Claritas Distinguished Lecture in the Sciences
George E. ’64 and Margaret Lauver ’66 Harris endowed the Distinguished Visitor Program at Susquehanna University. This program is designed to facilitate lectures, seminars or residencies by nationally acclaimed figures in business, government, or education, focusing on topics of public interest. The series invites a distinguished scholar in the sciences to deliver a public address on our campus, usually in the fall of the academic year and is organized by the School of Natural & Social Sciences.
What’s Soil Got To Do With Climate Change?
Asmeret Asefaw Berhe
Nov. 13, 2024 at 7:30 p.m.
Stretansky Concert Hall
The soil system stores twice as much carbon as the atmosphere and all of the world’s vegetation combined. The exchange of greenhouse gases between the soil and the atmosphere controls the composition of the earth’s climate, and over the last two centuries, human actions have increased the flux of greenhouse gases from soil to the atmosphere. Asmeret Asefaw Berhe, Professor of Soil Biogeochemistry and Falasco Chair in Earth Sciences at the Department of Life and Environmental Sciences, University of California, Merced, will present fundamental mechanisms by which the soil system controls the earth’s climate and the potential of different land management practices to bend the curve of increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. In addition, Berhe will discuss her career trajectory from a professor to leading one of the largest science funding agencies in the nation, and the critical role of an inclusive excellence framework in addressing critical issues of our time, including climate change.
Past speakers
- 2023–24: Cathy O’Neil, Auditing Algorithms
- 2022–23: Michael S. Davis, The James Webb Space Telescope: It Works; Perfectly!
- 2021–22: Sam Sternberg, Rewriting the Code of Life with CRISPR
- 2019–20: Jackie Faherty, Our Cosmic Ballet
- 2018–19: Mary Lou Zeeman, Dynamical Systems and Their Application to Mathematical Biology
- 2017–18: Richard Robinson, nanoparticles
- 2016–17: Robert S. Pickart, In Search of Sinking Water: Wintertime Fieldwork in the North Atlantic Ocean
- 2015–16: John Rogers, Electronics for the Human Body
- 2014–15: Bonnie Bassler, Tiny Conspiracies: Cell-to-Cell Communication in Bacteria
- 2013–14: Sonia Kreidenweis, Clearing the Air: 25 Years of Visibility Observations in US National Parks … And What They Tell Us About Our World
- 2012–13: Chris Stringer, The Origin of Our Species
- 2011–12: Kerry Ressler, Fear and its Inhibition: From Mice to Men
- 2010–11: Edward O. Wilson, The Creation: An Appeal To Save Life on Earth
- 2009–10: Tyrone B. Hayes, From Silent Spring to Silent Night: A Tale of Toads & Men
- 2008–09: Larry R. Squire, Conscious and Unconscious Memory Systems of the Mammalian Brain
- 2007–08: Tim Flannery, The Weather Makers
- 2006–07: Rita Colwell, Climate, Infectious Disease and Human Health
- 2005–06: Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose To Fail or Succeed
