Owen G. Holmes Lectures
Owen G. Holmes Lectures
About the series
In recognition of Dr. Holmes’ record as a scientist, administrator, and academic concerned with public policy, these lectures will be given on topics of public significance related to the sciences and to be given on topics of public significance concerned with the sciences and with the nature and goals of the university in contemporary times.
These lectures are delivered by distinguished scholars of national or international reputation.
Past Talks
Loneliness, Scientific Authority, and Platonic Couches
In this talk, von Heyking discusses the 2023 United States Surgeon General Advisory on loneliness to examine broader questions regarding scientific authority, liberal democracy, political bonds, including friendship, and the role of the university in promoting them. The Advisory illustrates how overreliance on scientific authority to establish what is true about us leads to bizarre conclusions due to neglect of broader questions about personhood, friendship, and self-government. He suggests ways fields beyond the physical sciences, including his field of political philosophy, can supplement and round out how we think about human flourishing and community.
Dr. John von Heyking is a professor of political science at the University of Lethbridge, where he teaches political philosophy. He is the author of Comprehensive Judgment and Absolute Selflessness: Winston Churchill on Politics as Friendship (2018), The Form of Politics: Aristotle and Plato on Friendship (2016), and Augustine and Politics as Longing in the World (2001). He has coedited numerous volumes, including two volumes of the Collected Works of Eric Voegelin and, most recently, Friendship Studies: Politics and Practices Across Cultures (2024). He has published scholarly articles on topics including liberal and civic education, friendship, personhood, resistance to totalitarianism, cosmopolitanism, empire, Islamic political thought, punishment, and religious liberty. His scholarly essays and articles have appeared in numerous volumes and journals, including Cambridge Journal of China Studies, Review of Politics, History of Political Thought, Supreme Court Law Review, Perspectives on Political Science, Political Science Reviewer, History of Human Sciences, International Political Anthropology, and the University of British Columbia Law Review. His popular writing has been published by Finest Hour, Voegelinview, American Oxonian, Globe and Mail, Calgary Herald, C2C: Canada's Journal of Ideas, Troy Media, and Convivium.
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Why is the Brain Important?
The brain is the vehicle for all the qualities that define our humanity. It is at the centre of all early development and learning, engagement with education and family life, participation in social interactions, creative work and creating our knowledge of all aspects of the universe. Understanding how the brain creates perception from sensation, memories for percepts and generates action is key to understanding all human phenomena. We will produce an assemblage of current neuroscience research to highlight key issues relevant to health, education, artificial intelligence, criminal justice, ethics and political behaviour.
Dr. Rob Sutherland is Professor and Chair of the Department of Neuroscience, Tier 1 Board of Governors Research Chair in Neuroscience, and Director of the Canadian Centre for Behavioural Neuroscience. In 2021, he was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and in 2022 was awarded the Donald O. Hebb Distinguished Contribution Award by the Canadian Society for Brain, Behaviour, and Cognitive Science. He investigates the neurobiology of learning, memory and dementia in rodents and humans. Sutherland received his degrees from the University of Toronto and Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. After he received his PhD, he moved to the University of Lethbridge in 1980 for postdoctoral training in neuropsychology. He has held faculty positions at the University of Lethbridge, University of New Mexico, University of Colorado Boulder and the Norwegian University of Science and Technology.
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The Science of Birdsong
Birdsong is a window into Nature’s soul, and an enduring mystery to science. How do songbirds make their music? Who are they singing to? And why do they bother? This interactive lecture teaches the foundations of birdsong science through examples, demonstrations, and stories from a career in birdsong research. Once we understand the basics, we’ll get into the weird stuff, like duets, soft song, and the dawn chorus.
Dr. David Logue is an associate professor in the Department of Psychology. Growing up in the foothills of Northern California, David loved to search for frogs and snakes and dreamed of exploring tropical forests. As a student at UC San Diego, he lucked into a chance to study tropical ecology in the jungles of Costa Rica. It was everything he had hoped it would be. Hooked on the tropics, David arranged a PhD studying duet singing wrens in the Panamanian rainforest. He went broke doing research, moved into his mom’s basement, and eventually landed a postdoc at the U of L. The week after he arrived, he met a mysterious artist named April Matisz. April and David married and moved to Puerto Rico, where David served as a professor of biology for six unforgettable years. When David was offered a position at the U of L, the growing family came back home to Southern Alberta. These days, David teaches classes in animal behaviour, animal communication, and decision-making, mentors a bunch of wonderful graduate students, and (still) studies how tropical birds communicate with songs.
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How not to get viral: Understanding the communication between viruses and humans.
Dr. Patel's goal is to obtain detailed insights into how viral nucleic acids interact with host proteins by employing interdisciplinary approaches. Information on the specific sites of host proteins that communicate with viral nucleic acids will ultimately allow the development of therapeutics that prevent host-viral communication. These interactions are essential for the survival and replication of the virus - stopping the interactions is thus of benefit for treating viral infection. Patel's research program is timely given recent global incidences of viral outbreaks and, in many cases, the lack of available treatment and the failure of currently available drugs designed to target viral components. In this talk, he will provide an overview of human-viral communications and discuss some of his recent work.
Dr. Trushar Patel is an emerging leader in the biophysical characterization of nucleic acids-protein and protein-protein complexes that are at the heart of viral infections. He was recruited to the University of Lethbridge in 2016 and subsequently was awarded the prestigious Canada Research Chair in 2017. In recognition of his early career success, he was promoted to Associate Professor in 2020. Before joining the University of Lethbridge, he received a distinguished Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellowship to work at the University of Birmingham (United Kingdom) and Canadian Institutes of Health Research post-doctoral fellowship to work at the University of Manitoba (Canada). Despite being at the early stage of his career, Trushar has published >70 peer-reviewed publications and several Editorial articles. He is also one of the youngest editors of the European Biophysics Journal.
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The Benefits and Risks of Artificial Intelligence
Dr. Rice's experiences as a woman in computer science have caused her to ask questions that others might not consider. As well, working in a liberal education institution (the University of Lethbridge) allowed her to interact with colleagues well outside her area of expertise.
The combination of these experiences led her to wonder whether tools previously only used in natural language analysis (specifically sociolinguistics) could be applied to the analysis of programming languages. Specifically, there was research demonstrating that men and women write and speak differently, but could she show that men and women program differently? This led her to look at artificial intelligence techniques used by the previous researchers, which led her to look more closely at artificial intelligence approaches, and how these are being used in society.
In this talk, she will explore both the benefits of the amazing recent advances in artificial intelligence, as well as the risks these present to society.
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Glaciers ‒ A Hot Topic
Glaciers are cool, and glaciologists have been reflecting on them for more than 200 years. However, recent global climate change patterns have rapidly overheated glaciers, resulting in widespread glacial retreat and even disappearance of glaciers.
Understanding the state and fate of the 200,000 existing glaciers in order to predict sea level rise, freshwater shortages, and landscape changes in Alpine and Arctic regions requires knowledge of individual glacier behavithe our and glacier change patterns within and among regions. This knowledge allows scientists to answer crucial questions such as: “Why do some glaciers not retreat?” and “What are the wild cards in glacier and sea level rise predictions?”
Dr. Hester Jiskoot studies individual glaciers and entire glacier regions, using a variety of methods including fieldwork, remote sensing, computer modelling and data mining. In this talk she will highlight some of her main research results, including insights into processes on, under, in front of, and around glaciers, ice flow instabilities, and new techniques that she helped develop. While some of this work involved large multi-national collaborations, much was done within Dr. Jiskoot’s research team in her Glaciology and Geoscience Lab at the University of Lethbridge.
At the end of this talk, the audience will better understand some of the current hot topics in glaciology and be able to catch common misinformation about glaciers in the news.
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Locating Happiness: Beyond Individualism.
In recent decades, an increasing interest in happiness and wellbeing has come to permeate scholarly, governmental, and popular imaginaries and practices, signalling a paradigm shift in orientation to work on society and work on the self. Driven in part by the emergent sub-disciplines of positive psychology and happiness economics, these new engagements with happiness, marked by a radically individualistic perspective, both reflect and buttress neoliberal forms of governance. Collective housing communities represent a challenge to this dominant, EuroAmerican orientation by locating well-being, at least in part, in the social.
My research on two urban collective housing communities – Kankanmori, in Tokyo; and, Quayside Village, in Vancouver, will 1) place into relief the cultural assumptions and forms of governance at the foundations of dominant EuroAmerican approaches; 2) highlight alternative models of wellbeing that provide potential, practical responses to problems associated with the individualizing, fragmenting, and isolating aspects of neoliberal projects of governance; and, 3) explore governmentalities of utopia as method.
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Beyond the Binary: What the West Can Learn from Non-Western Approaches to Gender Diversity.
In many cultures, worldwide, more than two genders are recognized. In such places, individuals exist that are perceived as being neither men, nor women. Instead, such individuals are recognized as “third” genders.
Dr. Vasey works in two such cultures. Since 2003, he has conducted research in the south Pacific island nation of Samoa, where feminine same-sex attracted males are recognized as a third gender, known locally as fa’afafine.
Since 2015, he has worked in the Istmo region of Oaxaca, Mexico, where feminine same-sex attracted males are recognized as a third gender, known locally by the indigenous Zapotec as muxes.
Dr. Vasey will describe his research in both these cultures that illuminate lessons a Western audience might learn from non-Western approaches to gender diversity.
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DNA Damage, Repair and Disease: How Computers Can Help Us Understand.
Our DNA contains genetic instructions for our body to grow, develop, and function. However, these instructions in our DNA can be damaged by exposure to external and internal influences such as UV light, medical X-rays, environmental pollutants, and hormones. It has been estimated that there are more than 20,000 damaged DNA sites per typical human cell at any time. Although enzymes in our cells can repair much of this damage, some damage persists and has significant health effects, including aging, cancer, inflammatory diseases, and autoimmune disorders. To combat these health consequences, it is essential to understand the molecular-level details of the chemical reactions that damage and repair DNA in our cells.
Although DNA damage and repair is a complicated process, computer calculations can provide the information required to complement traditional experimental work focused on unraveliAlthough DNA damage and repair are a complicated process, computer calculations can provide the information required to complement traditional experimental work focused on unravelling the connection between DNA damage and disease.ng the connection between DNA damage and disease. Indeed, highly accurate computer calculations can serve as powerful predictors of experimental outcomes, clarify discrepancies between experimental hypotheses and results, and provide information not available from traditional ‘wet’ experiments. I will discuss how state-of-the-art computer hardware and software can be used as a first step to map the relationships between DNA damage, repair and disease.
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What if everything we know is wrong?
Loved by audiences across Canada for making complex scientific issues understandable, meaningful, and fun, Bob McDonald is in high demand. A fixture in broadcasting for more than 30 years, he is currently the host of CBC Radio’s Quirks & Quarks--the award-winning science program that is heard by 500,000 people each week--and is the author of numerous bestselling books.
In addition to hosting Quirks & Quarks, McDonald is a regular reporter for CBC TV’s The National and host of the children's series Head's Up. As a writer, he has authored four bestselling science books, and contributed to numerous textbooks, magazines, and newspapers (including The Globe and Mail). His latest book is Canadian Space Walkers: Hadfield, MacLean and Williams Remember the Ultimate High Adventure.
McDonald has been honoured for his outstanding contribution to the promotion of science within Canada. He is an Officer of the Order of Canada and a recipient of the Queens Jubilee Medal. “ He has been awarded the Michael Smith Award” from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council, the “Sir Sanford Fleming Medal” from the Royal Canadian Institute, and the “McNeil Medal” from The Royal Society of Canada. He also won a 2008 Gemini Award for “Best Host in a Pre-School, Children’s or Youth Program or Series.”
He holds eight honorary doctorates from Canadian universities.