College of Arts + SciencesSeminar Series

The College of Arts and Sciences is pleased to announce the inaugural year of the 利记sbo College of Arts and Sciences Seminar Series.

This lecture series invites the campus community to join us as we explore the relationships between the arts and sciences through a dedicated annual theme. To engage this theme, our three college departments -- Math and Computer Science; Humanities, Social Sciences, and Communication; and Natural Sciences -- invite internal and external speakers to help us discover links between each other's disciplines through seminars, lectures, and roundtable discussions.

Lectures will be held on Thursday from 12:30 PM - 1:45 PM in S100. Each event is free, open to the public, and followed by free pizza for attendees.

The College of Arts and Sciences is pleased to announce its seminar theme for the 23-24 academic year: Experimental Curiosity.

Through a diverse series of events hosted by our three departments, we invite the campus community to join us as we explore the relationship between experimentation and curiosity in the many senses of each term. How does experimentation fuel curiosity? How does curiosity lead to new experimental methods and approaches? How do researchers take their curiosity and transform it into tangible experiments that yield knowledge? How does experimentation and curiosity vary across disciplines? How does experimental curiosity change the way we approach our personal and professional development? Does it make us bolder in our quest to satisfy the unknown?

With roots in southwest Michigan and a catalyst in chemical biology, we will explore an unanticipated path to agricultural research. In my current role as the Michigan State University Potato and Sugar Beet pathologist, we work at the crossroads of many disciplines, including chemistry, biology, microbiology, crop and soil science, meteorology and climatology, engineering, technology, and food science. Our work with regionally and internationally important agricultural crops is further built on multifaceted interactions with farmers, agri-business professionals, commodity and scientific organizations, policy and regulatory agencies, as well as a diverse network of academic, public, and private researchers. These connections enable our research and extension program to develop integrated management strategies for current and emerging potato and sugar beet diseases. Current investigations of pathogen biology, ecology, and disease epidemiology help us develop tools, including predictive models and monitoring technologies, for use in effective and economical disease management. We will examine the influence of how curiosity and experimentation through defining undergraduate, graduate, and post-graduate experiences have led to and shaped our current research activities.