Lecturers 2008-09

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All lectures are free and open to the public. They are held at 4:00 in the auditorium of the Science Center Complex on Roosevelt Drive on the Auburn University Campus. Parking areas nearest the auditorium are the lot in front of Comer Hall on the corner of Roosevelt and College Streets,and the Library parking deck off Roosevelt. Tiger Transit busses (Charcoal Line) run between the Jules-Collins Smith Museum of Fine Arts and campus regularly until 6:00 pm weekdays. Persons parking in the Museum lot should be at a bus stop by about 5:30 in order to be sure to catch the last bus back to their car. The nearest bus stop to the COS Auditorium is on Mell Street at Roosevelt.

For more information, contact:
Littleton-Franklin Lectures Program
Department of Biological Sciences
331 Funchess Hall
Auburn University
Auburn, AL 36849-5312
(334)-844-4830

Natalie Angier
January 27, 2009

Natalie Angier started her writing career at the New York Times covering science stories and ended up wining the Pulitzer Prize for a series of 10 feature articles on a wide array of scientific topics from the biology of scorpions to the importance of parasites in evolution to the ubiquitous effect of philandering in the animal kingdom.

She has written a plethora of books including Natural Obsession, an inside look at the high-throttle world of cancer research, The Beauty of the Beastly, a look at the multitudinous, mostly invertebrate creatures we’d rather forget, and Woman: An Intimate Geography, a celebration of the female body and biology. In 2007 Houghton Mifflin published The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science, a guide to the fundamental concepts of modern science that researchers in all the major scientific disciplines, from physics to chemistry to biology to geology, wish that everybody understood about their work.

Angier has received many notable awards including the American Association for the Advancement of Science prize for excellence in science journalism, the Exploratorium’s Public Understanding of Science award, the Lowell Thomas Gold Medal for travel writing, and the Lewis Thomas award for distinguished writing in the life sciences.

In her free time she teaches at Cornell University in the Andrew D. White Professor-at-Large post, studies Spanish, and practices weightlifting.