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Visiting Scholar Lisa Pratt |
Randolph-Macon College’s Phi Beta Kappa Chapter will host a Visiting Scholar, Professor Lisa Pratt, in November 2010. In addition to visiting multiple classes,
Pratt will give a public lecture at 7:00 p.m. on Thursday, November 11, 2010 in the Washington Room of Washington-Franklin Hall. Her lecture, titled
Technical and Ethical Challenges Associated with the Search for Extraterrestrial Life, is
free and open to the public.
Pratt is Provost’s Professor of Geological Sciences at Indiana University and recipient of the 2003 Distinguished Faculty Award in the College of Arts and Sciences. As part of her research into life-sustaining energy for microbes in the deep subsurface of Earth, she has collected samples of water, rock, and natural gas in active gold mines at depths up to 2.5 miles below the surface in South Africa and in the Canadian Arctic. Her collaborative research with Tullis Onstott on radiolysis of water as a source of energy for metabolism has been highlighted worldwide.
Pratt recently chaired a NASA science advisory group that proposed a 2018 rover called the Mars Astrobiology Explorer and Cacher (MAX-C), which is equipped to drill and encapsulate rock cores as the first step in a sample return campaign. She currently serves on the Mars Panel for the National Research Council Planetary Science Decadal Survey. She has been active on national committees of the Geological Society of America, the Geochemical Society, and the Society for Sedimentary Geology and is a former member of the editorial boards of
Geology,
GSA Bulletin, and
Geobiology.
The Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar Program makes available each year a dozen or so distinguished scholars who visit colleges and universities with Phi Beta Kappa chapters. Scholars spend two days on each campus, meeting informally with students and faculty, taking part in classroom discussions and giving a public lecture. The Visiting Scholar Program has sent 577 Scholars on 4,784 two-day visits since it was established in 1956.
In 2009, Randolph-Macon College’s Zeta Chapter of Virginia was selected by the Phi Beta Kappa Senate to receive the
Triennial award for the most outstanding chapter at a liberal arts college in the United States. The Chapter is supported through a generous endowment from Dr. John B. Werner ’53 and his wife, Anita S. Werner.
Founded in 1776, Phi Beta Kappa is the nation’s oldest academic honor society. It has chapters at 280 colleges and universities, and over 600,000 members. Phi Beta Kappa recognition was given to Randolph-Macon in 1923, and the college is one of only 10 percent of the colleges in the country so designated by this esteemed honorary society. Phi Beta Kappa’s Greek initials are ΦBK, which mean “Love of learning is the guide of life.”
For more information on R-MC’s Phi Beta Kappa Chapter, visit
http://www.rmc.edu/News/09-10-08%20Phi%20Beta%20Kappa.aspx.