October 14, 2007
Deborah Kaufman and Alan Snitow
Thirst: Fighting the Corporate Theft of Our Water

November 11, 2007
David Mabberley
The Story of the Apple

January 13, 2008
Paul Dietrich
Cosmos, Eros, Abyss: Forms of Western Mysticism

February 10, 2008
Hideo Mabuchi
Quantum Optics and Atomic Physics

March 9, 2008
David Montgomery
Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations

April 13, 2008
Ellen Dissanayake
The Deep Structure of the Arts

Both Deborah Kaufman and Alan Snitow are writers and film documentarians. They wrote and produced the film then co-authored the book Thirst: Fighting the Corporate Theft of Our Water with Michael Fox, which was seen on PBS. Kaufman founded the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival. An activist for human rights and social justice issues, Kaufman is also an attorney and member of the California State Bar. Snitow’s journalism has taken him into award-winning TV production in California.
 LEARN MORE  Snitow-Kaufman Productions, Thirst
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David Mabberley is Professor of Botany at the University of Washington where he is also director of the Botanic Gardens. His education includes a B. A. and M. A. in Botany from Oxford, England and a Ph.D. from Cambridge. His publications include sixteen books and over 200 publications. Awards include the important Linnean Gold Medal for Botany. He has lectured and taught the world over. Current research interests include systematics and ecology of Rutaceae (especially Citrus), Vitaceae, Malvaceae (‘Tiliaceae’), Meliaceae and Labiatae; economic plants; importance of nineteenth-century horticulture in scientific progress; and history of botanical illustration. He is President of the International Association for Plant Taxonomy and a trustee of the Sir Joseph Banks Archive Project in London.
 LEARN MORE  University of Washington faculty profile, UBC Botanical Garden profile
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Paul Dietrich is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Montana. He received a B. A. from Wesleyan University and an M. A. and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. He teaches the history of western religious thought, mysticism, medieval women mystics, renaissance intellectual history, and medieval art history. Recent courses include: The Grail Quest; Perfect Fools — Divine Madness and Holy Folly from Plato to Dostoevsky; Crusade and Jihad: Comparative Christian and Islamic Political Thought; and “Who Do You Say That I Am?” — Images of Jesus from the New Testament to modern America. Current research and publishing projects include Romanesque iconography in Provence; an overview of recent research on Meister Eckhart; the interpretation of the Qur’an and theories of vision of the fifteenth century philosopher Nicholas of Cusa. Books include Meister Eckhart and the Beguine Mystics.
 LEARN MORE  University of Montana profile, “Medieval Women Mystics”
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Hideo Mabuchi is Associate Professor of Physics and Control & Dynamical Systems at the California Institute of Technology. He received his A.B. from Princeton University and Ph.D. from Caltech. His research primarily explores the details of how microscopic quantum systems interact with macroscopic measurement and control devices used in the lab. This is an important avenue of work for future electronic devices, because as those devices become increasingly smaller, designers will find it more necessary to take quantum effects into consideration. Other interests include the application of mathematical methods from control theory to analyze and design complex physical systems, quantum optics with nanostructures, molecular biophysics, and quantum metrology. His honors include an A. P. Sloan Research Fellowship, an ONR Young Investigator Award and a Fellowship from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Genius Grant.
 LEARN MORE  Caltech faculty profile, MabuchiLab
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David Montgomery is a Professor of the Earth and Space Sciences and Director of the Quaternary Research Center at the University of Washington. He received a B.S. in geology from Stanford University and a Ph.D. in geomorphology from the University of California at Berkeley. His primary research interests concern landscape-forming processes and their interactions with other natural systems. The result is his book: Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations. He has been named Fellow of the American Geophysical Union.
 LEARN MORE  University of Washington faculty profile, “Earth’s Dirty Little Secret”
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Ellen Dissanayake is Affiliate Professor in the School of Music at the University of Washington in Seattle. She synthesizes a wide variety of approaches — from neuroscience and ethology, physical and cultural anthropology, and developmental and cognitive psychology — to support her claim that the arts, including music, evolved to be an inherent part of human nature: normal, natural, and necessary. Three books she has written are: What Is Art For?, Homo Aestheticus, and Art and Intimacy. Her work draws upon experiences from more than fifteen years residence in non-Western countries, including Sri Lanka, India, Nigeria, and Papua New Guinea. In 1997, she was Emens Distinguished Professor of the Arts at Ball State University in Indiana, and in 1998, Distinguished Visitor in the Department of Fine Arts at the University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada.
 LEARN MORE  Profile, Review, “The Core of Art: Making Special”
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