AGENDA
FULL SYMPOSIUM AGENDA
(click on link above)
Accepted presentations will be programmed into thematic sessions focused on pressing aspects of rapid change. Natural, Social and Geophysical sciences are all encouraged to submit abstracts and presentations may be of disciplanary or interdisciplinary nature.
Planned Thematic Sessions
● Coastal and Rural Communities: Vulnerabilities and Adaptations ● Oil and Gas Development: Balancing Interests with Sustainability ● The Future of Marine Ecosystems ● Freshwater Systems: Hydrological Security in the Face of Rapid Change ● Local, Traditional and Indigenous Knowledges
Planned Cross-Cutting Sessions
● Stakeholder Participation in Complex Multi-User Systems ● Questions of Scale and Knowledge in Observation from Local to Remote Sensing
● University - Community - Industry: Partnerships to Inform Policy Development
Keynote Speaker
Murray Gell-Mann, Ph.D., is an American physicist who received the 1969 Nobel Prize in physics for his work on the theory of elementary particles.
Among his many accomplishments, he formulated the quark model of hadronic resonances, and identified the SU(3) flavor symmentry of the light quarks, extending isospin to include strangeness, which he also discovered. He discovered the V-A theory of chiral neutrinos in collaboration with Richard Feynman. He created current algebra in the 1960s as a way of extracting predictions from quark models when the fundamental theory was still murky, which led to model-independent sum rules confirmed by experiment.
Gell-Mann, along with Levy, discovered the sigma model of pions, which describes low energy pion interactions. Modifying the integercharged quark model of Han and Nambu, Fritsch and Gell-Mann were the first to write down the modern accepted theory of quantum chromodynamics although they did not anticipate asymptotic freedom.
Gell-Mann is responsible for the see-saw theory of neutrino masses, which produces mass at the inverse-GUT scale in any theory with right-handed neutrino, like the SO(10) model. (Wikipedia 2008)
Gell-Mann will address concepts of complexity and creative thinking related to biological and cultural evolution.
Murray Gell-Mann, Ph.D., Biography
Plenary Speaker
F. Stuart (Terry) Chapin, Ph.D., A professor of ecology in the Institute of Arctic Biology at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, was the first Alaskan elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2004. He has received the Kempe Award for Distinguished Ecologist in 1996 and Usabelli Award for the top research in all fields from the University of Alaska in 2000.
Chapin began his undergraduate studies as an economics major at Swarthmore College in 1962, but an introductory biology elective class and many hours spent outdoors convinced him to switch his major to biology. He graduated in 1966 with a bachelor's degree in biology and then spent 2 years in the Peace Corps, station in Bogota, Columbia. He entered Graduate School at Stanford University and earned his Ph.D. in biological sciences in 1973.
Chapin's research has concentrated on the adaption of plants to changing environmental conditions and investigating the dynamics of socioecological systems under changing conditions. (www.pnas.org - Phillip Downey, Freelance Science Writer)
Chapin will speak about interdisciplinary principles of sustainability in a rapidly changing arctic.
http://www.faculty.uaf.edu/fffsc/