Office of Advancement

This is a wonderful chance to mingle and dine with other alumni and students from the LGBTQ+ community. Enjoy delicious food and have fun while making new connections!

Please visit the February Celebration web site for a complete schedule of family activities.

Students, alumni, and friends of all fitness levels and experience are welcome to participate in this fun run through the trails around the campus. Registration begins at 9 a.m. Run begins at 9:30 a.m.

Alexis Mychajliw, assistant professor of biology and environmental studies, examines insights from scientific studies of the past with observations from people living with carnivores in the present to consider what it is that makes the conservation of carnivores both so politically polarizing yet ecologically urgent. The full description of this talk can be found at right here.

Phil Chodrow, assistant professor of computer science will examine large language models (LLMs) power modern chatbots and text generators. How do they work and what do they mean for human society? We’ll begin by describing next-token-prediction and reinforcement learning with human feedback, the two technical tasks that underlie contemporary LLMs. The full description of this talk can be found right here.

Sharad Joshi, associate professor in the Nonproliferation and Terrorism Studies (NPTS) program, examines the multiple strategies through which terrorists exploit conditions created by natural disasters such as earthquakes, floods, and tsunamis (amongst other such catastrophes). These strategies include participating in disaster relief activities with the expectation that it will lead to increased fundraising and enhanced recruitment. The full description of this talk can be found right here. 

Please join Anderson Professor of Environment and Biosphere Studies Molly Costanza-Robinson for a talk entitled “Sources and Ecological Consequences of Salting Vermont’s Streams.”

Talk Description: I will share work from an ongoing collaborative project in which we seek to understand the magnitude, source(s), and ecological consequences of elevated salt levels in Lake Champlain Basin streams.

For more information and to register please visit the Faculty at Home website.

Please join Charles A. Dana Professor of Political Science Murray Dry for a talk entitled “The Presidency and the Constitution: The Founders’ Views and the State of the Office and its Powers Today.” Talk Description: This talk takes its points of departure from two books on the American presidency that were published in 2020. The first is “After Trump: Reconstructing the Presidency”, by Bob Bauer and Jack Goldsmith. The authors provided a roadmap for reform of the presidency in the post-Trump era.