March 28 – April 1, 2016

Monday, March 28

No Seminars

Tuesday, March 29

No Seminars

Wednesday, March 30

Psychology/Neuroscience Cannon Callosum seminar: What tamarins can tell us about the uniqueness of us 
Dr. Julie Neiworth, Professor of Psychology, Carleton College. This event is intended to potentiate the connectivity between the neuroscience communities at Carleton and St. Olaf.
6:30 pm, Black and Gold Ballrooms

Humans evolved to express behaviors very different from our close relatives, the great apes, in terms of our development, our cooperative care of children, and our means for food getting, which typically relies heavily on cooperation and prosocial helping. Cotton top tamarins are one of a very few number of primate species which also breeds cooperatively. If cooperative breeding relies upon prosociality and unusual social/cognitive traits, then we might expect to find similar social thinking in these two disparate species. A sampling of studies from our lab outlines the similarities and differences in neural processing, cognition, and social thought we have discovered between humans and tamarins. These findings suggest ways in which humans evolved to be uniquely different from other primate species, and ways in which tamarins may serve as a viable animal model for brain and behavior processing in humans.​

Physics Colloquium: Subsurface Waves in the Oceans and Lake Superior
Sam Kelly, Assistant Professor, Large Lakes Observatory and Dept. of Physics, University of Minnesota Duluth
3:30 pm, RNS 210

Thursday, March 31

No Seminars

Friday, April 1

Seminar: Breaking Strong Bonds and Recovering Rare Earths: Adventures in Sustainable Chemistry
Marion H. Emmert, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Departments of Chemistry & Biochemistry, Chemical & Mechanical Engineering

Catalysis is one of the most powerful tools of green chemistry, enabling reactions with lower energy consumption and providing new pathways for bond formations. In particular, catalytically functionalizing C-O bonds (common in biomass) under mild conditions are critical reactions to enable more sustainable chemical methodologies. Our approach towards addressing these challenges focuses on establishing a mechanistic understanding in order to translate this knowledge into broadly useful protocols for organic synthesis and biomass activation.

At the end of the materials lifecycle, inventing new technologies to provide sustainable sources of raw materials through recycling is another critical challenge for the movement towards a circular economy. Our efforts in this area take an approach similar to our developments in the area of catalysis: Based on understanding principles and mechanisms of materials flows, we use the principles of green chemistry to enable the design of novel, sustainable rare earth recovery technologies.

3:00 pm refreshments, 3:15 pm seminar, RNS 310