Carnegie Mellon
SHS - Science and Humanities Scholars Brought to you by the Mellon College of Science and the College of Humanities and Social Sciences.
Curriculum Advising Programs & Activities FAQ

Programs & Activities

The SHS program provides its students with opportunities beyond academics.

Quick Links to:

SHS Housing

In addition to fostering interdisciplinary, critical thinking, and problem-solving skills in the classroom, an optional clustered housing space is provided for SHS students. This gives students an opportunity to get to know one another outside of class and bond with others who have interests in both humanities and sciences. The housing cluster provides students with a wide array of social and academic opportunities since many students have similar interests. Socially, SHS cluster students take trips to museums, participate in intramural sports, and have floor movie nights. Academically, students are able to study together since many students take the same classes. In the past, professors have come to the housing cluster to do review sessions before exams.

The SHS cluster is located on the 5th floor of the Stever House dormitory (formerly known as New House), which was built in 2003. Stever House is the first dormitory in the country to become certified under the Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design (LEED) Green Building Rating System, developed by the U.S. Green Building Council. The rating examines such features as water efficiency, indoor environmental quality and materials. Stever provides students with many modern amenities, such as air conditioning, constant air circulation, a workout facility, and study rooms on each floor.

Beyond their first year, SHS students frequently choose to arrange living in close proximity to each other. One formal residential opportunity for SHS upperclass students is Interdisciplinary House, founded by a group of SHS students starting in fall 2008. Students in the SHS Program as well as the BXA (Bachelor of Science and Arts, Bachelor of Humanities and Arts, Bachelor of Computer Science and Arts) Programs are eligible to apply to live in Interdisciplinary House.

Back to Top


Victor M. Bearg Science and Humanities Scholars Speaker Series

Victor M. Bearg, 1964 MCS graduate in Physics, has generously endowed a speaker series to bring dynamic lecturers to campus.

 

Dean Keith Simonton, co-sponsored with the University Lecture Series, delivered a talk "Creativity in the Arts and Sciences: Contrasts in Disposition, Development, and Achievement" on April 1, 2010.

Psychologists have often thought of creativity as if it’s a single entity. Some people are creative, others not. Some people have jobs that require creativity, while others work in jobs where they are not required to be “creative.” But does this one-size- fits-all creativity really exist? This question is first examined by looking at the characteristics of major domains of creativity in the arts and the sciences. It then becomes clear that the creativity of a scientist differs from that of an artist. Further distinctions can be made among various scientific disciplines or artistic genre as well. For example, the creativity of a scientific revolutionary differs from that of a practitioner of normal science. Moreover, the creators in these diverse domains vary systematically in their dispositional traits (e.g., psychopathology) and developmental experiences (e.g., birth order). These differences then suggest what is required to display exceptional creative achievement in one’s chosen field. The answer is surprising.

Dean Keith Simonton, PhD, is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of California, Davis. He is the author of 396 publications, including eleven books, and is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Association of Applied and Preventive Psychology, the American Psychological Association, the Association for Psychological Science, the Western Psychological Association, and the International Association of Empirical Aesthetics.

 

Rebecca Skloot, co-sponsored with the Department of English, read from her New York Times-bestseller The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks on February 26, 2010.

Skloot’s work tells the story of Henrietta Lacks, an African-American woman whose cells – taken without her permission in the 1950’s at Johns Hopkins – have become a central tool of biomedical research. These “HeLa” cells, the first “immortal” human cells to be predictably cultured and reproduced in the lab, were central to the development of the polio vaccine in the 1950’s. HeLa clones – trillions by some counts – continue to be made, bought, and sold, and to fuel research around the world, including recent advances in radiation therapy, in vitro fertilization, and gene mapping. But Skloot’s work goes beyond the HeLa story. It’s also the story of the Lacks family and deeply connected to the history of African Americans in the US and current debates on informed consent, donor protocols, and the “business” of medicine.

Rebecca Skloot is an Assistant Professor at University of Memphis and an award-winning writer. She’s a contributing editor at Popular Science and has been a correspondent for NPR’s RadioLab and PBS’s Nova Science NOW. Her work appears in The New York Times, O, Discover, Columbia Journalism Review, and Prevention. Skloot has degrees in biological sciences and nonfiction writing and has taught at Memphis, the University of Pittsburgh, and NYU’s graduate program of Science, Health, and Environmental Reporting.


 

SHS Student Advisory Council (SAC)

Students are encouraged to get involved in the Student Advisory Council (SAC) for SHS. The council is a group of students who work with SHS faculty to sponsor and plan events for the SHS program. The SAC oversees and executes the Mentor Program and the SHS Choice of Majors Fair. They also help choose guest lecturers and plan social events where SHS students can interact and meet faculty. If you would like to get involved with the SHS SAC, please contact Andy Butler at abutler@andrew.cmu.edu.

Back to Top


Speaker Series

Each semester, the SHS program sponsors a student /faculty dinner. This is a chance for SHS students to meet with faculty from the College of Humanities & Social Sciences, the Mellon College of Science, and from across the university an informal setting and discuss their interests. SHS students invite many of these speakers themselves. This is a great opportunity to meet and talk to some interesting and talented people!

Some examples include:

Indira Nair
Vice Provost of Education and Professor of Engineering and Public Policy

Gregg Franklin
Department of Physics
What is Interdisciplinarity?

Jim Daniels
Department of English
Poetry Reading and Film Screening

Bruce Armitage
Department of Chemistry
Historical and Scientific Tour of the Mellon Institute

Jay Ball
Department of Drama
Contemporary and Campus Performances of the Oresteia Trilogy

Scott Sandage
Department of History
Why Einstein and Dylan Never Had Bad Hair Days

George Loewenstein
Department of Social and Decision Sciences
Functional MRI of the Brain during Economic Decisions

John Mackey
Department of Mathematics
Arrow's Theorem

Caroline Acker
Department of History

Rick McCullough
Dean of the Mellon College of Science and Professor of Chemistry
The Road to Plastic Lights, Computer Chips, Sensors, and Nanoscale Devices

Keith Campbell, Guest Lecturer
The University of Nottingham
Cloning Technology and its Implications

Keith Campbell, along with colleague Ian Wilmut of Roslin Institute, took biological science to a new level with the 1996 creation of Dolly the sheep. Dolly was special because she was the first animal to be cloned from a somatic, or body cell. Since Dolly's arrival, great interest and debate has emerged concerning the potential for human cloning. Campbell opposes pursuit of this application. Instead, he emphasizes the almost limitless potential for medical advances that cloning and related technology might bring-new ways to prevent and treat genetic abnormalities, disease and disability, more knowledge of the secrets of cell differentiation, and a better understanding of fetal development.

Marlene Behrmann
Professor, Psychology Department and Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition
Humans and the Way They See

Despite the fact that visual scenes may contain multiple objects and people, humans can recognize the objects and individuals with ease and accuracy. Research in my lab focuses on studying how this is achieved - what are the necessary psychological processes and representations that underlie abilities such as object segmentation and recognition, face recognition, mental imagery, reading and writing and spatial attention? Although these questions are asked within the framework of information-processing models used in cognitive psychology, I am also interested in identifying the neural mechanisms, which are responsible for these complex abilities.

Back to Top



Carnegie Mellon       College of Humanities and Social Sciences       Mellon College of Science       Home