Chapman seminars focus on cause and effect in scientific data

August 30, 2019

Tanya Clayton

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.