Fusing Curiosity with Discovery: February 21 - March 2

Donna Strickland is a professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Waterloo and is one of the recipients of the 2018 Nobel Prize in Physics for developing chirped pulse amplification with Gérard Mourou, her Ph.D. supervisor at the time. They published this research in 1985 when Strickland was a Ph.D. student at the University of Rochester in New York. Together they paved the way toward the most intense laser pulses ever created. The research has several applications today in industry and medicine — including the cutting of a patient’s cornea in laser eye surgery and the machining of small glass parts for use in cell phones. Strickland was a research associate at the National Research Council Canada, a physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and a member of the technical staff at Princeton University. In 1997, she joined the University of Waterloo, where her ultrafast laser group develops high-intensity laser systems for nonlinear optics investigations. She is a recipient of a Sloan Research Fellowship, a Premier’s Research Excellence Award and a Cottrell Scholar Award. She served as the president of the Optical Society (OSA) in 2013 and is a fellow of OSA, the Royal Society of Canada and SPIE (International Society for Optics and Photonics). Strickland is an honorary fellow of the Canadian Academy of Engineering as well as the Institute of Physics. She received the Golden Plate Award from the Academy of Achievement and holds numerous honorary doctorates. 

Speaker Engagement

• Shattering Barriers with a Laser Focus: Three World-Changing Women in Physics at Texas Science Festival, Feb. 25, 2025 at 5:30 p.m.

Dr. Ed Viesturs is widely regarded as this country’s foremost high-altitude mountaineer. He is familiar to many from the 1996 IMAX Everest Expedition documentary. In 2002, he was awarded the historic Lowell Thomas Award by the Explorer’s Club for outstanding achievement in the field of mountaineering. He has also received the American Alpine Club Sowles Awards for his participation in two rescues on K-2 and National Geographic’s Adventurer of the Year recognition.

After earning his doctorate in Veterinary Medicine in 1987 while also serving as a guide on Mount Ranier, Dr. Viesturs decided to embrace his passion for climbing the highest peaks of the world full-time. Viesturs has successfully reached the summits of all of the world’s fourteen 8000-meter peaks without supplemental oxygen, an 18-year project he christened Endeavor 8000. He is one of only a handful of climbers in history (and the only American) to accomplish this. His books about his experiences include “No Shortcuts to the Top: Climbing the World's 14 Highest Peaks,” “K2: Life and Death on the World's Most Dangerous Mountain” and “The Mountain: My Time on Everest.”  

Speaker Engagement

• No Shortcuts to the Top at the Texas Science Festival, Feb. 27, 2025 at 7 p.m.

Vauhini Vara is a writer — a journalist, editor, fiction writer, essayist and playwright — in Colorado. She began her journalism career as a technology reporter at The Wall Street Journal and later launched, edited and wrote for the business section of The New Yorker’s website. Since then, her writing has also appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, Wired and elsewhere. She is a Businessweek contributing writer and can sometimes be found working as a story editor at The New York Times Magazine. Her debut novel, The Immortal King Rao (Norton, 2022), was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Publications that named it a notable book of the year include NPR and The New York Times, where Justin Taylor called it “a monumental achievement.” Her story collection, This is Salvaged (Norton, 2023), was longlisted for The Story Prize and the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award, and named by The New Yorker, Publisher’s Weekly and others as a notable book of the year. Her third book, a work of nonfiction called Searches — an examination of how technology companies are both serving and exploiting the human desire for connection and understanding, most recently with artificial intelligence — will publish in 2025. Vara is also the author of a play, Ghost Variations — a stage adaptation of her essay “Ghosts” — which was selected to be performed as part of the Denver Center for the Performing Arts’s 2024 Colorado New Play Summit. Vara has given lectures and readings at the Chautauqua Institute, the New York State Writers Institute and the Jaipur Literature Festival, as well as at Stanford University, Princeton University, the Ohio State University and many other institutions.  Her journalism has been honored by the Asian American Journalists Association, the South Asian Journalists Association, the International Center for Journalists, the McGraw Center for Business Journalism, the International Journalists’ Programmes and the National Association of Real Estate Editors. Her fiction has received an O. Henry Award, as well as honors from the Rona Jaffe Foundation, the Canada Council for the Arts, MacDowell, Yaddo and Hedgebrook. Her creative nonfiction has been honored by the Best American Essays series and the Canada Council for the Arts. She is a mentor at the Lighthouse Writers Workshop’s Book Project and was a founding mentor for Periplus, a collective mentoring writers of color. She sits on the board of the Krishna D. Vara Foundation, which awards an annual scholarship to a graduating high-school student at Mercer Island High School in memory of her sister, Krishna Vara. Vara was born in Saskatchewan, Canada, as a child of Indian immigrants and grew up there and in Oklahoma and the Seattle suburbs. She lives in Colorado with her husband, the writer Andrew Altschul, and their son.

Speaker Engagement

• If AI Can Write, Why Should We? at Texas Science Festival, Feb. 26, 2025 at 4:30 p.m.

Karl Gebhardt’s research focuses on two main areas: black holes and dark energy. His work on black holes has helped build the case that a class of medium-mass black holes exists in between the stellar-mass black holes that result when massive stars explode as supernovae and the supermassive black holes that lie at the hearts of galaxies. Karl is also one of the architects of HETDEX, the Hobby-Eberly Telescope Dark Energy Experiment. This McDonald Observatory project seeks to understand dark energy, that enigmatic force causing the universe's expansion to speed up. Dark energy has been called the most important puzzle in all of science today. Karl received his Ph.D. in Physics and Astronomy from Rutgers University. He holds the Herman and Joan Suit Professorship in Astrophysics.

Speaker Engagement

• Black Holes: The Edge of All We Know at Texas Science Festival, March 1, 2025 at 7 p.m.