in local colleges, I fell in love, dropped everything and moved to California. There, I first studied at San Francisco State University then completed a PhD in particle physics at University of California in Santa Cruz. I then started my research activities at CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics located near Geneva, where I worked as a Senior Research Scientist with Indiana University until I retired in 2016. From 2011-2014, I worked within the CERN Communication group, writing blogs for the Quantum Diaries and answering questions from numerous media worldwide. Explaining particle physics in simple and accessible terms has become my trademark. Since 2013, I have given more than sixty presentations to large audiences in seven countries. I hope my book will allow me to reach even larger audiences since particle physics is too much fun to leave it only to physicists!
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Colloquium: Students present their work in panel discussions, poster sessions, presentations
Tue, December 5, 2017 SSC 2201 Atrium
COD Faculty Panel Discussion: Topic: Between Utopia and Dystopia
Tues, Jan. 30 Time TBD
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STEM Speaker Series: Wes Ketchum
Friday, Feb. 9, 2018 7:00 p.m. HSC 1234
Wes Ketchum is a member of the MicroBooNE collaboration at FermiLab, and he has spent the last year working at CERN in Switzerland. In 2014, he won the Physics Slam with his presentation using Claymation to show how different particles interact inside a liquid-argon particle detector, depicting them as multicolored monsters bumping into one another and creating electrons for the detector’s sensors to pick up.
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STEM Speaker Series: Andy Jansen
Friday, March 9, 2018 7:00 p.m. HSC 1234
Andrew Jansen is a chemical engineer in Argonne’s Chemical Sciences and Engineering Division who plans and conducts goal-oriented research and development on advanced battery systems; providing technical guidance and program direction. His work includes evaluating developmental cells/batteries with an emphasis on cell chemistry and hardware development for lithium-based battery chemistries for transportation applications.
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Arts Lecture: Marissa Lee Benedictza
Thursday, March 22, 2018 11:00 a.m. MAC 205
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STEM Speaker Series: Ted Daeschler
Friday, April 20, 2018, 7:30 p.m. HSC 1234
Ted Daeschler is an American vertebrate paleontologist and Associate Curator and Chair of Vertebrate Biology at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia. He is a specialist in fish paleontology, especially in the Late Devonian, and in the development of the first limbed vertebrates. He is the discoverer of the transitional fossil tetrapod Hynerpeton bassetti, and a Devonian fish-like specimen of Sauripterus taylorii with fingerlike appendages, and was also part of a team of researchers that discovered the transitional fossil Tiktaalik. He received a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in 1998. He has held recent research grants from the National Science Foundation, the National Geographic Society, and other donors. He is also known for his work on the preservation of natural history collections.
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STEM-CON Keynote Speaker: Emily Graslie
Saturday, April 28, 2018, 9:00 a.m. MAC
Emily Graslie is an American science communicator and YouTube educator. She started volunteering at the Philip L. Wright Zoological Museum at the University of Montana in 2011 and graduated with a BFA in studio art/painting. Today, she is the writer, producer, co-creator and host of The Brain Scoop, an educational YouTube channel that explores behind-the-scenes of The Field Museum in order to share the work of scientists and the value of research collections with the world. She is now employed by The Field Museum as their first-ever Chief Curiosity Correspondent and was the keynote speaker at the Chicago March for Science on April 22, 2017.
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