Programs & Events
The Provost’s Seminar Series features members of the following academies who visit campus to share their insights and meet with the campus community:
- American Academy of Arts and Sciences
- National Academy of Sciences
- National Academy of Engineering
- National Academy of Medicine
Fall 2026 Seminar Series
Naomi J. Halas | Physics and Astronomy
University Professor and Stanley C. Moore Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Rice University
“Machine Learning-Enhanced Surface-Enhanced Spectroscopies for the Detection of Toxic Environmental Contaminants”
August 21, 2026
9:15 a.m.
UGA Center for Continuing Education and Hotel, Masters Hall
The University of Georgia’s Department of Physics and Astronomy and NSF Workshop will host a Spectroscopy Data and AI Workshop keynote by Naomi J. Halas, University Professor and Stanley C. Moore Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering. The free lecture, titled “Machine Learning-Enhanced Surface-Enhanced Spectroscopies for the Detection of Toxic Environmental Contaminants,” will be on Friday, August 21, at UGA’s Center for Continuing Education and Hotel as part of the Fall 2026 Provost’s Seminar Series.
Halas’ lecture will focus on the ability to detect and identify polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) and their derivatives, polycyclic aromatic compounds (PACs) using spectroscopy-informed machine learning algorithms in mixtures, as well as using spectra calculated using Density Functional Theory for molecular species that are not commercially available.
Halas is best known for showing that the nanoscale internal and external morphology of noble metal nanoparticles controls their optical properties. She was the first person to introduce structural control into the colloidal synthesis of coinage metal nanoparticles to control their optical resonances. She is co-founder of Syzygy Plasmonics, a company with over 100 employees that has developed a light-based chemical reactor for ambient-temperature ammonia cracking and methane reforming. She is also co-founder of Nanospectra Biosciences, a company offering ultralocalized photothermal ablation therapies for cancer based on her nanoparticles. Halas is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Sciences, the Royal Danish Academy of Science and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Sponsored by the NSF Workshop and the Department of Physics and Astronomy
Event contacts: Yiping Zhao and Fengbo Ma
Lars Peter Hansen | Statistics
David Rockefeller Distinguished Service Professor, Departments of Economics, Statistics and the Booth School of Business, University of Chicago
Bradley Lecture: “Uncertainty Quantification for Robust Decision Making Under Ambiguity”
September 29
4 p.m.
Brooks Hall, Room 145
The University of Georgia’s Department of Statistics will host a lecture by Lars Peter Hansen, David Rockefeller Distinguished Service Professor in the Departments of Economics, Statistics and the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago, on Tuesday, September 29, at 4 p.m. in Brooks Hall Room 145 as part of the Fall 2026 Provost’s Seminar Series. The lecture is free and open to the public.
Hansen’s lecture, “Uncertainty Quantification for Robust Decision Making Under Ambiguity,” will draw on recent research connecting literature surrounding decision theory and extending uncertainty quantification methods to address policy challenges — including climate change — that incorporate concerns about potentially “deep uncertainties.”
Hansen is a leading expert in economic dynamics, drawing approaches from macroeconomics, finance and statistics. Hansen has made fundamental advances in the understanding of how economic agents cope with changing and risky environments. He is the recipient of the 2013 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. He also won the 2010 Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Economics, Finance and Management. In 2006, Hansen was awarded the Erwin Plein Nemmers Prize in Economics from Northwestern University. Hansen is a fellow of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Finance Association. He also is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
A short after-dinner talk, “Why Uncertainty Can Be a Call to Action,” will follow the lecture.
Sponsored by the Department of Statistics
Event contact: Ryan Christopher Robinson
Torben (Torrey) C. Rick | History
Senior Scientist and Curator of North American Archaeology, Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History
Georgia Museum of Natural History Summit Keynote
December 2026
The Georgia Museum of Natural History at the University of Georgia will host a summit keynote by Torben (Torrey) C. Rick, senior scientist and curator of North American Archaeology at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, in December 2026 as part of the Fall 2026 Provost’s Seminar Series.
Rick oversees a portion of the anthropology collections, works closely with a wide variety of students and fellows, collaborates with the museum’s Repatriation Program and studies collections from across the museum. As an archaeologist and historical ecologist, his interdisciplinary research is global in scope and focuses on understanding the long-term interactions between people and marine ecosystems. This research uses the past as a vehicle to document how we arrived at present day conditions and to help plan for future environmental change. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, a fellow of the California Academy of Sciences and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Sponsored by the Georgia Museum of Natural History
Nominations
The Provost’s Office will invite up to two speakers each Fall and Spring semester, and nominations will be considered on a rolling basis. Nominations for the Provost’s Seminar Series may be submitted to Maggie Parker at [email protected].
Speakers must be a member of one of the following academies to be considered: American Academy of Arts and Sciences, National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, National Academy of Medicine.
Nominators and their respective unit heads or deans are expected to serve as hosts for their selected speaker. The Provost’s Office will cover all travel expenses for speakers and provide a nominal honorarium. Talks given through the Provost’s Seminar Series are also eligible for designation as a Signature Lecture.
Contact
All nominations will be retained for future consideration if not selected initially. For more information about the Provost’s Seminar Series, please contact Maggie C. Parker at (706) 542-9860 or [email protected].
Spring 2026
Steven White | Physics and Astronomy
Distinguished Professor of Physics and Astronomy, University of California, Irvine
Chhabra-Landau Lecture: “Combining Monte Carlo and Tensor Networks to Beat the Quantum Exponential”
February 26
White is a condensed matter physicist who specializes in the simulation of quantum systems. He is particularly known as the inventor of the density matrix renormalization group, one of the leading approaches for simulating quantum systems in several areas of physics and chemistry, and the first tensor network algorithm. His simulations of models for high temperature superconductors have clarified the role of striped states, and his simulations of frustrated magnets have demonstrated the existence of quantum spin liquids. He has won the Rahman Prize in Computational Physics from the American Physical Society, and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences.
Sponsored by the Center for Simulational Physics
Event contact: Phillip Stancil
Fall 2025
Gary S. May | Higher Education
Chancellor, University of California, Davis
“A Retrospective and Prospective Look at the Value of Higher Education”
September 12
A national leader in STEM education and inclusion, May has served as the University of California, Davis Chancellor since 2017. Under his leadership, the university enrolls over 40,000 students, generates more than $1 billion in research funding annually, and contributes $12.5 billion to California’s economy. An expert in semiconductor manufacturing and expanding inclusion in engineering, May was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2018. In 2020, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences for his contributions to academic excellence and access.
Sponsored by the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences
Event contact: Susan Ambrosetti
Spring 2025
Bridget Scanlon | Geology
Research Professor, Bureau of Economic Geology, Jackson School of Geosciences, University of Texas at Austin
“Evaluating Approaches towards more Sustainable Global Water Resources Management”
January 24
Bridget Scanlon is a Research Professor at the Bureau of Economic Geology, Jackson School of Geosciences, University of Texas at Austin. Her degrees are in geology with a focus on hydrogeology with a B.A. Mod. from Trinity College, Dublin (1980); M.Sc. from the Univ. of Alabama (1983), and Ph.D. from the Univ. of Kentucky (1985). She has worked at the University of Texas since 1987. Her current research focuses on various aspects of water resources, including global assessments using satellites and modeling, management related to climate extremes, and water quality issues. Her recent research emphasizes linkages between drinking water quality violations and social vulnerability in the US. She has authored or co-authored approximately 170 publications. Dr. Scanlon is a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union and the Geological Society of America and a member of the National Academy of Engineering.
Sponsored by the Department of Geology
Event contact: Adam Milewski
Sarah Binder | Public and International Affairs
Professor of Political Science, George Washington University and Senior Fellow in Governance Studies, The Brookings Institute
George S. Parthemos Lecture: “Legislating in Partisan Times”
March 11
1 p.m.
Richard B. Russell Special Collections Libraries Auditorium (271)
Sarah Binder is professor of political science at George Washington University and senior fellow in Governance Studies at The Brookings Institution, specializing in Congress and legislative politics, as well as Congress’s relationship with the Federal Reserve.
She is most recently the co-author with Mark Spindel of The Myth of Independence: How Congress Governs the Federal Reserve (Princeton University Press 2017), which was awarded the Richard F. Fenno Jr. Prize for the best book published in legislative politics in 2017 and the Gladys Kammerer Award for the best book published in 2017 on U.S. national policy. Her earlier books include Minority Rights, Majority Rule: Partisanship and the Development of Congress (Cambridge University Press 1997); with Steven S. Smith, Politics or Principle? Filibustering in the United States Senate (Brookings Institution Press 1997); Stalemate: Causes and Consequences of Legislative Gridlock (Brookings Institution Press, 2003), winner of the Richard F. Fenno, Jr. Prize for the best book in legislative studies; and with Forrest Maltzman, Advice and Dissent: The Struggle to Shape the Federal Judiciary (Brookings Institution Press 2009). Her work has also appeared in the American Political Science Review and elsewhere.
Binder was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2015. She is also an American politics editor at Good Authority (a political science blog), a former coeditor of Legislative Studies Quarterly, and George Washington University’s Faculty Senate parliamentarian.
Binder received her Ph.D. in political science from the University of Minnesota in 1995 and B.A. from Yale University in 1986. She joined Brookings in 1995 and George Washington University in 1999.
Sponsored by the School of Public and International Affairs
Event Contact: Lauren Ledbetter
Lenore A. Grenoble | Linguistics
John Matthews Manly Distinguished Service Professor, Department of Linguistics, The University of Chicago
Thin Ice: Language and cultural change in a melting Arctic
March 24
4 p.m.
Miller Learning Center, Room 214
Lenore А. Grenoble is the John Matthews Manly Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Chicago, specializing in Slavic and Arctic Indigenous languages. She also holds positions as an adjunct professor at Ilisimatusarfik (the University of Greenland) and as director of the Arctic Linguistic Ecology Lab at the M.K. Ammosov North-Eastern Federal University in Yakutsk, Russia. Her research focuses on language contact and shift, vitality and sustainability, documentation and revitalization. Her primary fieldwork engages with speakers in far northeastern Russia, Siberia and Greenland. Grenoble is currently engaged in research that brings together linguistic, sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic factors in contact-induced morphosyntactic change and shift, together with a study of the relationship of climate change, urbanization, language vitality and well-being in Arctic Indigenous communities.
Sponsored by the Department of Linguistics
Event Contact: Keith Langston
Spring 2024
J. Michael Kosterlitz | Physics
Harrison E. Farnsworth Professor of Physics, Brown University
Chhabra-Landau Lecture in Physics
March 14, 3:55 p.m., Physics Building 202
Born in Scotland and educated at the University of Cambridge, J. Michael Kosterlitz is the Harrison E. Farnsworth Professor of Physics at Brown University, where his research focuses on theoretical condensed matter physics. In 2016 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for his work in using topology to explain phase transitions (now known as Kosterlitz-Thouless transitions) in two-dimensional materials. In 2017 he was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences.
Sponsored by the Center for Simulational Physics, the Department of Physics and Astronomy and the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences
Event contact: Amberly Tankersley
Eric Betzig | Biology, Chemistry and Physics
Professor of molecular and cell biology and Eugene D. Commins Presidential Chair in Experimental Physics, University of California, Berkeley
“New Windows Into the Secret Lives of Cells”
March 25, 10:20 a.m., STEM Research Building II, 1218
Eric Betzig and his colleague Harald Hess built the first super-resolution single molecule localization microscope. For this work, he was a co-recipient of the 2014 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. A professor of molecular and cell biology, Betzig is also the Eugene D. Commins Presidential Chair in Experimental Physics, a Senior Fellow at the Janelia Research Campus, and an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute at the University of California, Berkeley. Betzig was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2015.
Sponsored by the Department of Physics and Astronomy, the Department of Chemistry and the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology
Event contact: Yohannes Abate
Fall 2023
David A. Lake | Political Science
Distinguished Professor of Political Science, Jerri-Ann and Gary E. Jacobs Endowed Chair in Social Sciences, University of California, San Diego
“Anarchy, Hierarchy, and the Use of U.S. Power
in International Relations”
December 4, 2023
Lake has published widely in international relations theory and international political economy and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2006.
Sponsored by the Department of International Affairs and the School of Public and International Affairs.
Spring 2023
Steven G. Louie | Physics
Distinguished Professor of Physics, University of California Berkeley
Chhabra-Landau Lecture: “Discovering Nature with Computation: The Fascinating Quantum World of One- and Two-dimensional Materials”
April 13, 2023
Professor Steven G. Louie is a Distinguished Professor of Physics at the University of California at Berkeley (UC Berkeley) and a Senior Faculty Scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. He received his physics Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in 1976. After having worked at the IBM Watson Research Center, Bell Labs, and U of Penn, he joined the UC Berkeley faculty in 1980.Louie is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences, American Academy of Arts & Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and Academia Sinica, as well as fellow of the American Physical Society (APS), American Association for the Advancement of Science, and Materials Research Society (MRS). He is a recipient of the APS Rahman Prize for Computational Physics, APS Davisson-Germer Prize in Surface Physics, MRS Materials Theory Award, and Foresight Institute’s Feynman Prize, among others. His research is in theoretical and computational condensed matter physics. Louie has published over 680 papers. He is known for his pioneering development of the ab initio GW method and for his studies of novel materials and reduced-dimensional systems.
Sponsored by the Department of Physics and Astronomy and Center for Simulational Physics, Franklin College of Arts and Sciences.
Trudy F.C. Mackay | Genetics
Director, Center for Human Genetics at Clemson University
“Genetic Architecture of Complex Traits: Lessons from Drosophila”
March 1, 2023
Mackay is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Sponsored by the Department of Genetics, Franklin College of Arts and Sciences.
Spring 2022
Jahan Ramazani | English
University Professor and Edgar F. Shannon Professor, University of Virginia
“A Life in Poetry”
April 13, 2 p.m.
Ramazani specializes in modern and contemporary Irish, British, American, Caribbean American, and African poetry. His books include “The Hybrid Muse: Postcolonial Poetry in English” and “Poetry in a Global Age.” He is the editor of numerous books and special journal issues including “The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry” and “The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Poetry.” In his latest book, “Poetry in a Global Age,” Ramazani discusses modern and contemporary poems not only in relation to world literature, war, and questions of orientalism but also in light of current debates over ecocriticism, translation studies, tourism, and cultural geography.
Event hosted by the Willson Center for the Humanities and Arts. Lecture is part of the Spring 2022 Signature Lecture Series.
Fall 2021
Annette Gordon-Reed | History
Carl M. Loeb University Professor of History, Harvard University
Constitution Day: “On Juneteenth: History, Memory, the Present and the Future”
September 17, 11:30 a.m.
Gordon-Reed is a distinguished professor and a Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family” and “On Juneteenth.” She has received numerous honors, including the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a MacArthur Fellowship, the National Humanities Medal, the National Book Award, the Frederick Douglass Book Prize, the George Washington Book Prize and the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. Her lecture is part of Constitution Day, an annual celebration of the day that representatives to the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia completed and signed the U.S. Constitution in 1787.
Co-sponsored by the American Founding Group, The Gable Fund of the Department of History, Jack Miller Center, Office of Institutional Diversity, President’s Venture Fund, School of Law, School of Public and International Affairs, and Willson Center for Humanities and Arts.
Fall 2020
Johanna Drucker | Digital Humanities
Breslauer Professor of Bibliographical Studies at UCLA; Distinguished Professor of Information Studies
“Rethinking Assumptions: The Current Value(s) of Academic Work”
September 25, 1 p.m.
Drucker is internationally renowned for her work in the history of graphic design, typography, experimental poetry, fine art, and digital humanities. Her research includes modeling interpretation for electronic scholarship, digital aesthetics, the history of visual information design, history of the book and print culture, and critical studies in visual knowledge representation. Drucker’s most recent books are “SpecLab: Digital Aesthetics and Speculative Computing” and “Graphic Design History: A Critical Guide.” She is currently working on a database memoire, “ALL, the Online Museum of Writing” in collaboration with University College London and King’s College. Drucker is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Sponsored by the Office of the Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs and Provost, Willson Center for Humanities and Art, UGA Libraries, and the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences.
Spring 2020
Daryll J. Pines | Engineering
Dean, Clark School of Engineering; Professor of Aerospace Engineering
“Aerospace Prizes Inspire the Five I’s of Success”
March 5, 4 p.m.
Pines is a member of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE), American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA), and Institute of Physics (IOP).
Faculty Profile | Meet the Dean
Event hosted by the College of Engineering.
