2023 National Hazing Prevention Week at CMU

Monday, Sept. 25 to Friday, Sept.29

Explore resources to prevent hazing.

Palestinian Cuisine: Terroir and Identity

Monday, Sept. 25, 5 to 6:30 p.m., 510 William Pitt Union, Student Office of Sustainability, 3959 Fifth Ave. 

Chef Fadi Kattan grew up in Bethlehem where he inherited his love of food from his maternal grandmother. Fadi’s cuisine and savoir faire combine worldly influences, a desire for perfection and a passion for sharing the stories of the local foragers, gardeners, farmers and cooks that have shaped the culinary heritage of Palestine. Fadi speaks on various platforms of Palestine’s rich culinary heritage, the importance of terroir, the role of cuisine as a diffusor of culture.

Culture and Cuban Sandwiches: How a Local Delicacy Embodies Tampa’s Latin Identity 

Tuesday, Sept. 26, 6 to 8 p.m., Virtual 

Much like the Cuban Sandwich, Tampa features layers of diverse demographic ingredients that form the city’s cultural identity. Join Associate Professor of Hispanic Studies Kenya Dworkin for a discussion of the many facets of the multicultural Latin identity of Tampa and how it came to be. 

Kenya C. Dworkin y Méndez, PhD (U.C. Berkeley 1994) is an Associate Professor of Hispanic Studies and Co-Director of the Master’ in Global Communication and Applied Translation program at Carnegie Mellon University. With support from a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, she is currently completing a performance ethnography, and racial and ethnic history of a virtually unknown chapter of U.S. and Cuban theater history that took in Tampa, Florida. She has published widely in Cuban, U.S. Latino, and Latin American Jewish and Sephardic literary and cultural studies, and is also an active translator. Dworkin is also engaged in community-oriented, cultural and social and civil rights work in Pittsburgh and Cuba through four non-profit organizations she currently directs or co-directs: Coro Latinoamericano-a Spanish-language community choir; the Latin American Cultural Union–a Spanish-language community choir; Círculo Juvenil de Cultura — an outreach program for Hispanic children and families; and CubaCivica — a civic engagement training program for members of Cuban independent civil society in the effective use of deliberative democracy. 

Register today!

University Lecture Series Event with Abigail Marsh: “The Biology of Heroism”

Wednesday, Sept. 27, 5 to 6 p.m. Simmons Auditorium

Reception to follow

Vice Provost for Education Amy Burkert, is pleased to invite you to the first University Lecture Series event for the 2023-2024 academic year.

Inaugural Carl & Amy Jones Lecture in Interdisciplinary Science: “The Biology of Heroism”

Featuring Abigail Marsh, psychologist and neuroscientist

Abigail Marsh is a professor in the Department of Psychology and the Interdisciplinary Neuroscience Program at Georgetown University. She is a pioneer in the neuroscience of heroism, altruism, courage and compassion, and the co-founder of the nonprofit mental health organization, Psychopathy Is.

Register now

President's Lecture Series Inaugural Distinguished Lecture

Thursday, Sept. 28, 11:15 a.m. to 12:15 p.m., Simmons Auditorium, First Floor, Tepper Building 

President Farnam Jahanian invites you to the launch of his President’s Lecture Series featuring

General Laura J. Richardson, Commander, U.S. Southern Command, First Army Female Combatant Commander delivering a distinguished lecture on Partnering in the Western Hemisphere - Challenges and Opportunities. 

This event is free and open to members of the CMU community. Please register by Wednesday, Sept. 27. On-site registration is available as space permits. 

Questions? Please contact uls@andrew.cmu.edu

Find out more and register

Student Academic Success Center Workshop: Applying to Graduate School

Thursday, Sept. 28, 3 p.m., Zoom

Although different graduate schools may ask you to answer different prompts, most ask that you write no more than a two-page application essay. The application essay is difficult to write because you must pitch your candidacy to a few department faculty members who read through hundreds – or sometimes thousands – of other essays. In this workshop, you will receive a crash course in preparing your application essay. This workshop is appropriate for anyone considering applying to graduate school in the near future, but it is expected that participants will come prepared to discuss their academic goals.

Learning Objectives:

• Understand the genre of the graduate school application essay
• Learn how to avoid some of the most common application essay pitfalls
• Develop a plan/timeline for finishing the essay before your respective deadline

Please email access@andrew.cmu.edu if you have a disability and need an accommodation for your disability in order to participate fully in the meeting. 

Register for Applying to Graduate School

Neuroscience Institute Distinguished Speaker Series: Jennifer Groh 

Thursday, Sept. 28, 4 p.m., MI 328 (MI Social Room)  

Computing the location(s) of sounds in the visual scene

How the auditory system encodes the locations of sounds involves rich computational problems. I will focus on two particular computations:

1. How does the brain compute the visual locations of sounds across eye movements? We recently discovered that the eardrums move when the eyes move, suggesting that a copy of eye movement commands is sent to the ear by the brain, potentially causing sound transduction to be altered by eye movements (Gruters, Murphy et al. PNAS 2018; Lovich et al. biorxiv 2022; Lovich et al Phil Trans B 2023).
2. How does the brain encode more than one sound (or visual) location at a time? I will discuss evidence for neural time-division multiplexing, in which neural activity fluctuates across time to allow representations to encode more than one simultaneous stimulus (Caruso et al, Nat Comm 2018; Jun et al. eLife 2022).

These findings all emerged from experimentally testing computational models regarding spatial representations and their transformations within and across sensory pathways. Further, they speak to several general problems confronting modern neuroscience such as the hierarchical organization of brain pathways, selectivity of processing and limits on perception/cognition.

Find out more

CMU to YC

Thursday, Sept. 28, 5 to 6 p.m., Swartz Center for Entrepreneurship, 4765 Forbes Avenue

Join us for an exciting event at the Swartz Center for Entrepreneurship! "CMU to YC" is a must-attend talk for aspiring entrepreneurs. William Zeng graduated from Carnegie Mellon in 2021 with a bachelor's degree in Statistics/Machine Learning. He worked at Roblox for two years as the youngest senior machine learning engineer in the company's history. In June, he decided to leave Roblox to work on Sweep, an AI-powered junior developer. William, and his co-founder Kevin, are now working full-time on Sweep as a member of the summer '23 class.

Get inspired by William Zeng, a successful entrepreneur, who has made the journey from Carnegie Mellon University to Y Combinator. Learn from his experiences, ask any questions and network with like-minded individuals. See you there!

Register to attend

Book Launch: DEATH IN CUSTODY: How America Ignores the Truth and What We Can Do about It 

Deaths resulting from interactions with the US criminal legal system are a public health emergency, but the scope of this issue is intentionally ignored by the very systems that are supposed to be tracking these fatalities. We don't know how many people die in custody each year, whether in an encounter with police on the street, during transport, or while in jails, prisons or detention centers. In order to make a real difference and address this human rights problem, researchers and policymakers need reliable data.

In Death in Custody, Roger A. Mitchell Jr., M.D., and Jay D. Aronson, Ph.D., share the stories of individuals who died in custody and chronicle the efforts of activists and journalists to uncover the true scope of deaths in custody. From Ida B. Wells’s enumeration of extrajudicial lynchings more than a century ago to the Washington Post’s current effort to count police shootings, the work of journalists and independent groups has always been more reliable than the state's official reports. Through historical analysis, Mitchell and Aronson demonstrate how government at all levels has intentionally avoided reporting death-in-custody data.

Find out more

Presented by the Center for Africanamerican Urban Studies & the Economy (CAUSE)

Free Screening of The Martian

Friday, Sept. 29, 6 to 9 p.m., McConomy Auditorium, CUC

Join us for a free screening of Ridley Scott's The Martian (2015) starring Matt Damon sponsored by the Center for the Arts in Society.

Mental Health and Jesus Special Talk

Friday, Sept. 29, 7 to 9 p.m., Doherty Hall 

Special talk on a Christian perspective on mental health, what it means to have good mental health, and how Jesus deals with anxiety and stress in the Bible.

Student Academic Success Center Workshop: Writing Strategies for Second Language Users

Monday, Oct. 2, 4 to 5 p.m., In Person 

Have you ever been told that your writing in English is “awkward” or “unnatural?” Writing in an additional language can be challenging because the expectations often vary greatly from culture to culture. This workshop will cover a variety of strategies that can help you to write more quickly, easily and clearly in English.

Learning Objectives:

• Understand how cultural differences and values influence North American academic writing expectations.
• Learn about strategies and tools that can help them to communicate their ideas more effectively in a variety of contexts.
• Practice using these tools to work with lexical bundles, academic voice and source use.

Register for Writing Strategies for Second Language Users

Chinese Mid-Autumn Festival Celebration 中秋晚会

Tuesday Oct. 3, 6 to 8 p.m., McConomy Auditorium, CUC

The Chinese Mid-Autumn Festival is also known as the Moon Festival. The full moon has long been regarded as a symbol of reunion and togetherness in Chinese culture. Come to have fun together with us. Free and open to the public!

Exploring Careers in the Language Services Industries 

Wednesday, Oct. 4, 5 to 6 p.m., Posner Hall 152 

There is a growing demand for professional translators, interpreters, localizers and project managers. In the U.S., the biggest buyers of these services domestically are the government and the healthcare industry. There is also high demand in the courts, retail, customer service and financial sectors, to name a few. 

All undergraduate and graduate students interested in working with languages are invited to meet representatives from ALC Bridge: The Association of Language Companies for a discussion of how globalization has led to a steady increase in the demand for language services in recent years. 

Registration required

Lecture: Frontier Rebels - The Vigilante Origins of the American Revolution, 1765-1776

Thursday, Oct. 5, 5 to 6:30 p.m., Baker Hall A53 (Steinberg Auditorium) 

Join the Humanities Center for a lecture by Dr. Patrick Spero. Spero recasts the familiar narrative of the American Revolution, moving the action from the Eastern Seaboard to the treacherous Pennsylvania frontier. He recounts the untold story of the 1765 rebellion of the “Black Boys”: a ragtag group of settler vigilantes who rose in insurgency in reaction to the pan-Indian resistance movement known as "Pontiac's War” and against British attempts to negotiate peace agreements with native nations in the wake of the Seven Years’ War.

Patrick Spero, executive director of the George Washington Presidential Library, is he author of Frontier Country: The Politics of War in Early Pennsylvania (Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2016) and Frontier Rebels: The Fight for Independence in the American West, 1765-1776 (W.W. Norton & Co., 2019); and co-editor with Michael Zuckerman of The American Revolution Reborn: New Perspectives for the 21st Century (Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2016).

Botany & Betrayal: Seminar Moderated by Michel Gobat

Friday, Oct. 6, 12 to 1:30 p.m.

Join the Humanities Center for a lunch and a discussion of "Botany and Betrayal: Andre Michaux, Thomas Jefferson, and the Kentucky Conspiracy of 1793," moderated by Michel Gobat, professor in the University of Pittsburgh's Department of History. A copy of the paper will be available on the Humanities Center website.

Register by Sept. 28.

Please note: registration is capped at 15. If the seminar is full, email Prof. David Shumway (shumway@andrew.cmu.edu) and request to be added to the waitlist.

Brothers: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Race — Book Symposium

Friday, Oct. 6, 3:30 to 4:30 p.m. (reception); 4:30 to 6 p.m. (symposium & discussion), Baker Hall A53 (Steinberg Auditorium)

A story of love and loss across the color line, Brothers is a historian’s quest to make sense of the life and death of his older brother. Peter Slate, born Uderulu Osakwe and also known as XL the 1I, a mixed-race hip-hop artist and screenwriter, was the victim of a racially-charged assault in 1994. A group of white men attacked him in a club in Santa Monica. His family saw it as a hate crime but the truth is more complicated. Twenty years later, Nico Slate, a historian and writer, began investigating the night his brother was attacked and the larger story of their family — a story that speaks both to the power of love to transcend racial lines and to the persistence of racism in contemporary America.

Nico Slate is a professor in the Department of History at Carnegie Mellon University. His research examines struggles against racism and imperialism in the United States and India. His most recent book is Brothers: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Race (Temple University Press, 2023).

Presented by the Center for Africanamerican Urban Studies & the Economy (CAUSE)