Title: Globalization, Science and Technology and the Public Good

 

Speaker: Prof. Venkatesh Narayanamurti，Harvard University

 

Time: 14：00-15:30, May 14^th, 2013

 

Venue: Room 302, School of Public Policy and Management, Tsinghua University

 

 

Venkatesh Narayanamurti is the Benjamin Peirce Professor of Technology and Public Policy and a Professor of Physics at Harvard. He is also the Director of the Science, Technology and Public Policy Program at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School (HKS).  He currently also serves as the Foreign Secretary of the U.S National Academy of Engineering. He was formerly the John L. Armstrong Professor and Founding Dean of the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and Dean of Physical Sciences at Harvard.

 

Previously he served as the Richard A. Auhll Professor and Dean of Engineering at the University of California at Santa Barbara. Prior to that, he was Vice President of Research at Sandia National Laboratories and Director of Solid State Electronics Research at Bell Labs. He obtained his PhD in Physics from Cornell University and has an Honorary Doctorate from Tohoku University. 

 

He is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering and the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences, and a Fellow of the American Physical Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the IEEE, and the Indian Academy of Sciences.  He has served on numerous advisory boards of the federal government, research universities and industry. He is the author of more than 230 scientific papers in different areas of condensed matter and applied physics. He lectures widely on solid state, computer, and communication technologies, and on the management of science, technology and public policy.

 

 

Prof. Venkatesh Narayanamurti speech will address three questions:

1. What does it mean to be a leading and societally relevant university in an increasingly globalized world?

2. What does it mean to be a broadly educated person in the 21st century?

3. What should radically innovating R&D institutions look like?

Prof. Venkatesh Narayanamurti’s views are shaped from my his personal experiences in industry, research intensive universities and in U.S national laboratories. He will review what is known about the processes of innovation and the role of engineering as a linking discipline with the society at large.

 

Prof. Venkatesh Narayanamurti’s view is that as many of the societal grand challenges, such as energy and sustainability, require global solutions. We must therefore prepare engineering graduates for this new environment. We need to educate “renaissance engineers”-those who understand not only how things work but also how the world works. This necessarily requires a new breed who are able to relate to societal well-being! It also requires new institutional modalities which allow holistic and integrated problem solving.