The Good Life Speakers
Alan Houston
Interim Vice Chancellor of Student Affairs
Alan Houston is Interim Vice Chancellor – Student Affairs at UC San Diego, with broad responsibility for programs and services that support and enhance students’ educational experiences.
Houston is an internationally recognized historian of political thought, an accomplished teacher and a skilled administrator. At Oberlin College he doubled majored in Mathematics and Political Philosophy. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1988, and joined UC San Diego’s Department of Political Science one year later. The recipient of numerous honors, awards and fellowships, his most recent career highlights include:
- In 2012 he received the Chancellor’s Associates Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching;
- In 2010 he became Provost of Eleanor Roosevelt College;
- In 2009 he made front-page news when he discovered 49 previously unknown letters to and from Benjamin Franklin;
- In 2008 he published his fourth book, Benjamin Franklin and the Politics of Improvement (Yale University Press).
Professor of Music
Roger Reynolds’s compositions incorporate elements of theater, digital signal processing, dance, video, and real-time computer processing, in signature multidimensionality. The central thread through his career links language with musical space. In addition to his composing, Reynolds's writing, lecturing, organization of musical events and teaching have prompted numerous residencies at festivals and universities the world over. In 2011, having taught for over four decades at UCSD, he inaugurated an Arts program at the UC’s Washington Center. Whispers Out of Time – based on a John Ashbery poem – earned him the 1989 Pulitzer Prize. Reynolds’s writing, beginning with the influential Mind Models (1975), has appeared widely in international journals. His recent multimedia work, george WASHINGTON, was premiered at the Kennedy Center by the National Symphony Orchestra in October 2013.TheLos Angeles Times’s Mark Swed labeled him an “all-around sonic visionary”. The Library of Congress established a Special Collection of Reynolds’s work in 1998:
http://lcweb2.loc.gov/diglib/ihas/html/rreynolds/rreynolds-home.html
"Musings on "Good Lives": Relationships, Sustenance, Aspirations, Truth, Secrets, Boundaries, Purpose, Flight"
My talk begins with brief consideration of some difficulties with Aristotle’s discussion of the “mere” life and the “good”. I will posit a triad of factors that support the kind of life I have sought, one guided by: relationships, sustenance, and aspiration. I consult with wise and moving sources of human expression: poets Lucretius, Dickinson, Ashbery, and Wilbur, novelists Kundera and Ondaatje, philosopher Suzuki, the music of Bach and Mahler, the art of Leonardo, Sengai, Vermeer, Valásquez, the Aboriginal sand painters of Australia, Van Gogh, Picasso and Cage. From them, I fashion a continuous mosaic of words, sounds and images, that evolves from the straightforward into an intricately inferential multimodality dream state, returning at the close, again, to (seeming) directness.
Gabriella Wienhausen
Associate Dean for Education in the Division of Biological Sciences
Gabriele Wienhausen is the Associate Dean for Education in the Division of Biological Sciences at UC San Diego. A such, she is responsible for the undergraduate and graduate educational programs in the Division, as well as providing leadership for the strategic and operational aspects of the Division’s educational mission.
In addition to her role as Associate Dean, Dr. Wienhausen is co-director of and a faculty member in the Doctoral Program in Mathematics and Science Education jointly offered by UC San Diego and San Diego State University. Her research focuses on the educational technology as a leverage to enhance education. Since 2004, she has also been the Principal Investigator for PRIME, the Pacific Rim Experience program for undergraduates, which provides science and engineering undergraduates a project-based, hands-on research internship program combined with an experience in international cultural awareness.
Gabriele Wienhausen was the founding Provost of UC San Diego’s Sixth College. In that role, she oversaw the development and implementation of the college’s general education curriculum, which is dedicated to interdisciplinary thinking, seeing, and listening in culture, arts, and technology. She was also the founding co-director of the California State Summer School for Math and Science (COSMOS), an intensive summer residential program for students grades 8-12 with a demonstrated aptitude in STEM fields; co-founder of Teams In Engineering Services (Global TIES), which provides multidisciplinary internships with local and global non-profit organizations; and Principal Investigator for the Howard Hughes Undergraduate Science Enrichment Program, where she designed, implemented, and managed the High School Science Enrichment Program, Lower Division Undergraduate Support, and Upper Division Research Projects, as well as outreach programs for three high schools in Southeast San Diego.
Dr. Wienhausen has been the recipient of numerous honors and awards, including both the Academic Senate Distinguished Teaching Award and the Chancellor’s Associate Award. Since 2010, she has been honored with the UC San Diego Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action and Diversity Award, the YWCA Tribute to Women & Industry Award, and the Athena Pinnacle Award in Education. Most recently, she was selected by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the National Institute of Health to be one of 40 Vision and Change Leadership Fellows to lead a national effort in catalyzing reform in undergraduate biology education.
Carol Padden
Professor, Department of Communication
CAROL PADDEN is Sanford I. Berman Professor of Language and Human Communication and Associate Dean in the Division of Social Sciences at UCSD. She studies emerging sign languages in various parts of the world including in Israel and Turkey. She has written numerous academic and popular articles about sign language grammars. With Tom Humphries, she is the co-author of four books on language and culture of deaf people in the United States. Her work has been supported by the U.S. Department of Education, the Spencer Foundation, the National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health. She has been elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and the Linguistic Society of America. In 2010, she was named a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellow.
“Different Lives, Different Languages”
Human languages have astonishing diversity. Among the nearly 7000 languages of the world are those with quite different expressive capacities: some languages use speech and yet others use no sounds at all, instead they use the hands and the body to communicate. These are the sign languages of deaf communities which exist alongside spoken languages. Sign languages are created out of necessity and reflect the deep creative possibilities of human beings. I study the social and cultural conditions in which humans spontaneously create sign languages de novo even when they have spoken languages, and what such languages teach us about human possibility and creativity.
Fonna Forman
Professor of Political Science
Fonna Forman is a political theorist best known for her revisionist work on Adam Smith, recuperating the ethical, social and public dimensions of his political economy. Current work focuses on theories and practices of global justice as they manifest at the local scale, and the role of civic engagement and cross-sector collaboration in strategies of progressive urban reform. Fonna is associate professor of political theory at the University of California, San Diego, where she is founding co-director of the Center on Global Justice and the Blum Cross-Border Initiative. She is also special advisor on Urban and Public Initiatives for the City of San Diego, leading the development of its new Civic Innovation Lab.
Professor of Visual Arts
Teddy Cruz is known internationally for his urban research on the Tijuana/San Diego border, advancing border neighborhoods as sites of cultural production from which to rethink urban policy, affordable housing, and civic infrastructure. Recipient of the Rome Prize in Architecture in 1991, his honors include representing the US in the 2008 Venice Architecture Biennale, the Ford Foundation Visionaries Award in 2011, and the 2013 Architecture Award from the US Academy of Arts and Letters. Teddy is a professor in public culture and urbanism at University of California, San Diego, where he is founding co-director of the Center for Urban Ecologies and the Blum Cross-Border Initiative. He is also special advisor on Urban and Public Initiatives for the City of San Diego, leading the development of its new Civic Innovation Lab.
UC San Diego Chancellor
Pradeep K. Khosla, a world-renowned electrical and computer engineer, is the eighth Chancellor of UC San Diego and a Distinguished Professor. At UC San Diego, he has initiated a comprehensive, all-inclusive strategic planning process to develop a unifying vision and shared goals for the future of the campus. Khosla previously served as Dean of Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Engineering, a Fellow of the Indian Academy of Engineering, an Honorary Fellow of the Indian Academy of Science and a Fellow of the American Association of Artificial Intelligence. He is the recipient of numerous awards for his leadership, teaching and research, including the 2012 Light of India Award, a Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, and the George Westinghouse Award for contributions to improve engineering teaching. In 2012, he was named one of the 50 most influential Indian-Americans by SiliconIndia. He received his bachelor’s degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, and his master’s and doctoral degrees in electrical and computer engineering at Carnegie Mellon.
Dean of Jacobs School of Engineering
Albert P. Pisano began his service as Dean of the Jacobs School of Engineering on September 1, 2013. Pisano holds the Walter J. Zable Chair in Engineering and serves on the faculty of the departments of mechanical and aerospace engineering and electrical and computer engineering.
Pisano is an elected member of the National Academy of Engineering for contributions to the design, fabrication, commercialization, and educational aspects of MEMS.
Prior to his appointment at UCSD, Pisano served on the UC Berkeley faculty for 30 years where he held the FANUC Endowed Chair of Mechanical Systems. Pisano was the senior co-director of the Berkeley Sensor & Actuator Center (an NSF Industry-University Cooperative Research Center), director of the Electronics Research Laboratory (UC Berkeley’s largest organized research unit), and faculty head of the Program Office for Operational Excellence, among other leadership positions. Since 1983, Pisano has graduated over 40 Ph.D. and 75 M.S. students.
From 1997 to 1999, Pisano was a program manager for the MEMS Program at the Defense Advanced
Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
Pisano earned his undergraduate (’76) and graduate degrees (’77, ’80, ’81) in mechanical engineering at Columbia University. Prior to joining the faculty at UC Berkeley, he held research positions with Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, Singer Sewing Machines Corporate R&D Center and General Motors Research Labs.
Pisano’s research interests include: micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS) wireless sensors for harsh environments (600°C) such as gas turbines and geothermal wells; and additive, MEMS manufacturing techniques such as low-temperature, low-pressure nano-printing of nanoparticle inks and polymer solutions. Other research interests and activities include MEMS for a wide variety of applications, including RF components, power generation, drug delivery, strain sensors, biosensors, micro inertial instruments, disk-drive actuators and nanowire sensors. He is a co-inventor listed on more than 20 patents in MEMS and has co-authored more than 300 archival publications.
Pisano is a co-founder of ten start-up companies in the areas of transdermal drug delivery, transvascular drug delivery, sensorized catheters, MEMS manufacturing equipment, MEMS RF devices and MEMS motion sensors.
"Engineering as a Force for the Public Good"
In this talk, Professor Albert P. Pisano, Dean of the Jacobs School of Engineering at UCSD, will describe a vision of abundance for the world, made possible by technological advances in engineering. These advances have promise to usher in an era of abundant manufacturing, abundant fresh water, abundant food production and abundant energy. Further, Professor Pisano will offer a vision of how engineering education must change to enhance the progression of these technological advances. This is the vision of Experiential Engineering Education (E3) as well as stories about how engineers, working with our colleagues in the sciences and the humanities, should, can and do have immediate, direct positive impact on the day-to-day life of all of us, both in the developed and the developing world.
