Speakers for this event

• David Kaiser

  David Kaiser

  David Kaiser is Germeshausen Professor of the History of Science and Professor of Physics at MIT. He is the author of several award-winning books about modern physics, including How the Hippies Saved Physics: Science, Counterculture, and the Quantum Revival (2011) and Quantum Legacies: Dispatches from an Uncertain World (2020). A Fellow of the American Physical Society, Kaiser has received MIT’s highest honors for excellence in teaching at both the undergraduate and graduate-student levels. A frequent contributor to National Public Radio and PBS NOVA television documentaries, his work has also been featured in Science, Nature, the New York Times, and the New Yorker magazine.

• Katrina LaCurts

  Katrina LaCurts

  Katrina LaCurts is a Senior Lecturer and Undergraduate Officer in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Primary academic interests lie in the intersection of computer systems and society, and Dr. LaCurts specializes in the teaching of large undergraduate systems courses and managing the EECS Undergraduate Office, which serves nearly 1700 students. Dr. LaCurts serves on the Office of Minority Education’s Faculty Advisory Committee and has been a member of the EECS Committee on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion and the Dean’s Action Group on Social and Ethical Responsibilities of Computing. In 2021, Dr. LaCurts received the inaugural School of Engineering Distinguished Educator Award.

• Kelsey Gibbons

  Kelsey Gibbons

  Kelcey Gibbons is a PhD student at MIT in the HASTS program (History, Anthropology, Science, Technology, and Society). Her research focuses on race and technology, particularly the African American experience of technology in the late 19th to mid 20th century. She is interested in the computer as a technology of black freedom, community building, and American citizenship; and in how black betterment organizations wove the computer into black freedom narratives and how the computer (as a device, idea, image) contributed to how those freedoms were imagined, sought-after, communicated. Recent publications include “Inventing the Black Computer Professional”, in Abstractions and Embodiments: New Histories of Computing and Society.