University Lecture Series

Monday, October 30^th

4:30pm Adamson Wing, 136A Baker Hall

The First Human: The Race to Discover Our Earliest Ancestors

Ann Gibbons

Correspondent, Science Magazine

“The First Human…this dynamic chronicle of the race to find the “missing links” between humans and apes transports readers into the highly-competitive world of fossil hunting and into the lives of the ambitous scientists intent on pinpinting the dawn of humankind. The quest to find where and when the earliest human ancestors first appeared is one of the most exciting and challenging of all scientific pursuits. The First Human is the story of four international teams obsessed with solving the mystery of human evolution and of the intense rivalries that propel them.”

Ann Gibbons has been a correspondent for more than a decade for Science magazine, where she has specialized in writing about evolution. With a name like Gibbons, it was perhaps inevitable that she would write about primate evolution, including the evolution of humans. Her research has included many hours observing highly evolved scientists in their familiar habitats, whether upright in the lab sequencing DNA or prone on the ground excavating fossils from ancient graves.

She has taught science writing in the English Department at Carnegie Mellon and has written articles for the New York Times, Discover, Insight travel guies, and other publications.

=========

International Festival Full details at www.cmu.edu/internationalfestival.

============================================

Thursday, November 2nd

4:30-5:30pm: Epidemic Vulnerabilities In A Connected World
McConomy Auditorium
Donald S. Burke, M.D. is Dean of the University of Pittsburgh’s Graduate School of Public Health and UPMC–Jonas Salk Chair in Global Health.

Friday, November 3rd

10-11am: Slow-Food International McKenna Room
Marlene Parrish has enjoyed a long personal relationship with food and cooking. Currently, she writes about food and travel for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and other newspapers. Food editor of Pittsburgh Magazine, restaurant reviewer, Phantom diner for KDKA-TV, marketing director for a restaurant group and owner of a cooking school are some of the other positions she has held. As co-leader of Slow Food Pittsburgh, she promotes sustainable agriculture and the pleasures of the communal table. Parrish is a graduate of Carnegie Institute of Technology.

10:30-11:30am: Autogenic Training Workshop
Connan Room
Autogenic Training is a powerful mind body technique that is used to help people reach deep levels of relaxation and thereby tap into the healing powers of the body. It was originally developed by the German psychiatrist Prof. Johannes Schultz as a form of training that originates within the self. Karin Arnds, Dipl-Psych, LMFT, is a native German, and completed her Masters degree in Psychology at the University of Marburg, Germany. She is on staff at Carnegie Mellon’s Student Counseling Center (CAPS) and also provides family and couples therapy in her private practice in Shadyside. She has taught Autogenic Training as a relaxation technique to many different populations in Germany and the United States.

11am-12pm: Privacy Implications of Public Health Informatics
Peter Room
Information Technology is being widely deployed in public health settings for applications ranging from disease monitoring to generating community health indices. Data for these applications are collated from a variety of sources such as hospitals, pharmacies, payors, and so on. Professor Rema Padman of the Heinz School for Public Policy will provide an overview of the trade-offs between societal benefits and the privacy implications of such data-intensive applications that are becoming increasingly contentious.

11am-12pm: Quality of Life Technology
Wright Room
Jim Osborn, Executive Director of the Quality of Life Technology Center will speak about the newly created center’s work. Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh both have long-standing traditions of technical excellence, interdisciplinary research and working together to solve problems for the betterment of society.
Emily Zipfel is a graduate student in the school of Health and Rehabilitation Science at the University of Pittsburgh. She works with Dr. Rory Cooper at the Human Engineering Research Laboratories (HERL), an interdisciplinary lab devoted to the research and design of wheelchairs and assistive technology (AT) for people with disabilities. She will discuss work done at HERL related to research, design and technology transfer of AT to developing countries.

12:30-2pm: Keynote Lecture & Lunch: Living in a World Without Borders
Rangos Ballroom
Dr. Richard Heinzl, founder of Doctors Without Borders, will offer the International Festival keynote lecture. Lunch will be provided to all in attendance. Tickets are free and are available at the University Center Information Desk.

2-3pm: Stress, Social Networks, Social Status & the Common Cold
McKenna Room
Over the last 20 years Dr. Sheldon Cohen, Robert E. Doherty Professor of Psychology, has been interested in how psychological and social factors influence susceptibility to disease, especially the common cold. Much of his work uses a unique paradigm in which he assesses psychological characteristics in individuals and then intentionally exposes them to viruses that cause colds and flu.

2:30-3:30pm: Fearlessness: Zen and the Art of War
Wright Room
Reverend Kyoki Roberts of the Zen Center of Pittsburgh, a Soto Zen Buddhist priest and a founding member of the Order of the Prairie Wind (OPW), will speak on Zen Buddhism Meditation.

3-4pm: Place and Health: How Where You Live Matters Connan Room
This session will look at how the social and physical environment shapes health behavior and ultimately health. Tamara Dubowitz is an Associate Policy Researcher at RAND and was trained in Social Epidemiology with concentrations in Maternal and Child Health and Public Health Nutrition.

3-4pm: Kill Two Chickens and Call Me In The Morning: Cross-Cultural Approaches to Health and Illness Dowd Room
Dr. Marie Norman serves as Adjunct Professor of Anthropology in the Department of History as well as Teaching Consultant and Research Associate at the Eberly Center for Teaching Excellence. While her research has focused on tourism and caste relations in Nepal, one of her primary interests is medical anthropology, and she has taught courses at Carnegie Mellon and on Semester at Sea dealing with cross-cultural approaches to health and illness..

3:30-4:30pm: Risk & Opportunity: AIDS, Injection Drug Use, & Public Health Outreach Peter Room
Caroline Jean Acker, Associate Professor of History at Carnegie Mellon, is a historian of medicine and public health. She is the author of Creating the American Junkie: Addiction Research in the Classic Era of Drug Control (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002) and co-editor, with Sarah W. Tracy, of Altering American Consciousness: the History of Alcohol and Drug Use in the United States, 1800-2000 (University of Massachusetts Press, 2004). In 1995, she co-founded Prevention Point Pittsburgh, Allegheny County’s needle exchange program. She continues to volunteer with the program and serves as the president of its board of directors.

3:30-4:30pm: Optimism, Coping and Health
Rangos 3
Michael Scheier, Professor and Head in the Department of Psychology and Co-Director of the Pittsburgh Mind-Body Center will present. For a number of years now researchers have explored the impact of positive expectancies on psychological and physical well-being.

4-5pm: Diabetes and Culture
Wright Room
Janice Dorman, Associate Professor in the Department of Epidemiology at the University of Pittsburgh, will present on the World Health Organization (WHO) Multinational Project for Childhood Diabetes (WHO DIAMOND Project), which has been developed to investigate and characterize global incidence, mortality and health care.

5:30-6:30pm: Supercourse: Epidemiology, the Internet & Global Health
Connan Room
Ronald LaPorte, Professor of Epidemiology at the University of Pittsburgh and Director of Disease Monitoring and Telecommunications at the WHO Collaborating Centre, will lead a presentation on Supercourse, a global repository of lectures on public health and prevention targeting educators across the world. Supercourse has a network of 38000 scientists in 151 countries who are sharing for free a library of over 2742 lectures.


Saturday, November 4th

9:30-10:30am: Refugee Health and Reproductive Rights
Wright Room
Khadra Mohammed, Director of the Pittsburgh Refugee Center, will discuss refugee health and reproductive rights.

12-1pm: We Are More Than Just Fast Runners: A Look at Kenya Today
Dowd Room
Join Soila Pertet, Ph.D. student in the department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, as she shares her home country of Kenya’s rich cultural traditions and discusses how those traditions are maintained in light of current medical, political and social conditions. Soila will also discuss the HIV/AIDS pandemic in Kenya and how culture has influenced and been influenced by the pandemic.

12:30-1:30pm: Medical Service Learning Experiences Abroad
Connan Room
Carnegie Mellon students share their unique study abroad experiences with medical service learning in this panel discussion. Malasa Jois, senior biological sciences and psychology major, did a preceptorship abroad in various clinics in Oaxaca, Mexico through the Child Family Health International program during June 2006. Sheila Prakash, senior biological sciences major, went to Kenya with International Service Learning, a program that allows students to join international health care teams and provide medical treatment to villages and communities where medical facilities are inadequate or completely unavailable.

1-2pm: South Africa, AIDS, Theatre and Me McKenna/Peter Room
Barbara Mackenzie-Wood, Head of Acting/Music Theatre in the School of Drama will talk about her work with AIDS affected children in South Africa and the Theatre program she helped to created with World Camps.

1:30-2:15pm: Global Perspective on Local Introspective: An Israeli, a Middle Eastern, or a Jew?
Dowd Room
Ido Roll, a Ph.D. student in Human and Computer Interaction, will share her personal journey.

3-4pm: Nonmaterial Aspects of Health: Mind and Spirit Dowd Room
Humankind is more than just molecules in motion. There is a strong coupling between mind and spirit and human health. Gary Patterson, Professor of Chemical Physics and Polymer Science, will lead a panel discussion on the relationship between social, psychological and religious factors and physical wellbeing.

3:30-4:30pm: The Practice of Tarantismo in the Salento Area of Southern Italy
McKenna/Peter Room
Franco Sciannameo, College of Fine Arts Distinguished Scholar in Multidisciplinary Studies and interim director of its Bachelor of Humanities and Arts (BHA) and Bachelor of Science and Arts (BSA) programs, will present a lecture on his research on Tarantismo.