In Brief: April 17

Award-winning New York Times White House correspondent Jackie Calmes will visit the University on April 21 to talk about her job at one of the most prestigious news organizations in the world.

Calmes will meet with students during the day and give a public speech, titled “Inside the White House Press Corps,” at 4 p.m. in 101A Olscamp Hall.

“I think audience members will find it inspiring that Jackie has risen to the ranks of Washington insider without having an ivy-league degree,” said Julie Hagenbuch, lecturer in the Department of Journalism and Public Relations and coordinator for Calmes’s visit. “She hails from our area, a Toledo native, and has made her way to the top entirely on her own."

Calmes earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Toledo and a master’s degree in journalism from Northwestern University. She began her career at the Abilene Reporter-News in west Texas, and in 2005, she was awarded the Gerald R. Ford Journalism Prize for Reporting on the Presidency. Calmes joined the New York Times in 2008 as a national correspondent and has been covering the White House since 2010.

Calmes’s visit is possible because of the Florence and Jesse Currier Endowment, which supports seminars and faculty research projects relevant to the journalism department.

Past Currier speakers have included columnist Molly Ivins, filmmaker Michael Moore, CBS News reporter Steve Hartman, Fox News analyst Juan Williams, Rolling Stone writer Evan Wright and NPR reporter Brian Bull.

The student chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists is also sponsoring the event.

Many of the world’s most urgent problems require a scientific solution, and yet science is facing serious threats, both internally and externally, according to Dr. Arturo Casadevall, director of the Center for Immunological Sciences at Montefiore Medical Center Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York.

As this year’s Jean Pasakarnis Buchanan speaker, Dr. Casadevall will address the problems of science and suggest some solutions. His talk, titled “Science at a Crossroads:  Time for Reform,” will be held at 7 p.m. April 21 in 112 Life Sciences Building, the Pasakarnis-Buchanan Lecture Hall. The talk is free and open to the public and aimed at a lay audience.

The next day (April 22), he will give a departmental lecture, “Thoughts on the Origins of Virulence,” at 11 a.m. in the same room. The talk is also open although designed primarily for those with a background in science.

According to Casadevall, science is arguably humanity’s greatest intellectual invention. In the 250-plus years since the Scientific Revolution, humanity has attained a great understanding of the natural world and this has translated into a tremendous range of innovation that ranges from interplanetary probes to vaccines to rapid communications.  However, he says, the scientific enterprise is facing threats from inadequate funding, a societal focus on short-term goals and anti-scientific movements characterized by denial of scientific information as well as a reward structure focused on winner-take-all economics, over-specialization and poor communication skills with the public, who fund science.