Winter 2018

Grant Ballard
“Providing the scientific basis for protection of the world’s last pristine ocean”
Chief Science Officer at Point Blue Conservation Science
www.pointblue.org
Grant currently leads several projects investigating and communicating the effects of landscape-scale environmental stressors on ecosystems and human stakeholders in western North America and the Southern Ocean. He is responsible for shaping and growing the organization’s multi-investigator scientific research and conservation programs towards the vision that healthy ecosystems will continue to sustain thriving wildlife and human communities in California and beyond, on land and at sea, for decades to come. He will talk about his research on the Ross Sea ecosystem, the creation of a large Marine Protected Area, and climate-smart conservation.

Marit MacArthur
“Poetry Reading, Performative Speech, and Sound Studies”
Lecturer, University Writing Program, UC Davis
http://writing.ucdavis.edu/people/mjmacart
MacArthur analyzes recordings of poetry readings as texts-in-performance, researching the evolution of and trends in performance styles. Such research requires tools that work well on low-quality, noisy audio common in humanities research, including poetry readings, radio plays, and talking books, the datasets for a new collaborative project funded by a NEH Digital Humanities Advancement grant. Working with media historian Mara Mills (NYU), radio historian Neil Verma (Northwestern University), neuroscientist/bioengineer Lee Miller (UC Davis), and software developer Robert Ochshorn, MacArthur is developing and supporting humanistic research on audio archives. She will talk about her initial findings analyzing sample recordings of 100 American poets.

Veronika Hubeny
“Wonders of Black Holes”
Professor http://hubeny.physics.ucdavis.edu/
Veronika Hubeny is a theoretical physicist, exploring the fundamental underpinnings of our universe. Her research interests lie mainly in areas of string theory and quantum gravity. Hoping to elucidate the underlying nature of spacetime, she is particularly fascinated by `holographic dualities’ which describe higher-dimensional gravitational theory by a lower- dimensional non-gravitational one. Much of her work involves deeper understanding of black holes within this context, and their mysterious links to quantum information theory.