Awards Night
John Marshall Dining Room,
Memorial Student Center
Marshall University
Huntington, WV 25702
Details
The Awards Night festivities begin on Thursday, May 1st with a dinner at 6:00 p.m. in the John Marshall Dining Room of the Memorial Student Center. The menu choices are Maple Bourbon Pork Loin, Chicken Marsala, or Tortellini with Alfredo Pesto. All will be served with a house salad, whipped potatoes, vegetable medley, and dessert. The cost of the dinner will be $20 per person (payable by check to COVACS only). If you will be attending, please RSVP to Lester8@marshall.edu including your meal choice(s), and put “Chemistry Awards Night” in the subject line.
Following dinner, the Awards Ceremony will begin at 7:00 p.m. in the Shawkey Dining Room of the Memorial Student Center. The evening will conclude with a presentation by Dr. Michael L. Norton from the Marshall University Department of Chemistry entitled “Life and Times: Beware the Paradigm”.
Abstract
We are all bounded by our small swath of time and must use it wisely. Through a series of research vignettes, I will highlight several ways in which students, staff and fellow faculty have contributed to creating a productive and collaborative community throughout my career at Marshall University, making it a great choice for me. Fortunately for all of us, the changes in science in the past 50 years have been quite breathtaking, with the pace of breakthroughs accelerating. I will present a personal perspective on a few of these changes, with particular emphasis on cases in which progress was stunted, in some cases for many years, by what “we” thought we knew or the “current paradigm.” Fortunately, either through brilliance or serendipity, these barriers of unrecognized ignorance have been breached. In contemplating the next 100 or even 1000 years, we are left to consider that many of our current “knowns” are indeed not knowns at all. Through a review of a few cases of paradigm shifts, I challenge the listener to perform what is nearly impossible: logically uncovering inconsistencies in our current set of scientific knowns.