Chapman seminars focus on cause and effect in scientific data
August 30, 2019
Speakers will discuss how to detect cause and effect in scientific data during the
the 2019 Chapman Chair Lecture Series at the University of Alaska Fairbanks from Sept.
3-6.
The free public seminars will be held Tuesday, Thursday and Friday afternoons, Sept.
3, 5 and 6, in the Elvey Building, Room 214, on the Fairbanks campus. A full schedule
of the series, hosted by the UAF College of Natural Science and Mathematics, is available
online at http://cnsm.uaf.edu/chapman-chair/.
Jürgen Kurths, who holds the Sydney Chapman Endowed Chair of Physical Sciences at
UAF, will moderate the seminars and make a presentation. Kurths is a mathematical
physicist from the Institute of Physics at Humboldt University of Berlin and the Potsdam
Institute for Climate Impact Research.
Other guest speakers include neurobiologist Claudia Lainscsek, of the Salk Institute
for Biological Studies, and Dmitry Kondrashov, an ocean and atmospheric science researcher
from the University of California, Los Angeles.
The UAF speakers are atmospheric scientist Uma Bhatt, biochemist Kelly Drew, physicist
David Newman, mathematical physicist Renate Wackerbauer, and climate researcher John
Walsh.
Newman, who helped organize the seminars, said speakers will focus on determining
causality — the techniques and difficulties, as well as some of problems, that arise
when people try to find causal relationships in data.
“This is relevant to society because it is how we make the predictions that are important
in science and often critical to us,” said Newman. Questions of causation arise in
predicting climate, weather, health trends, infrastructure needs and even the economy,
he said.
The Alaska State Legislature created the Chapman chair in 1983 as the first endowed
chair in the University of Alaska system. The position gives students and faculty
a chance to learn from distinguished researchers who are pioneers in the physical
sciences.