LIR Course Schedule

2025 Past Events

The Importance of Biodiversity and the Future of Conservation: A Case Study of South American Rainforests

Tuesday, March 18th

Paul Fine, professor of Integrative Biology at UC Berkeley, discussed the importance of describing biodiversity for the future of rainforest conservation.

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The Role of Biological Field Stations in Advancing Ecosystem Science

Tuesday, March 4th

Speaker: Ida Naughton, Reserve Director for the Angelo Coast Range Reserve

The experimental removal of introduced species can provide unparalleled opportunities to examine community reassembly. Invader-removal experiments, for example, can clarify how recovery is influenced by processes acting within a given system or alternatively reflects processes acting at larger spatial scales. Introduced ants can displace native ant species, but no long-term, large-scale removal experiment has ever been performed to test how native ant communities reassemble after the removal of numerically and behaviorally dominant introduced ants.

Naughton presented on the ecological impacts of introduced Argentine ants on the California Channel Islands, and the ongoing recovery of native ant assemblages following landscape-scale removal of Argentine ants from Santa Cruz Island, California. Naughton also discussed the vital role that biological field stations such as the UC Natural Reserve System play in advancing our understanding of ecological processes by enabling long term research studies in the environmental sciences.

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Series: Alternatives to Fossil Fuels

Part I: Fusion in the Lab, and the Potential for Fusion Power

View recording. 

Tuesday, January 28th

Speaker: Roger Falcone, Past President of the American Physical Society and former Director of the Advanced Light Source at Lawrence Berkeley Lab. 

Topic: Roger Falcone discussed recent experiments that demonstrated significant fusion energy output in a national lab facility, and pointed to commercial efforts that are addressing the challenging problem of developing fusion power. 

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Part II: The Current Status and Prospects for Nuclear Power Worldwide

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Tuesday, February 4th

Speaker: Dr. Robert J. Budnitz, a nuclear engineer whose principal work has been advancing the safety of nuclear power reactors and for many years ran his own consulting practice. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and was on the scientific staff at the University of California Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He earned a Ph.D. in experimental physics from Harvard in 1968.

Topic:  Nuclear power reactors now provide 10% of the world’s electricity (just under 20% in the US). Nuclear power’s continuation and expansion could play a major role in ameliorating the climate crisis since it produces no greenhouse gases. However, the cost of new nuclear reactors, based on the large-reactor designs used up to now, is simply too high to compete with other forms of power generation.

Attention worldwide has turned to the design of smaller reactors, so-called “small modular reactors” (SMRs). The promise, yet unrealized, of SMRs is they would be much less expensive since they could be fabricated in a factory rather than on site. This presentation will provide a report on the current status and prospects for these SMRs, which in many people’s minds are the hope for the future for nuclear power worldwide. Issues that could prove to be barriers will be discussed, including the link to nuclear weapons development and the issue of radioactive waste.

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Part III: 5 Things You Need To Know about Wind and Solar Power

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Tuesday, February 11th

Speaker: Dr. Ryan Wiser, a Senior Scientist in and Senior Advisor to the Energy Markets and Policy Department at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Topic:  This talk addressed the rapid growth of wind and solar power as technology has advanced and costs have declined. Yet annual deployments levels need to double or triple relative to the recent past to meet decarbonization targets. As was discussed, multiple barriers may constrain growth—which also highlight opportunities to accelerate deployment.

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2024 Past Events

Series: Engineering Risks, Disasters, and Corporate Behavior

Organized by Carol Séquin and Donald Mastronarde

Part I: A Memorial Lecture on the Engineering Aspects of the World Trade Center Collapse

Tuesday, September 10th

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Speaker: Albolhassan Astaneh-Asl, Professor Emeritus of Structural Engineering, astaneh@berkeley.edu

Topic: First, this Memorial lecture honors the memories of the victims of the tragic and criminal terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center towers on September 11, 2001, as well as pays tribute to the first responders, the firefighters, EMTs, and police officers, who so heroically sacrificed their lives to save others. Second, the lecture focuses on the engineering aspects of the tragic collapse of the World Trade Center. Dr. Astaneh, with a grant from the National Science Foundation flew to New York a week after the tragic 9/11 attacks, when the flights to New York resumed, and conducted the reconnaissance and investigation of the collapsed WTC towers. In May of 2002, he testified before the Committee on Science of the House of Representative as part of World Trade Center Public Hearings.  Subsequently provided with unique access to all the plans and structural drawings of the WTC, he worked for the next six years with his team of volunteer engineers and Berkeley students, performing a detailed and extensive nonlinear finite element analysis of the impact of the planes on the towers.

His team’s investigation revealed that the World Trade Center towers were constructed using an unusual structural system called steel “Bearing Walls'', where the weight of the building was given to relatively thin stiffened steel plate bearing walls on the outside and steel columns on the inside that were connected to the outside walls with steel truss joists instead of the usual vertical columns and horizontal beams connected to each other with sturdy connections. The investigation showed that from an engineering point of view, the main cause of the collapse was due to the use of this unusual steel “bearing wall” system, very vulnerable to impact and fire. The study also showed  that had the structure been designed using a traditional beam and column configuration following the governing design codes instead of the unusual steel bearing wall system, the damage would have been limited to localized failure, and the towers most likely would not have collapsed.

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Series: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Literature

Organized by Donald Mastronarde

Part I: Sexuality, Novels, and Problems of Translation

Tuesday, October 1st

Speaker: Michael Lucey, Professor of French and Comparative Literature, mlucey@berkeley.edu

Topic: How do you talk about sexuality when talking about different times and places in which different languages are spoken and different implicit structures of cultural concepts produce the social forms within which sex/gender and sexuality take place? Add to this the problem of the co-existence in the same social space of multiple sexual ideologies and sexual cultures, as well as of multiple languages. “Given that the novel is a fundamentally monolingual form,” Amitav Ghosh has asked, “how does it deal with characters whose linguistic identities are complex and unsettled?” This article looks at novelistic situations in which both linguistic and sexual identities are “complex and unsettled.” What are translation’s limits in such situations? What kind of linguistic anthropological work can novels do? Literary examples are drawn from works by James Baldwin, Tahar Ben Jelloun, Abdellah Taïa, and Mohamed Mbougar Sarr.

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Part II: Jean-Jacques Rousseau on the Unnaturalness of Sex, Love, and Marriage

Tuesday, October 8th

Speaker: William Burton, Assistant Professor of French, affiliate faculty, Center for Science, Medicine, Technology, and Society [NB: pronouns they, them, theirs], wmb@berkeley.edu

Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s sexual politics have long been a stumbling block to feminists interested in his thought. He called for a sex-segregated society, and his arguments often seem to presuppose that men and women’s social roles are determined by biology. Following the lead of the lesbian feminist Monique Wittig, this talk will show that Rousseau did not espouse such a belief. Instead, he envisioned a state of nature from which the categories of sex were absent, and argued for the necessity of creating them. These ideas developed in debate with the philosopher John Locke and the scientist Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon, who claimed that romantic love and marriage existed prior to society. Marshalling a variety of data, Rousseau claimed that both were social institutions, and although he did not say so explicitly, his argumentation reveals that for him, the sexes were not natural, either, but linguistic conventions.

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Series: Berkeley in Space

Organized by Donald Mastronarde

Part I: A Case in Favor of Space Exploration

Tuesday, October 29th

Speaker: Panos Papadopoulos (Department of Mechanical Engineering), Director of College of Engineering Aerospace Programs

Topic: Aerospace engineering is currently experiencing extraordinary growth driven primarily by space (as opposed to atmospheric) flight. In this seminar, a case will be made about the present and future opportunities associated with space exploration.

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Part II: Transforming Astrophysics with AI

Tuesday, November 5th

View recording. 

Speaker: Joshua S. Bloom, Professor of Astronomy

Topic: In this talk, Professor Bloom will describe ways in which astrophysics is leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) to break through some computational and human bottlenecks that otherwise impede scientific progress. Rather than just adopt existing approaches developed for industrial applications, astrophysics is also helping to drive new AI research directions.

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Part III: The Renaissance of Astrophysics

Tuesday, November 12th

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Speaker: Raffaella Margutti, Associate Professor, Astronomy Department and Physics Department

Topic: This lecture will review how new observational capabilities to study the night sky have led to recent discoveries and new ways to think about the universe around us.

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Post-Mortem on the 2024 Election

Reflections on the Election: Town Hall Discussion

Tuesday, November 19th

Speakers: Paul Pierson, John Gross Endowed Chair, Professor of Political Science; Robert Van Houweling, Associate Professor of Political Science

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The Carol D’Onofrio LIR Lecture in Public Health

Carol D’Onofrio was Chair of the UCB Retirement Center Board from 2009-2011 and served as a member at large from 2006-08. She served on the Learning in Retirement Committee for many years, chairing the committee in 2017-2019. Carol passed away on April 14, 2020. 

Embracing Controversy: A Second Look at CDC Reforms After Covid-19

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Speaker: Ann Keller, Associate Professor of Health Politics, UC Berkeley School of Public Health

Addressing criticism that the agency’s Covid-19 response was lacking, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has proposed internal agency reforms intended to improve its performance during the next pandemic. This talk offers a critique of reform efforts that imply that failure-free performance is achievable if the agency simply improves its access to information collection and processing. Drawing from social science scholarship that addresses the social processes that support scientific learning and policymaking in contested political environments, I ask whether science-informed policy can emerge without controversy and deliberation. Finally, this talk examines what standards public health officials can be held to when one replaces the goal of omniscience with one of transparent learning.