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The David B. Abernethy Emeriti/ae Lecture Series: Autobiographical Reflections features distinguished senior faculty members speaking about their lives, careers, and inspirations. Speakers reflect a wide range of teaching and research fields at Stanford, including the arts, humanities, social sciences, education, business, law, engineering, sciences, and medicine.

Stanford Emeriti/ae Council Autobiographical Reflections Stanford University

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The David B. Abernethy Emeriti/ae Lecture Series: Autobiographical Reflections features distinguished senior faculty members speaking about their lives, careers, and inspirations. Speakers reflect a wide range of teaching and research fields at Stanford, including the arts, humanities, social sciences, education, business, law, engineering, sciences, and medicine.

    Myra Strober: Ninety Men and Me

    Myra Strober: Ninety Men and Me

    On February 28, 2024, Myra Strober, Professor of Education, Emerita, and Professor Emerita of Economics (by Courtesy) at the Graduate School of Business, treated an audience of emeriti/ae community members to a wonderful lecture, entitled “Ninety Men and Me: Some Autobiographical Reflections.” Speaking candidly and from the heart, she traced the arc of her life as a student, wife, and mother of young children, making her way in academia beginning in the 1960s at a time when women were rare as graduate students and even more rare as professors. Discovering along the way that she was a “feminist,” she created, through her research, the new field of gender (or feminist) economics and helped to found what is now Stanford’s Clayman Institute for Gender Research (initially the Center for Research on Women). Strober spoke about leading the joint MBA-MA in Education degree program, teaching a popular course entitled “Work and Family” for many years, and recently co-authoring a book, “Money and Love: An Intelligent Roadmap for Life’s Biggest Decisions.” With humorous anecdotes and an unfailingly positive attitude, Strober described the difficult challenges she had faced and the valued support she has received in her professional and personal life.

    • 1 Std. 16 Min.
    Michael Wald: The Power of Social Context

    Michael Wald: The Power of Social Context

    On Nov. 15, 2023, Michael S. Wald, the Jackson Eli Professor of Law, Emeritus, reflected on his 57 years at the Stanford Law School combining research, teaching, and university service. He also described professional periods of leave including at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the San Francisco Department of Human Services. He acknowledged his good fortune as a white male growing up in the 1950s within a highly supportive educational system and community, leading to Cornell University as well as Law and Political Science degrees from Yale University. He contrasted his own experiences with those of highly disadvantaged children who are often trapped on a “school to prison” conveyer belt. He discussed the ways in which his research and involvement in drafting state and national legislation had been focused on bettering the life chances of families and children who must overcome poverty and inequality in order to thrive. Wald reflected dismay over the vast and unintended expansion of the U.S. welfare system over the past thirty years. He stressed that deep interdisciplinary collaborations, such as those he and faculty in the social sciences and medicine had carried out at Stanford’s Boys Town Center for the Study of Children, Youth and Families, will be necessary at universities like Stanford if multiple structural barriers are to be surmounted.

    • 1 Std. 20 Min.
    Ann Arvin: Autobiographical Reflections

    Ann Arvin: Autobiographical Reflections

    On Apr. 19, 2023, Ann Arvin, the Lucile Salter Packard Professor of Pediatrics and Professor of Microbiology and Immunology, Emerita, a nationally recognized scientist, spoke to an emeriti/ae audience. She shared some of her experiences growing up on a farm and as a “faculty brat.” She commented on her undergraduate years at Brown University as a philosophy major, followed by an MD at the University of Pennsylvania, with just seven female students who found the patriarchy “alive and well,” but were active in seeking changes. Arvin noted that becoming an assistant professor in a Medical School clinical department brings with it the demanding and simultaneous new role of attending physician and “decider” in patient care. She also reflected on the challenges of joining Stanford in 1978 as one of very few women faculty across campus, gravitating to each other and founding a Faculty Women’s Caucus to help bring about change. She described the excitement of her research career in molecular virology and infectious diseases, focusing on the varicella zoster virus (which causes chicken pox and shingles). Enticed into leadership through the University Fellows Program, Arvin served from 2006 to 2018 as Stanford’s Vice Provost and Dean of Research, and she offered perspectives on Stanford’s robust system of of interdisciplinary programs and institutes, envied by many peer universities. In response to a question, Arvin expressed pride in being a physician-scientist and the hope that this valuable and rewarding model will continue.

    • 1 Std. 5 Min.
    Paul Yock: Tales of a Medical Gizmologist

    Paul Yock: Tales of a Medical Gizmologist

    On Feb. 15, 2023, Paul Yock, the Weiland Professor of Bioengineering and Medicine, Emeritus, treated an audience of emeriti/ae community members to a wonderful lecture, entitled “Tales of a Medical Gizmologist,” about his life and career. After a middle-class upbringing in St. Louis Park, Minnesota, he attended Amherst College and Oxford University, studying both science and philosophy, then attended Harvard Medical School and pursued a career as an interventional cardiologist first at UCSF followed by Stanford. He provided a fascinating “insider’s” perspective on the major role that Stanford has played in creating the large Bay Area medical technology ecosystem. Tracing the story from the 1980s when several faculty members who became health technology pioneers left Stanford due to a perceived lack of support for their innovation activities, he discussed the present environment where the university, and particularly the School of Medicine, is placing heavy emphasis on “translational” research bringing discoveries forward into patient care. This evolution was reflected in the inclusion of an early Medical Device Network as part of the “Bio-X” concept, the creation of innovation fellowships in 2001, the launch of many start-up companies from Stanford Biodesign, and the creation of the Bioengineering Department, uniquely housed in two schools. He discussed in some detail how the biodesign process is being taught and improved, for example by ensuring that consumers of health care are involved in the research phase. A beneficial fusion of entrepreneurship and scholarship was evident throughout this talk, in which Yock acknowledged his mentors and predecessors.

    • 1 Std. 7 Min.
    Clayborne Carson: Where Do We Go from Here? Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Still Unanswered Question for the World

    Clayborne Carson: Where Do We Go from Here? Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Still Unanswered Question for the World

    In a lecture on Nov. 15, 2022, Clayborne Carson, the Martin Luther King, Jr., Centennial Professor of History, emeritus, spoke in the Emeriti/ae Council’s “Autobiographical Reflections” lecture series. He traced the path of his early life growing up in Los Alamos, New Mexico, undergraduate and graduate studies at UCLA, becoming a “historian” rather unintentionally, and his almost fifty-year career at Stanford. He described his early interest in the civil rights movement, focused principally on young activists his own age, especially those in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which became the subject of his first book. Carson explains how he was asked by Mrs. Coretta Scott King to edit and publish her late husband’s speeches, sermons, and other writings, and became the founding Director of the King Institute at Stanford. He also spoke about his collaboration with PBS on the Eyes on the Prize documentary series which led him to write two plays about King’s life and teachings, which have been performed in China and in Palestine. Carson is continuing his online educational efforts by establishing the World House Project at the Freeman Spogli Institute, collaborating with international human rights advocates to realize King’s vision of a global community in which all people can “learn somehow to live with each other in peace.”

    • 1 Std. 5 Min.
    William Durham: Surprising Implications of Evolution

    William Durham: Surprising Implications of Evolution

    On April 20, with an introduction by Professor Emeritus David Abernethy, Professor Emeritus William Durham presented a lively Abernethy Autobiographical Reflections lecture to Emeriti/ae at the Stanford Faculty Club. Durham’s lecture highlighted three widely distinct aspects of evolution from the biological, to the cultural, to the personal.
    First, stemming from the blue-footed booby photo of Professor Emeritus Lubert Stryer’s recent Abernethy lecture, Durham considered the origin of the iconic Blue-footed Boobies of Galapagos. Here opportunistic mating and the elevated importance of blue feet evolved to an essential reproductive strategy in both female and male blue-footed boobies. The seasonal shift in blue-footed booby foot color to aqua is dependent on dietary carotenoids from sardines (in turn from phytoplankton) and correlates with their ocular spectral sensitivity range and with cold mineral-rich marine upwellings nearby. The foot-color shift to “sardine blue” points to a Galapagos origin for the species, counter to orthodoxy in the field.
    In the second, surprising example, Durham discussed a classic cultural anthropological study of the Thongpa, a group of tax-paying serfs in traditional Tibet and Tibetan-speaking Nepal. Cultural inheritance in this society resulted in an exceptional diversity of marriage practices tightly managed by parents with the long-term goal of uniting all legal heirs of each generation into a single marriage with inheritance, thus to hold on to the essential land. This cultural practice was maintained in the context of extreme climate, low primary production in the steep agricultural valleys, and financial tolls exacted by the local manorial landlords. Thongpa emigrants to India do not continue those diverse marriage practices. There were clear adaptive advantages to the practice in the homeland, yet it’s a product of cultural evolution – an important correction, says Durham, to the claims of sociobiology.
    In keeping with the theme of Autobiographical Reflections, in his final example Durham credited his childhood interest in finding fossils, from brachiopods to trilobites, during limestone treasure hunts near his home in Northern Ohio. In his personal “evolution,” the enduring question remains: what are the origins of the diversity of life?

    • 1 Std. 18 Min.

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