Speaker Line up for October 2, 6 pm
Alejandro Cardenas-Avendano, PhD – Assistant Professor of Physics, Wake Forest University.
Alejandro studies the effects of gravity on astrophysical systems. Before joining Wake Forest he was a Richard P. Feynman Distinguished Fellow at Los Alamos National Laboratory and a Postdoctoral Fellow at Princeton University.
Chasing Light Echoes Around Black Holes
What happens when light gets stuck going in circles around a black hole? We’ll take a look at one of Einstein’s strangest predictions, why these cosmic “echoes” have remained hidden, and how the next generation of telescopes could help us see them for the first time.
Erin Henslee, PhD – Associate Professor, Wake Forest Engineering.
Her research at Wake Forest spans biomedical engineering, STEM education, and faculty development. She co-runs HiddenSTEM.wfu.edu, a site dedicated to sharing inclusive curriculum resources. She believes math and science are beautiful places of creativity and discovery and should be taught and talked about that way! She runs the Great Engineering Bake Off summer camp with Kaleideum annually (and loves to talk about it)!
The Rhythms of Life
Have you ever wondered why more people are born and die between 3am and 5am? Is there really such a thing as morning “larks” and night “owls”? Why does your teenager sleep so much? The answers are in Chronobiology, the serious scientific study of how our internal biological clocks tick, but human behavior makes it an absolute comedy of errors. At its core, it is the daily biological warfare between who you want to be and what your circadian rhythms actually demand. In this talk we will explore the rhythms that have shaped us biologically and socially.
Joseph Mills, PhD – Professor, UNC School of the Arts.
A faculty member at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, Joseph Mills holds an endowed chair, the Susan Burress Wall Distinguished Professorship in the Humanities, and has been honored with a UNC Board of Governors Award for Excellence in Teaching. He has published eight volumes of poetry, most recently The Holiday Cycle, a book of short fiction, and academic criticism, including editing a volume of critical essays A Century of the Marx Brothers. In the spring of 2027, Press 53 will publish his New and Selected Poems. More information is available at www.josephrobertmills.com.
The Long and Winding Yellow Brick Road: Why We Return to Oz Again and Again
Why does The Wizard of Oz continue to captivate audiences more than a century after it was first published? From the original novel to the classic film, The Wiz, and Wicked, each generation has found new meanings in Dorothy’s journey down the Yellow Brick Road. This talk explores the enduring questions at the heart of Oz: What do we truly need? What makes a community? Who holds power, and why? Along the way, we’ll consider why a Kansas farm girl, a mysterious wizard, and a land filled with witches and talking animals still have so much to teach us about being human.