CUSP SPEAKER SERIES PRESENTS: 2009-2010

“Deviant Perceptions on the Current Economic Crisis” with Bruce Greenwald

30 September 2009

Dr. Bruce Greenwald is one of the nation's leading economists. He currently serves as the Robert Heilbrunn Professor of Asset Management and Finance at Columbia University's Graduate School of Business, teaching Value Investing, Economics of   Strategic Behavior, and Globalization of Markets.  He has also taught Strategic Management of Media, Corporate Finance and Managerial Economics. Described by the New York Times as “a guru to Wall Street’s gurus,” Greenwald is an authority on value investing with expertise in productivity and the economics of information.

In late 2007, Dr. Greenwald accepted a part-time engagement with First Eagle Funds, a division of Arnhold and S. Bleichroeder Advisers, LLC ("ASBA").  He serves as Director of Research for ASBA’s Global Value Group and consults worldwide on a variety of issues concerning capital markets, business strategy, corporate finance and labor performance. In addition to his work in economics, he has written several      investing-related books, including Value Investing: From Graham to Buffett and Beyond, with Judd Kahn, et al (Wiley, 2001), and Competition Demystified: A Radically Simplified Approach to Business Strategy, with Judd Kahn (Putnam Penguin, 2005).  Recent publications include: Economics for an Imperfect Word: Essay in Honor of Joseph Stiglitz   (co-editor, MIT Press 2003), Security Analysis, 6th Edition (Co-editor/Contributor, McGraw Hill, 2008), and Globalization (John Wiley & Sons, 2008).

Prior to Columbia, Dr. Greenwald taught as a professor at the Harvard Business School and Wesleyan University. He was also a research economist at Bell Laboratories and, for a one-year period beginning in 1987, was the staff economist for the Presidential Task Force on Market Mechanisms (the Brady Task Force).

Dr. Greenwald holds a B.S. and Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and M.P.A. and an M.S from Princeton University.

 

“What does it mean to be an ‘Artist’?” with Tina Landau

17 November 2009

What does it mean to be an 'artist' - beyond the obvious meaning of producing works of art?  Why do we choose to create?  For whom do we make art?   Should the meaning of art be evident?   To whom or what (if anything) is the artist responsible in these times? Are there important qualities for an artist to possess?  How do you live a life that fuels creativity?  Can you balance a life in the arts with paying your bills?  Referencing her personal experiences and struggles as a writer and director, Tina will explore the role of the artist in society today.

Tina Landau is a theater writer and director whose work has appeared both on   Broadway and Off Broadway, as well as in regional theaters both in the U.S. and abroad.  Tina’s recent credits include directing this Fall’s “Superior Donuts” on Broadway and “In the Red and Brown Water” at the Public Theater.  Her original pieces include the musicals “Floyd Collins, Dream True,” and the upcoming Broadway musical “Beauty.”  Landau is a member of the Steppenwolf Theater Company in Chicago and teaches at the Yale School of Drama.  In addition to her theater work, Landau has also written screenplays and the book The Viewpoints Book with co-author Anne Bogart. 

Landau was named a 2007 Ford Fellow by United States Artists, an arts advocacy foundation dedicated to the support and promotion of America's top living artists.  Landau is a graduate of Yale College and later attended A.R.T.'s Institute for Advanced Theatre Training at Harvard.

 

“From the Stone Age to the Cyber Age: Searching Beyond the Evident” with Robert Klitzman, M.D.

9 February 2010

Dr. Klitzman will describe themes in his work over several decades that reveal how he has used social science, particularly ethnographic methods, and open-ended means of inquiry to explore phenomena beyond the evident in several areas of medicine.  After college, as he described in his book, The Trembling Mountain: A Personal Account of Kuru, Cannibals and Mad Cow Disease, he spent a year living and working among the Stone Age Fore group in the Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea, studying cannibalistic rituals that led to the spread of the kuru epidemic, caused by prions, which were later found to be responsible for Mad Cow Disease.  He then applied lessons he learned there concerning ethnographic study and observation to work on a variety of moral and ethical issues in medicine.  He will discuss how these approaches shaped his studies of HIV transmission and sexual ethics (cf Being Positive:  The Lives of Men and Women with HIV, and Mortal Secrets:  Truth and Lies in the Age of AIDS), of the moral education of physicians (cf A Year-long Night:  Tales of A Medical Internship, In a House of Dreams and Glass:  Becoming a Psychiatrist, When Doctors Become Patients), and most recently, genetics, interpretations of ethics in different social contexts, and other areas.  He will explore how he has sought to remain open-minded to phenomena that he has then sought to investigate systematically.

Dr. Robert Klitzmanis an Associate Professor of Clinical Psychiatry (in Sociomedical Sciences) in the College of Physicians and Surgeons and the Joseph Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University, the Director of the Ethics and Policy Core of the HIV Center, and the Director of the Masters of   Bioethics Program that is being established. Dr. Klitzman has received numerous honors and awards for his work, including fellowships from the Russell Sage   Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Aaron Diamond Foundation, the Commonwealth Fund, and elsewhere.

 

“The Physics of Angels and Demons and beyond: Antimatter Bombs, Mini Black Holes and Extra Dimensions” with Michael Tuts

14 April 2010

The movie “Angels & Demons” opens with a shot of the ATLAS experiment at the CERN Laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland. It is the laboratory where particle physicists create antimatter in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC); the antimatter is then stolen to create a bomb which is used to threaten the Vatican. Dr. Tuts will use the movie as an opportunity to tell about the real world of particle physics and what is science fact vs. science fiction in the movie. Particle physics deals with the world of the very small; the world of fundamental particles (including antimatter) and the forces that bind them. How nature behaves on this small scale can be very strange indeed and at times is contrary to everyday experience and what seems evident to one’s senses. As a Columbia experimental particle physicist working on one of the world’s largest experiments, ATLAS, which will use the world’s highest energy particle accelerator, the LHC, Dr. Tuts will explain the exciting physics to discover, such as: the nature of mass (or where is the Higgs particle?); evidence of new fundamental particles that make up the “dark matter” that accounts for a quarter of our universe; evidence for the creation of mini-black holes that are predicted by some string theory inspired models. As we look beyond the evident in nature, we will also see that the influence of particle physics extends beyond the evident in society – from recent movies like “Angels and Demons” to our everyday life. All these are areas that have been strongly influenced by particle physics.

Dr. Michael Tuts has been Professor of Physics at Columbia University specializing in experimental particle physics since he joined the faculty in 1983.  He has been spokesperson for the CUSB experiment at CESR; he has been co-project manager for the D0 experiment upgrade at Fermilab, and he is currently the US ATLAS experiment Program Manager for the experiment at the LHC, a position he has held since 2005. In this latter role he manages the US ATLAS program consisting of some 500 US physicists from 44 US institutions with an annual budget approaching $40M per year. His research has focused on understanding and discovering fundamental particles. The ATLAS experiment is one of the largest scientific instruments ever built, and involves physicists from 169 institutions from 35 countries around the world. Dr. Tuts has published over 350 journal papers. Dr. Tuts has been a Sloan Fellow and is a Fellow of the American Physical Society. At Columbia he has been the Director of Nevis Labs, and he enjoys teaching undergraduates. In 2004, his teaching was recognized when he was awarded one of five Columbia Presidential Awards for Outstanding Teaching.

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