Alexander Graham Christie Lecture

 

Alexander Graham Christie was the longtime head of the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the Johns Hopkins University in the first half of the twentieth century. He also served as the President of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers in 1939, and was the first Chairman of the Maryland Board of Registration for Professional Engineers and Land Surveyors. The JHU Student Section and the Baltimore Section of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers honor Professor Christie’s many contributions to the engineering profession through this lecture series, now in its twenty-first year. For more information on Dr. Christie, an article on his career.

The Johns Hopkins 26th Annual Alexander Graham Christie Lecture
March 26, 2009, Lecture 4:30-5:30pm, Reception 5:30-7:00

Topic: “Sisyphus Should Have Been a Surfer Dude”

Sisyphus was the Greek king cursed to roll a huge boulder up a hill, only to watch it roll down again, and to repeat this throughout eternity. This process is similar to how microorganisms move through environments to find food, the physics of that motion, and the time-reversible nature of motion.  Additionally, research has developed structures that might act to force microorganisms to endlessly move away from food, rather like poor Sisyphus .  Finally, research has found that bacteria, unlike Sisyphus, have a solution to the problem.

Speaker: Dr. Robert Austin is renowned physicist in the area of biophysics and micro/nanotechnology. He is currently a Professor of Physics at Princeton University and has been elected a fellow of the American Physical Society (1988) and a member of the American Academy of Sciences (1999).

Check out the rest of the ME seminars in the JHU ME Department.

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