Distinguished Faculty Lecture Series 2011-2012
The University of Massachusetts Amherst is proud of its faculty members and their many accomplishments. The Distinguished Faculty Lecture Series, an annual event for more than thirty years, is just one way that we honor and celebrate our faculty. Video of each lecture will be posted here about a week after the lecture.
Chasing Interdisciplinarity While Chasing Tornadoes
David J. McLaughlin
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Video will be posted when available.
Recent catastrophic tornadoes in Joplin, Missouri, Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and yes: even Springfield, Massachusetts, along with increasingly severe and anomalous weather patterns worldwide, have placed a high premium on weather centers that observe, understand, predict, and respond to hazardous weather with greatest accuracy. The Engineering Research Center for Collaborative Adaptive Sensing of the Atmosphere, conceived by Professor McLaughlin and his collaborators, comprises a dense network of small radars that communicate with one another to sense hazardous weather patterns and distribute accurate warnings to people who need them. Not just a collaboration among radar engineers, CASA also represents an interdisciplinary effort by meteorologists, sociologists, geographers, computer scientists, graduate and undergraduate students, and partners from the public and private sectors—all of whom are subject to the weather. Professor McLaughlin will articulate the social, policy, behavioral and technical interface issues around the use of CASA in weather-determined decision making and response.
Wednesday, April 4, 2012 • 4 p.m.
Mullins Center Massachusetts Room
Stress, Puberty, and Mental Health: Remodeling of the Brain's Response to Hormones
Jeffrey D. Blaustein
Department of Psychology and the Neuroscience and Behavior Program
Video will be posted when available.
Professor Blaustein is a pioneer in behavioral neuroendocrinology—the study of how hormones act on the nervous system to influence behavior and mental health. He discovered in animal models that, while hormones influence cells of the brain by acting on hormone-specific receptors, and consequently behavior, receptors for the hormones can also be regulated by stress and stimulation from the surrounding environment. Stress encountered during puberty in mice, for example, actually remodels the brain, permanently altering its response to ovarian hormones. These findings, although made in mice, have great promise to help us understand mental health as an entire complex of interactions between hormones, the environment, and the nervous system.
Wednesday, March 7, 2012 • 4 p.m.
Mullins Center Massachusetts Room
Communicating More -- or Less? Social Networking and Democratic Action in the Global Arena
Jarice Hanson
Department of Communication
Digital technologies—especially social media and social networking—are shaping new behaviors, communication contexts, social practices, and grassroots political movements around the world. Professor Hanson focuses on themes that reflect the shift from "old" to "new" media: online social practices such as cyberbullying and identity formation, the idea that new technology leads to efficiency, and the belief that interactive media are more "democratic"—both in the United States and emerging power bases elsewhere.
Wednesday, November 30, 2011 • 4 p.m.
Bernie Dallas Room, Goodell Building
UMass Amherst’s Radical Revolution in Economics, 1965-1981
Donald W. Katzner
Department of Economics
Against a backdrop of Cold War fears, social upheaval, and student activism, an academic department at a state-supported institution underwent changes as unexpected as they were rapid and wrenching. Professor Katzner describes how a significant, visible group of Marxian economists replaced their traditionalist counterparts in the UMass Amherst Economics Department and how the resulting turmoil eventually resolved itself into an intellectually exciting, friendly, and productive atmosphere with lasting implications for academic endeavor and a profound legacy for the economics profession.