Shulman Lectures in Science and the Humanities

"An Atom as an Onion"

Young-Kee Kim is the Louis Block Professor of Physics at the University of Chicago. She has devoted much of her research work to understanding the origin of mass for fundamental particles by studying the two most massive particles (the W boson and the top quark), as well as the Higgs particle, which gives mass to elementary particles. Between 2004 and 2006, she was the spokesperson of the CDF experiment at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory’s Tevatron, a collaboration with more than 600 physicists from around the world. From 2006 to 2013, she was Deputy Director of Fermilab.

"Research at the Energy Frontier: What, Why, and How?"

Jonathan Butterworth, an experimental particle physicist, is head of the Physics and Astronomy Department at University College London. His current research is on the ATLAS experiment at the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC), where he has led a UCL group that contributed to the tracking, trigger, and software for the experiment. His work has focused on physics processes at the LHC that will help us discover more about electroweak symmetry breaking, or basically “why some things have mass.” This included searching for the Higgs boson, discovered in July 2012.

"Matter Over Mind: Situational Strategies for Self-Control"

Angela Duckworth is Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania and a 2013 MacArthur Fellow. She studies non-IQ competencies, including self-control and grit, which predict success both academically and professionally. Her research populations have included West Point cadets, National Spelling Bee finalists, novice teachers, salespeople, and students. Duckworth received a BA in neurobiology from Harvard and, as a Marshall Scholar, a Masters in neuroscience from Oxford. She completed her PhD in psychology at the University of Pennsylvania.

"Gesture as a Mechanism of Change"

Susan Goldin-Meadow is the Beardsley Ruml Distinguished Service Professor of Psychology and Comparative Human Development at the University of Chicago. Her focus is on the ways that the body can affect learning––how it provides insight into a learner’s skills and contributes to changing them. More specifically, she studies movements of the body that are representational––the gestures we produce when we talk—and contrasts them with movements that have a direct effect on the world––actions on objects. She is a co-investigator of the NSF-funded Spatial Intelligence and Learning Center (SILC)

"Understanding the Moral Mind"

David Pizarro is currently Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at Cornell University. His primary research interest is in how and why humans make moral judgments, such as what makes us think certain actions are wrong, and that some people deserve blame. He also studies how emotions influence a wide variety of judgments. These two topics come together in much of his recent work, which has focused on disgust and the role it plays in shaping moral, social, and political judgments.