Leading physicist Brian Greene to present Self Graduate Fellowship Symposium lecture

LAWRENCE – Brian Greene, one of the world’s leading theoretical physicists and a brilliant, entertaining communicator of cutting-edge scientific concepts, will deliver the Madison and Lila Self Graduate Fellowship Symposium lecture at 4:30 p.m. Friday, April 13, at the Burge Union. Greene’s lecture, titled “Big Science and the Future of Discovery,” is free and open to the public.

Greene is a professor of physics and mathematics at Columbia University, where he is also the director of the Center for Theoretical Physics. He has lectured at both a general and a technical level in more than 30 countries and on all seven continents, and he is widely regarded for a number of groundbreaking discoveries in superstring theory. His first book, “The Elegant Universe,” was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in general nonfiction, spent more than half a year on The New York Times best-seller list and has sold more than a million copies worldwide. His subsequent books, “The Fabric of the Cosmos” and “The Hidden Reality,” were also New York Times best-sellers and inspired the Washington Post to call him “the single best explainer of abstruse ideas in the world today.”

“The Elegant Universe” and “The Fabric of the Cosmos” were each adapted into multi-part PBS documentaries hosted by Greene and lauded with numerous honors, including a George Foster Peabody Award for broadcast excellence. His novella “Icarus at the Edge of Time,” adapted for the stage with an original orchestral score by Philip Glass, premiered at Lincoln Center and has since been performed more than 50 times around the world. And with Emmy-winning journalist Tracy Day, Greene co-founded the World Science Festival, which has drawn an audience of more than 1.5 million people to its annual events.

A Harvard graduate and a Rhodes Scholar, Greene is a frequent television guest, joining Stephen Colbert eight times and playing himself in an episode of “The Big Bang Theory.” He has also had cameo roles in a number of Hollywood films, including “Frequency,” “Maze” and “The Last Mimzy.”

The Symposium lecture is sponsored by the Self Graduate Fellowship. The mission of the Self Graduate Fellowship is to identify, recruit and provide development opportunities for exceptional doctoral students in business, economics, engineering, mathematics, biological, biomedical, pharmaceutical and physical sciences who demonstrate the promise to make significant contributions to their fields of study and society as a whole.

The late Madison “Al” and Lila Self launched and permanently endowed the Self Graduate Fellowship in 1989, motivated by their strong belief in the vital importance of developing leadership for tomorrow.