Graduate students are invited to join us next Friday, March 6 for the next session of Christian Thoughts-in-Progress, a series designed for graduate students seeking to integrate their Christian faith with their academic pursuits. The program offers a supportive community for scholars seeking growth in their vocation as integrated Christian thinkers who are making a legitimate contribution to the academy as well as to the church and the common good. Each session will feature a brief presentation from a graduate student member of our community. The presenter will highlight ways in which they see their work attempting to make a contribution to their discipline and the Christian community at large.
Our presenter next week will be Justin Gumas, a Collegium Institute Graduate Fellow and post-doc at Penn's Perelman School of Medicine. Justin recently earned his PhD from Jefferson University's Biology and Molecular Pharmacology program. His CTIP presentation is provocatively titled "Should Basic Scientists Be Forced to Be More Useful?". Justin will present a chapter from his dissertation in which he argues that RNA fragments, acting well outside the roles traditionally ascribed to RNA, may function as mediators of neuroinflammation in the schizophrenic brain. He will discuss two roughly defined modes of research in the biological sciences: the basic mode, having as its primary aim knowledge for its own sake; and the applied or translational mode, in which utility is the primary aim. With these two apparently opposed modes of research in mind, he will seek to answer the central question: What is a scientist?
Dates: Monthly on Fridays, 12:00 - 1:00 pm
March 6
April 10
April 24
May 8
Lunch will be provided for all participants.
Location: Fox-Fels Hall (3814 Walnut St)
To RSVP for each CTIPS session, click the button below. Questions? Please contact Joe Perez-Benzo (jperezbenzo@collegiuminstitute.org).
This program is made possible by support from the Ambassador’s Fund for Catholic Education