Founding director of NYU’s Center for Urban Science and Progress to give Discovery Park lecture

Steven E. Koonin (Photo provided) Download Photo

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. - Steven E. Koonin, founding director of New York University's Center for Urban Science and Progress, will speak next week on the future of urban populations and how we are bringing informatics to the study and operation of urban systems.

The talk, titled Adventures in Urban Informatics, is at 11:30 a.m. Wednesday (March 9) in Burton D. Morgan Center for Entrepreneurship, Room 121. The Discovery Park Distinguished Lecture Series event, which is free and open to the public, will focus on a topic more prominent than ever with the nation's ballooning urban populations.

NYU's Center for Urban Science and Progress is a consortium of academic, corporate and government partners that pursues research and education activities to develop and demonstrate informatics technologies for urban problems in the “living laboratory” of New York City.

The former U.S. Department of Energy's undersecretary for science, Koonin also has been a faculty member at the California Institute of Technology, a research fellow at the Niels Bohr Institute, an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellow, provost of Caltech and chief scientist at BP.

Sponsors of the talk are Discovery Park and Lilly Endowment. Through a $1 million gift to Discovery Park from the Indianapolis-based Lilly Endowment, Purdue launched the Discovery Park Distinguished Lecture Series in 2006 to bring prominent speakers to campus. 

For more information, contact Maria Longoria-Littleton, engagement coordinator for Discovery Park, at 765-494-0015, mlongori@purdue.edu. 

Writers: Anna Schultz, 812-447-5229, schult70@purdue.edu

Phillip Fiorini, 765-496-3133, pfiorini@purdue.edu 

Source: Maria Longoria-Littleton, 765-494-0015, mlongori@purdue.edu