From Penn State Berks
Pictured above: “Curious Minds: The Power of Connection.”
The Penn State Berks Science Division will present a lecture titled “The Science of Curiosity,” a genre-bending exploration of curiosity’s powerful capacity to connect ideas and people. The lecture will be presented by Dani S. Bassett, co-author of “Curious Minds: The Power of Connection,” written with their twin, Perry Zurn. There will be a reception at 4 p.m. on Wednesday, Dec. 3, in the Perkins Student Center Multipurpose Room, followed by the lecture beginning at 4:45 p.m. in the Perkins Student Center Auditorium. This event is free and open to the public.
“The Science of Curiosity” is the inaugural event in the college’s newly established “Dr. Stanley and Grete Furrow Science Colloquium.” The presentation will delve into the nature of curiosity and cover some of the same material in Basset’s book, “Curious Minds.”
According to the book’s description, Bassett and Zurn — identical twins who write that their book “represents the thought of one mind and two bodies”— harness their respective expertise in the humanities and the sciences to get irrepressibly curious about curiosity. Traipsing across the literatures of antiquity and medieval science, Victorian poetry and nature essays, as well as work by writers from a variety of marginalized communities, they trace a multitudinous curiosity.
They identify three styles of curiosity — the busybody, who collects stories, creating loose knowledge networks; the hunter, who hunts down secrets or discoveries, creating tight networks; and the dancer, who takes leaps of creative imagination, creating loopy ones. Investigating what happens in a curious brain, they offer an accessible account of the network neuroscience of curiosity. And they sketch out a new kind of curiosity-centric and inclusive education that embraces everyone’s curiosity. The book performs the very curiosity that it describes, inviting readers to participate — to be curious with the book and not simply about it.
Bassett began their undergraduate studies as a student at Penn State Berks and currently holds the J. Peter Skirkanich Professorship at the University of Pennsylvania, with appointments in the Departments of Bioengineering, Electrical and Systems Engineering, Physics and Astronomy, Neurology, and Psychiatry. They are also an external professor at the Santa Fe Institute.
They received a B.S. in physics from Penn State University and a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Cambridge, UK, as a Churchill Scholar and as an NIH Health Sciences Scholar. Following a postdoctoral position at UC Santa Barbara, Bassett was a Junior Research Fellow at the Sage Center for the Study of the Mind.
They have received multiple prestigious awards, including American Psychological Association’s ‘Rising Star’ (2012), Alfred P Sloan Research Fellow (2014), MacArthur Fellow Genius Grant (2014), Early Academic Achievement Award from the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (2015), Office of Naval Research Young Investigator (2015), National Science Foundation CAREER (2016), Popular Science Brilliant 10 (2016), Lagrange Prize in Complex Systems Science (2017), Erdos-Renyi Prize in Network Science (2018), OHBM Young Investigator Award (2020), AIMBE College of Fellows (2020), and American Physical Society Fellow (2021). They have also been named one of Web of Science’s most Highly Cited Researchers for four years running.
Bassett is the author of more than 480 peer-reviewed publications, which have garnered over 64,000 citations, as well as numerous book chapters and teaching materials. Bassett’s work has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the Army Research Office, the Army Research Laboratory, the Office of Naval Research, the Department of Defense, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Paul Allen Foundation, the ISI Foundation, and the Center for Curiosity.
This event was made possible by the Dr. Stanley Furrow and Grete Furrow Excellence Fund in Science Endowment. Stanley Furrow is associate professor emeritus of chemistry at Penn State Berks, where he taught for more than 30 years, during which time Bassett was one of his students. The endowed fund provides support to bring in experts and renowned speakers in science. For more information on this event, contact Tami Mysliwiec, division head for science at Penn State Berks and associate professor of biology, at THM2@psu.edu.
The post Penn State Berks Presents ‘The Science of Curiosity’ Lecture appeared first on BCTV.
Source: bctv