Spring 2025 Series

The 2025 spring series will showcase the remarkable work of retired faculty members and will take place via Zoom (links below) and at Foster Auditorium in the Pattee-Paterno Library, University Park. This semester’s lectures cover diverse topics, offering insightful perspectives on science, the next world, and Zen Buddhism; findings in the works of Ernest Hemingway; animals and the natural world; and vitamin A metabolism. The spring schedule for the series is as follows:

Kenji Uchino: NEW SCIENCE – Scientific Approach to the Unknown World

January 28, 2025, 9:00 – 10:30 a.m.
ZOOM Only

Kenji Uchino is a “Zen” practitioner interested in learning the “Next World” after our death. In his lecture, Dr. Uchino will try to approach this “New Science” area in lay words as an engineering professor. He will first discuss “how the Nobel Prize winners developed their theories”, including Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg, Schrödinger and Dirac, coupled with Oriental religion. After the concept evolution from quantum physics, through ‘quark’, then ‘super-string’ models, he will then touch upon the “Holographic Universe”, including the ‘brain science’ and cosmic world, ‘Black Hole’. In the latter part of the lecture, Dr. Uchino will introduce the key aspects in “Zen” Buddhism, to reach the “Satori (Enlightenment)” status.

Lecture Recording

Ellen Knodt: Discoveries in the Archives

February 19, 2025, 2:30 – 4:00 p.m.
Foster Auditorium, Pattee-Paterno Library, University Park or via Zoom

Reading an author’s early manuscripts and letters can lead to discoveries of changes in the meaning of a particular work or in a change in an author’s perspective over time. Dr. Knodt’s work in the Ernest Hemingway Collection at the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston and rare books archives at Princeton and Yale has resulted in discoveries of a change of one word, or in another instance, a change in one letter, creating a different perception of a narrator. Hemingway’s letters, being collected and published by the Hemingway Letters Project housed at Penn State, have similarly yielded specific insights into one of the author’s more ambiguous stories and even his political ideas.

Presentation (PDF)

Glen Mazis: The Animal as Source of Human Excellence

March 20, 2025, 2:30 – 4:00 p.m.
Foster Auditorium, Pattee-Paterno Library, University Park or via Zoom

This lecture will present ideas from Dr. Mazis’ research that our distinctive human excellences are not the result of transcending our “animal nature,” but rather are founded upon the capacities of being an animal and part of the natural world. These excellences stem from our embodiment (versus “a nonmaterial spirit’), whether it is our capacities for thought, language, art, ethics, or care that are shared by many other animals in differing forms. Of interest to colleagues in philosophy, cultural studies, history, religion, the arts, poetics, biology, animal studies, ecology, and anthropology… Our obligation to respect both animals and the natural world as kin will be asserted.

Michael Green: From Engineering to Physiology to Nutritional Biochemistry: Applying Mathematics and Computer Modeling to Vitamin A Metabolism and the Assessment of Vitamin A Status in Community Settings

Tuesday, April 15, 2025, 2:30 – 4:00 p.m.
Foster Auditorium, Pattee-Paterno Library, University Park or via Zoom

In this lecture Dr. Green will describe how, after beginning studies in engineering at Berkeley, he moved into the life sciences, earning a BA in physiology and then a PhD in nutritional biochemistry – retaining a conviction that applied mathematics was an untapped resource for advancing knowledge about biological systems, including nutrient metabolism. During Dr. Green’s postdoctoral research at Cornell, followed by training at the Laboratory for Mathematical Biology at NIH and then years of self-study and collaboration, he developed an expertise in model-based compartmental analysis, using these tools to describe, simulate, and quantify the metabolism of nutrients and other biologically interesting entities. Dr. Green will focus his lecture on research done in his lab and with collaborators on whole-body vitamin A metabolism, ending with a discussion of how these complex mathematical approaches have led to improvements in the use of predictive equations to assess vitamin A status in community settings worldwide. 

Lecture Recording