A symposium sponsored by the National Academy of Sciences to be held on the University of Colorado at Boulder campus Oct. 31 will feature talks by three of Boulder聮s top researchers, all members of the prestigious national academy.
Free and open to the public, the symposium is part of a regional meeting of the NAS, one of about five held annually and the first ever held in Boulder. Congress created the NAS in 1863 to select the nation聮s top scientists in order to advise the federal government on questions of science and technology. There are currently 1,798 regular members of NAS from 43 states, including 18 from CU-Boulder.
The NAS symposium will be held from 1:30 p.m. to 3:30 p.m. on Tuesday, Oct. 31, in the Old Main Chapel on campus. The program will begin with a welcome and introductions by W. Carl Lineberger, the E.U. Condon Distinguished Professor in the CU-Boulder chemistry and biochemistry department. Lineberger was elected to the NAS in 1983 for his groundbreaking work in ionizing atoms.
"This symposium should be of broad interest to the public and is a chance to showcase some of the finest intellectual accomplishments in Colorado," said Lineberger, also a JILA Fellow. "I think it also is a recognition by the National Academy of Sciences regarding the degree that Boulder has grown scientifically over the past decade."
Headquartered on campus, JILA is a joint institute of CU-Boulder and the National Institute of Standards and Technology.
Lineberger聮s introduction will be followed by three talks by Boulder scientists: Distinguished Professor David Prescott of CU-Boulder聮s molecular, cellular and developmental biology department; Distinguished Professor Carl Wieman of the physics department and JILA; and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Senior Scientist Susan Solomon. Solomon also is a fellow of the Cooperative Institute in Research and Environmental Sciences, a joint institute of CU and NOAA on campus.
Prescott, who was elected to NAS in 1974, will speak on "The Bizarre Structure of Genes in Ciliated Protozoans: Evolution of Evolvability?" Prescott is studying the genetics of a particular ciliated protozoa with unique features that makes it useful in understanding the organization of DNA sequences in chromosomes and individual genes.
The particular protozoa he studies exhibit extraordinary rearrangements of segments in some genes, cutting, splicing and rearranging their DNA to a remarkable degree during each life cycle.
Prescott聮s talk will be followed by a lecture by Wieman, who was elected to NAS in 1995 and who will speak on "A New Form of Matter at the Coldest Temperature in the Universe: Bose-Einstein Condensate." In collaboration with Eric Cornell, a NIST senior scientist, CU-Boulder adjoint physics professor and JILA Fellow, Wieman聮s research involves trapping and cooling atoms to explore fundamental problems in physics.
In 1995 Wieman and Cornell led of team of physicists that created the first Bose-Einstein condensate, a new form of matter that allows scientists to study the strange and tiny world of quantum physics in detail. Predicted in 1924 by Albert Einstein, who built on the work of Satyendra Nath Bose, the condensate has created a new branch of atomic physics and occurs when individual chilled atoms begin to overlap and behave in identical fashion, forming a "superatom."
The final speaker will be Susan Solomon, who will share her research in a talk titled "Adventures Under the Ozone Hole." Solomon was elected to NAS in 1992 at the age of 36, the youngest member of the academy at the time. She was honored for developing theories about how chemical reactions involving manmade chlorine compounds could deplete Antarctic ozone.
Her leadership of National Ozone Expeditions to the Antarctic in 1986 and 1987 provided direct evidence the compounds were seriously depleting ozone. Solomon also was named a 1999 winner of the National Medal of Science, given annually by the U.S. president to eight outstanding researchers. Solomon is the first NOAA scientist to be honored with the medal, the nation's highest scientific honor.