Neighborhood Lecture Series

5251 Broad Branch Road, NW, Washington, DC 20015 - Greenewalt Building (PDF of directions)

Lectures Are Free, But Seating is Limited

The lectures begin at 6:30PM and will last approximately one hour. Doors open to the public at 6:00PM.
We provide informational materials about our research programs and light refreshments. Limited parking is available off Jocelyn and 32nd Streets in our lots, and there is street parking in the area. The campus is a three-block walk from Connecticut Avenue and two blocks south of Military Road.

Speaker: Larry R. Nittler - Larry studies the origin and evolution of stars, the Galaxy, and the Solar System, both through laboratory analysis of extraterrestrial materials and through planetary remote sensing. He received his B.A. in physics from Cornell University in 1991 and a Ph.D. in physics from Washington University in 1996. After a two-year postdoctoral fellowship at the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism, he took a position as staff scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. There, he worked on the Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous mission to the asteroid 433 Eros. He returned to Carnegie as a staff scientist in 2001. He has worked on comet samples returned by NASA’s Stardust mission and solar wind samples returned by the Genesis mission. He is currently Deputy Principal Investigator of the MESSENGER mission to Mercury. He received the Alfred O. Nier prize of the Meteoritical Society in 2001 and was named a Fellow of the same society in 2010. Asteroid 5992 Nittler is named in his honor

Speaker: Alycia J. Weinberger - Alycia has been a staff scientist at the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism (DTM) since 2001. She earned her B.A.in physics from the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, and her Ph.D. in physics from the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. She was a postdoctoral scholar at UCLA before coming to DTM. In 2000, the American Association of University Women and American Astronomical Society awarded her the Annie Jump Cannon prize for significant research by a female postdoctoral scholar. In 2002, she was awarded the Vainu Bappu Gold Medal by the Astronomical Society of India for her work. Weinberger specializes in observations of circumstellar disks and what they show about the processes of planet formation. She is a regular user of space telescopes and Carnegie’s Las Campanas Observatory in Chile. Shehas worked as a member of the science advisory committee and instrument teams to define the exciting science that will be done with the next generation Giant Magellan Telescope, slated to be more than 1,000 inches across.

When: Thursday, 25 October 2012

Title: "Using Pressure to Make Novel Materials"

Speaker: Timothy A. Strobel - Timothy received his B.S. (2004) and Ph.D. (2008) in chemical engineering from the Colorado School of Mines. While there, he studied the structure, stability, and dynamics of hydrogen clathrates. In 2008, he joined the Geophysical Laboratory as a Carnegie postdoctoral fellow and was appointed staff scientist in 2011. His research focuses on high-pressure conditions for understanding chemical processes and intermolecular interactions and using high-pressure conditions for synthesizing novel energy-related materials. He is also interested in clathrate hydrates, molecular spectroscopy of isolated species, novel hydrogen storage materials, molecular thermodynamics, and the phase behavior and electronic structure of molecular systems at high pressure.

When: Thursday, 25 April 2013

Title: "What Makes Habitable Worlds Habitable or Was Life on Earth Inevitable?"

Speaker: George D. Cody - George is a geochemist whose research broadly focuses on understanding organic chemistry in natural environments. He received his Ph.D. from Penn State University, where his early research focused on coal chemistry. His current research focuses on early solar system organic chemistry recorded in meteorites and comets as well as mineral catalyzed organic reactions with potential relevance to the origins of life. While evidence for life extends deep into Earth history, from a geochemical perspective, it is not obvious that life on Earth should have been inevitable. In this talk we will consider potentially critical facets of early Earth history that may have been crucial in enabling the emergence of life on what might well have been an inhospitable world.