Astronaut and visionary futurist Sian Proctor is the featured speaker at the annual Feigenbaum Forum on Innovation and Creativity, Friday, Sept. 12, at 5 p.m. in the Nott Memorial.
Her talk, “EarthLight: Exploring the Intersection of Art, Science and Engineering for Earth and Beyond,” is free and open to the public.
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The program is a featured event of the Robert E. Martinson '65 Engineering & Liberal Education Symposium. Both the forum and the symposium are organized in collaboration with the Templeton Institute
Proctor's pioneering work bridges the worlds of science, space exploration, humanity and creative expression.
A scientist and geology professor at South Mountain Community College, Proctor made history in September 2021 when she became the first African American woman to pilot a spacecraft, Inspiration4, the first all-civilian orbital mission to space.
The forum is supported by the Feigenbaum Foundation, created by brothers Armand V. Feigenbaum ’42 and Donald S. Feigenbaum ‘46, longtime benefactors to Union.
Acknowledged world leaders in systems engineering and total quality control, the Feigenbaums founded General Systems Co., a Pittsfield, Mass.-based international systems engineering firm that designs and helps implement operational systems for corporations and governments worldwide. Armand died November 2014; Donald, March 2013.
For more than a dozen years, the brothers hosted the Feigenbaum Forum, a gathering on campus at which academicians discussed characteristics of a new generation of leaders and how better to integrate liberal arts and other studies. The current series builds on this event by bringing in prominent speakers who have revolutionized their fields of endeavor through contributions deemed innovative and creative.
Previous speakers have included Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times columnist and author Thomas Friedman; John E. Kelly III ’76, a former executive vice president at IBM; noted techno-sociologist Zeynep Tufekci; Howard Gardner, an internationally renowned psychologist; and artist and designer Maya Lin, whose work includes the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and the Civil Rights Memorial.
As the first liberal arts college to offer engineering in 1845, Union holds a distinctive place in higher education.
Established in 2008, the engineering and liberal arts symposium brings together faculty, students and administrators from across the country and beyond to explore the benefits and challenges of a close partnership between engineering education and a liberal education.
Among the schools represented at the symposium are MIT, Dartmouth, Lafayette and Johns Hopkins University.