Discovery Park to welcome Katepalli Sreenivasan as first WebEx distinguished lecturer

Katepalli Sreenivasan
Download image

The first WebEx Discovery Park Distinguished Lecture of 2020 is scheduled for May 7. With an introduction by Purdue President Mitch Daniels, Katepalli Sreenivasan will present a seminar at 3:30 p.m. titled “The Impact of Abdus Salam: A Great Scientist and an Inspirational Humanitarian.”

This lecture is free and available to the public, and is presented by Discovery Park as part of the Discovery Park Distinguished Lecture Series. Register here to receive WebEx seminar details.

Sreenivasan states, "Abdus Salam’s concern for developing countries was genuine, and he was, in a certain sense, a universal man; it was he who wrote and believed, 'Scientific thought is the heritage of [all] mankind.'"

Educated in Punjab and Cambridge, Salam shared the 1979 Nobel Prize in physics with Sheldon Glashow and Steven Weinberg. He spent most of his adult life in England and Italy while maintaining close ties with Pakistan and used his considerable connections to build fine international institutions such as the International Center for Theoretical Physics or ICTP (which now bears his name) and the Third World Academy of Sciences (TWAS, now The World Academy of Sciences), both in Trieste, Italy. Salam relentlessly advocated the advancement of science in the developing world, especially in Arab-Islamic countries, as a means for economic development.

Sreenivasan is dean emeritus of NYU Tandon School of Engineering; the Eugene Kleiner Professor for Innovation in Mechanical Engineering; and professor of physics (Faculty of Arts and Science) and mathematics (Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences). Educated in India, Australia and the Johns Hopkins University, Sreenivasan taught at Yale and the University of Maryland and was appointed as the director of ICTP, where he holds a concurrent professorship in the name of the center’s founding director, the late Nobel laureate Abdus Salam.

The Discovery Park Distinguished Lecture Series is made possible by the Lilly Endowment as a mechanism for Purdue University and Discovery Park to bring to campus the latest thinking about science and technology and other broad areas of public interest.

About Discovery Park
Discovery Park is a place where Purdue researchers move beyond traditional boundaries, collaborating across disciplines and with policymakers and business leaders to create solutions for a better world. Grand challenges of global health, global conflict and security, and those that lie at the nexus of sustainable energy, world food supply, water and the environment are the focus of researchers in Discovery Park. The translation of discovery to impact is integrated into the fabric of Discovery Park through entrepreneurship programs and partnerships.

Source: Jay Gore,  gore@purdue.edu
Writer: Elizabeth Harwood, eharwood@purdue.edu