College of Arts + Sciences
Seminar Series

The College of Arts and Sciences is pleased to announce the inaugural year of the LTU 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?

A story of data, disease, and opportunity to work in HIV labs – Curious: Can math modeling cure HIV, diabetes, or save a marriage?

Mathematical modeling has had a profound impact on the study of diseases for over 100 years. With recent advances in health care, AI, and data collection, we were getting comfortable with our understanding of disease dynamics and then COVID reset our expectations. I’ll discuss how this impacted my recent work but also my journey from graduate school to today and how working in an HIV lab and collaborating with a medical professional on Diabetes led me to seeing things differently. I have been blessed to have had the opportunity to mentor over 20 students from undergraduate to Ph.D. where many have gone on to successful, interdisciplinary, careers in health care, medicine, and academics. Their success besides just being plain smart can be attributed to Experimental Curiosity; thinking outside the box, not being afraid to take chances, and truly being curious about Science.