DAVIS--Topics ranging from “the wonders of black holes” to the analysis of poetry reading recordings to protecting the “world's last pristine ocean” will highlight the UC Davis Leonardo Art Science Evening Rendezvous (LASER) presentations on Thursday, Feb. 15 in Room 115 of the Music Building.

The event, free and open to the public, begins at 6:15 with networking, followed by speaker presentations at 6:30, conversations at 7:15, and ending with “Rapid Fire Community Sharing.”

The speakers are Veronika Hubeny, UC Davis professor of physics, who will speak on “Wonders of Black Holes”; Marit MacArthur, lecturer in the UC Davis University Program, “Poetry Reading Performative Speech and Sound Studies”; and Grant Ballard, chief science officer for the Point Blue Conservation Science, headquartered in Petaluma, speaking on “Providing the Scientific Basis for Protection of the World's Last Pristine Ocean.”

Hubeny is a theoretical physicist who explores the fundamental underpinnings of the universe. She focuses her research in the areas of string theory and quantum gravity, exploring the underlying nature of space time. “I am particularly fascinated by holographic qualities which describe higher-dimensional gravitational theory by a lower-dimensional non-gravitational one,” she says. Much of her work involves deeper understanding of black holes within this context, and “the mysterious links to quantum information theory.” (See YouTube video)

MacArthur analyzes recordings of poetry readings as texts-in-performance, researching the evolution of and trends in performance styles. Such research requires tools that work well on low-quality, noisy audio common in humanities research, including poetry readings, radio plays, and talking books, the datasets for a new collaborative project funded by a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Digital Humanities Advancement grant. Working with media historian Mara Mills of New York University, radio historian Neil Verma of Northwestern University, neuroscientist/bioengineer Lee Miller of UC Davis and Berliln-based software developer Robert Ochshorn, MacArthur is developing and supporting humanistic research on audio archives. She will talk about her initial findings analyzing sample recordings of 100 American poets. 

Grant Ballard currently leads projects investigating and communicating the effects of landscape-scale environmental stressors on ecosystems and human stakeholders in western North America and the Southern Ocean. He is responsible for shaping and growing Point Blue's multi-investigator scientific research and conservation programs towards the vision that healthy ecosystems will continue to sustain thriving wildlife and human communities in California and beyond, on land and at sea, for decades to come. He will talk about his research on Antarctica's Ross Sea ecosystem, the creation of a large marine protected Area, and climate-smart

The Leonardo Art, Science, Evening Rendezvous (LASER) talks at UC Davis are evening presentations that engage the public as participants in conversations with artists, designers, scientists, and technologists making significant contributions to their fields. The evenings are designed to encourage unexpected juxtapositions between seemingly unrelated projects, facilitating the interdisciplinary conversations that engage the challenges of the 21st century.

Coordinator is Jiayi Young, assistant professor, the Department of Design. Several personnel in the UC Davis Art/Science Fusion Program, including artists/scientists Diane Ullman, professor of entomology, and Anna Davidson, now a postdoctoral researcher at UC Davis, founded the LASER program at UC Davis.

The UC Davis LASERS are sponsored by the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences; Humanities, Arts and Cultural Studies College of Letters and Science; and Leonardo/International Society for the Arts, Sciences and Technology (Leonardo/ISAST),