Monday, May 20, 2019

8:30 – 10:00 a.m.

Dr. Michael E. Webber, Ph.D.

As Acting Director of the Energy Institute, Josey Centennial Professor in Energy Resources, Author, and Professor of Mechanical Engineering, Dr. Michael E. Webber trains the next generation of energy leaders at the University of Texas at Austin and beyond through research and education at the convergence of engineering, policy, and commercialization.

Mr. Webber will make a presentation called:  “Power Trip: The Story of Energy”.

His first book, "Thirst for Power: Energy, Water and Human Survival", which addresses the connection between earth’s most valuable resources and offers a hopeful approach toward a sustainable future, is receiving wide praise. His upcoming book "Power Trip: the Story of Energy", will be published May 7, 2019 with a 6-part companion series on PBS later in 2019.

He was selected as a Fellow of ASME and as a member of the 4th class of the Presidential Leadership Scholars, which is a leadership training program organized by Presidents George W. Bush and William J. Clinton. Webber has authored more than 400 publications, holds 5 patents, and serves on the advisory board for Scientific American.

A successful entrepreneur, Webber was one of three founders in 2015 for an educational technology startup, DISCO Learning Media, which was acquired in 2018 by ProBility Media. Webber holds a B.S. and B.A. from UT Austin, and M.S. and Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from Stanford. He was honored as an American Fellow of the German Marshall Fund, an AT&T Industrial Ecology Fellow, and on four separate occasions by the University of Texas for exceptional teaching.

12:15 – 1:45 p.m.

Eliza Griswold

Eliza Griswold, a contributing writer covering religion, politics, and the environment, has been writing for The New Yorker since 2003. She has written and translated four books of nonfiction and poetry and is the author, most recently, of “Amity and Prosperity: One Family and the Fracturing of America”, winner of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction. 

She has held fellowships at Harvard Divinity School, Harvard University, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the New America Foundation.

Her translations of “Afghan women’s folk poems, I Am the Beggar of the World”, was awarded the 2015 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation.

Eliza authored “The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam”, which won the 2011 J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize, a PEN Translation Prize, and in 2010 the American Academy in Rome awarded her the Rome Prize for her poems.

Her second book of poems, “If Men, Then”, will be published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, in 2020.

She is currently a Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University, and she lives in New York with her husband and son.