2007: Lisa Randall
 Lisa Randall is one of the world's leading physicists and is among the most cited scientists of our time. Her book, Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe's Hidden Dimensions, brings her quest to explain the very fabric of reality—via string theory—to a broad readership.
A Professor of Theoretical Physics at Harvard, Randall's book takes readers into the incredible world of warped, hidden dimensions that underpin the universe we live in. Randall demystifies the science and beguilingly unravels the mysteries of the myriad worlds that may exist just beyond the one we are only now beginning to know.
Lisa Randall was the first tenured woman in the Princeton physics department and the first tenured woman theoretical physicist at MIT and Harvard. She is the winner of an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship and a National Science Foundation Young Investigator Award. In 2006, she received the Klopsted Award from the American Society of Physics Teachers and was featured in Newsweek's "Who's Next in 2006" issue.
2006: Jared M. Diamond
Jared M. Diamond is an American author, evolutionary biologist, physiologist, and biogeographer. Best known for the Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Guns, Germs, and Steel (1998), which explores the geographic, cultural, environmental, and technological factors which have led to domination of Western culture in the world and argues for a new kind of history based on science that can make predictions rather than merely describing "one damn fact after another."
Professor Diamond spoke about his most recent book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (2004) on Wednesday, March 1, 2006 beginning at 5 p.m. in Severance Hall. Collapse examines what caused some of the great civilizations of the past to collapse into ruin and considers what contemporary society can learn from their fates.
In addition to being a renowned author, Diamond is a professor of geography at the University of California, Los Angeles. He has received a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (the so-called “Genius Award”) as well as research prizes from the American Physiological Society and the National Geographic Society. He has been elected a member of all three of the leading national scientific/academic honorary societies, the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.
2005: Stephen Pinker
Steven Pinker is the Johnstone Professor of Psychology at Harvard University and a world-renowned linguist and cognition expert. He delivered the first in Case Western Reserve University’s annual Distinguished Lecture Series on March 14 at 4 p.m. in Severance Hall.
Pinker is best known for his books on language: The Language Instinct (1994), How the Mind Works (1997) and Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language. In 2002 he published The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, which explored the political, moral and emotional colorings of human nature. He is a three-time winner of the William James Book Prize.
A native of Montreal, Pinker holds a B.A. in experimental psychology from McGill University and a Ph.D. from Harvard. He taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1982-2003, when he moved to Harvard. |
