July 24, 2015 Science and Business Lecture Series to Address Landslides, Northwest Passage, Pluto and More

The summer/fall lecture series from the Science, Technology and Business Division at the Library of Congress will feature illustrated talks on a wide variety of topics, including updates on scientific studies of breast cancer and prostate cancer, the forecasting of landslides, the first close-ups of the planet Pluto, the search for planets outside our solar system, the 1850 McClure Arctic Expedition to discover the Northwest Passage, and Chinese energy policy.

The series runs from Aug. 11 to Dec. 8. All lectures, except for one, will take place in the Library’s James Madison Memorial Building, 101 Independence Ave. S.E., Washington, D.C. The Oct. 27 lecture will take place in the Thomas Jefferson Building, 10 First St. S.E., Washington, D.C. Free and open to the public, the programs are one hour in length. Tickets and reservations are not needed.

More detailed information about the topics and speakers will be highlighted periodically on the Library’s science blog “Inside Adams” at blogs.loc.gov/inside_adams/.

Series Schedule

At 11:30 a.m. on Tuesday, Aug. 11, in the West Dining Room, Dalia Kirschbaum will present “Finding the Slippery Slope: Detecting Landslides from Space.” A research physical scientist with the Hydrological Science division at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Kirschbaum will discuss using remote-sensing information to model and forecast landslides. Contact: (202) 707-1192.

At 11:30 a.m. on Wednesday, Sept. 16, in the West Dining Room, Lynnae Quick will present “Icy Volcanism in the Outer Solar System.” A postdoctoral fellow in the Planetary Geodynamics Laboratory at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Quick focuses on using analytical methods to model volcanic and cryovolcanic processes on the terrestrial planets and icy moons of the outer solar system. Contact: (202) 707-1192.

At 11:30 a.m. on Wednesday, Sept. 23, in the Mary Pickford Theater, author James H. Johnston will talk about his book “From Slave Ship to Harvard: Yarrow Mamout and the History of an African American Family” (2012). Johnston’s book tells the true story of an African-American family in Maryland over six generations. Contact: (202) 707-1964.

At 11:30 a.m. on Tuesday, Sept. 29, in Dining Room A, Elizabeth Platz will present “Prostate Cancer: Update.” Platz is a cancer epidemiologist and a professor in the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University. The lecture, part of Prostate Cancer Awareness Month, is co-sponsored with the Health Office at the Library of Congress. Contact: (202) 707-1207.

At 11:30 a.m. on Thursday, Oct. 8, in the Mary Pickford Theater, Stephen Rinehart will discuss “The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS).” Rinehart—an astrophysicist and associate chief of the Laboratory for Observational Cosmology at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center—is a project scientist for TESS, which will launch in 2017 and search for planets outside our solar system. Contact: (202) 707-1192.

At 11 a.m. on Thursday, Oct. 15, Room 139, Robert Clarke will present “Breast Cancer: Update.” Clarke is dean for research at the Georgetown University Medical Center, a professor in the Department of Oncology and co-director of the Breast Cancer Program at Georgetown University. The lecture, part of Breast Cancer Awareness Month, is co-sponsored with the Health Office at the Library of Congress. Contact: (202) 707-1207.

At noon on Tuesday, Oct. 27, in the Asian Division Alcove, Thomas Jefferson Building, Joanna Lewis, a professor in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, will discuss “Chinese Energy Policy.” The lecture is co-sponsored with the Library’s Asian Division. Contact: (202) 707-1207.

At 11:30 a.m. on Thursday, Oct. 29, in the Mumford Room, author and polar/maritime historian Glenn M. Stein will talk about his book “Discovering the North-West Passage: The Four-Year Arctic Odyssey of H.M.S. Investigator and the McClure Expedition.” Contact: (202) 707-4751.

At 11:30 a.m. on Thursday, Nov. 19, in the Mary Pickford Theater, Lucy McFadden will present “Dawn: A Journey to the Beginning of the Solar System.” McFadden investigates comets, asteroids and meteorites for the Planetary Systems Laboratory at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and is a co-investigator on the Dawn mission to the asteroid 4 Vesta and the dwarf planet Ceres. Contact: (202) 707-1192.

At 11:30 a.m. on Tuesday, Dec. 8, in the Mary Pickford Theater, Dennis Reuter will present “New Horizons: Journey to Pluto and Beyond.” Reuter, an astrophysicist, is an instrument scientist for the NASA mission New Horizons, which is taking the first close-ups of Pluto. (202) 707-1192.

The Library of Congress maintains one of the largest and most diverse collections of scientific and technical information in the world. The Science, Technology and Business Division provides reference and bibliographic services and develops the general collections of the Library in all areas of science, technology, business and economics, with the exception of clinical medicine and technical agriculture, which are the subject specialties of the National Library of Medicine and the National Agricultural Library. For more information, visit www.loc.gov/rr/scitech/.

The Library of Congress, the nation’s oldest federal cultural institution and the largest library in the world, holds more than 160 million items in various languages, disciplines and formats. The Library serves the U.S. Congress and the nation both on-site in its reading rooms on Capitol Hill and through its award-winning website at www.loc.gov.