This year, Gustavus is celebrating both its sesquicentennial and the 47th annual Nobel Conference—The Brain and Being Human. This year’s Nobel poster is also a subject of interest to many members of the Gustavus community.
The poster’s creator is a young Brazilian artist named Leandro Lima, who lives in Milan, Italy.
“We knew he liked abstract drawings, so we looked at some of his work, and decided that he could do part of the art for the poster,” Director of the Nobel Conference Chuck Niederriter said. “He used input from the committee to create the main artwork.”
Despite the fact that this conference falls on such an important year for Gustavus, many people involved with the planning of the Nobel Conference say not much is changing, from a marketing perspective, from previous years.
“I think we’re doing roughly the same thing. We had two preview speakers for the Making Food Good Conference, very much like how we did with Michael Chorost. We didn’t have a play, like On Ego, last year, but we have in previous years. We have made a concerted effort to involve everyone in this community,” Niederriter said.
“The greater publicity surrounding this year’s conference is because it is a neuroscience topic, and neuroscience is in,” Director of Communication Services and Special Events Dean Wahlund said.
Each year a lot of time and debate is put into deciding a relevant topic. “The topic of The Brain and Being Human floated to the top this year because one of the professors had wanted to try to get this topic done before he retired and really wanted to do this. We realized that in fact with all the breakthroughs in recent years, it would be a good time to do it,” Niederriter said.
“We needed to do it because it’s really important right now,” Niederriter said. To anyone interested in the sciences this will be the place to be, but science isn’t necessarily the only focus. Ethics of modern medicine, psychology, linguistics, theology and genetics are all involved.
“Neuroscience is essentially the liberal arts of modern society,” Niederriter said.
The diversity of subjects is exemplified in the presenters who range from having degrees in theology to neuroscience to economics. The conference is meant to be a gathering place of different people with different expertise and different opinions to come together and openly discuss the impact of recent discoveries in neuroscience. The conference will take place on October 4 and 5, 2011.