This lecture series commemorates the life and legacy of Professor Susan Odom, an energetic, productive, and driven faculty member in the Department of Chemistry from 2011 to 2021. It features speakers noted for outstanding research in Professor Odom’s fields of synthetic and materials chemistry.

Visit this page for more information on the Susan A. Odom lecture series.

Bio: Veronica Augustyn is the Jake and Jennifer Hooks Distinguished Scholar in Materials Science and Engineering and Associate Professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at North Carolina State University. She received her B.S. from the University of Arizona and Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles, both in Materials Science and Engineering. She was a postdoctoral fellow at the Texas Materials Institute, University of Texas at Austin. Her research focuses on the electrochemistry of materials for energy and environmental applications, including interfacial phenomena, insertion mechanisms, and confinement effects.  She is the recipient of several awards, including the National Science Foundation CAREER, the Department of Energy Early Career, and Sloan Research Fellowship. She is also the founder and faculty advisor of an award-winning international project, SciBridge, a student-led group that develops renewable energy research and education collaborations between universities in Africa and the U.S. She is an Associate Editor of the Journal of Materials Chemistry A and Materials Advances, and serves on the editorial advisory boards of ACS Energy Letters, Physical Review Materials, Energy Storage Materials, and ACS Nanoscience Au.

Abstract: Technological interest in electrode materials with long-term stability and reactivity in aqueous electrolytes is motivated by the urgent need for large scale, safe, and low-cost electrochemical energy storage and conversion. Transition metal oxides are an important class of redox-active electrode materials for aqueous electrochemical technologies including batteries, fuel cells, and electrolyzers. From a fundamental perspective, the electrochemistry of metal oxides in aqueous electrolytes across the entire pH scale inevitably involves protons. These can interact with transition metal oxides via numerous reactions including water electrolysis, surface adsorption and bulk insertion, and dissolution. These reactions are sensitive to the pH (especially the interfacial pH), and can involve proton donors beyond H₃O⁺. In this seminar, I will discuss our work on understanding the electrochemical behavior of metal oxides in aqueous electrolytes for energy storage and conversion. This includes proton insertion mechanisms, the interplay of proton insertion with the hydrogen evolution reaction, and the role of acid electrolyte composition on the speciation of proton-coupled electrochemical reactions. The metal oxides that I will discuss include hydrous tungsten oxides, metastable hydrogen titanates, and layered MnO₂.

2023 Mark and Ruth Luckens International Prize in Jewish Thought and Culture winner Eric Eisner (Yale University) presents his award-winning essay, "Jewish Rights on Middle Ground: Race and the Religious Test in Antebellum Maryland."

The presentation will take place via Zoom. Please click the following link to register for this special event!

https://uky.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_FR8l4qeLRB64l-R36LiDnw#/registration

Biography:
Eric Eisner is a J.D. candidate at Yale Law School. He has a B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania and an MPhil in American history from the University of Cambridge. His work has appeared in Southern Jewish History and the Journal of Religious History.

About the talk:
The 1826 Maryland Jew Bill allowed Jewish men to hold political office and positions of public trust. Historians have previously situated the Jew Bill in the politics of Maryland and as part of the religious and legal history of the United States, but they have not considered the importance of race. Maryland, a slave state that also possessed the nation’s largest free Black population, was the country’s “middle ground,” and the state’s racial politics form a necessary context to understand Jewish rights and the redefinition of citizenship in Maryland and the United States.

Henry D. Fetter is a graduate of Harvard Law School and a member of the California and New York Bars. He holds degrees in History from Harvard College and the University of California, Berkeley and has written about the Jewish Justices of the Supreme Court and antisemitism in American law schools. He is currently working on a book about Louis D. Brandeis’s appointment to the Supreme Court in 1916.

Zoom link for registration: https://uky.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_K8yI0T-ETJqiy-cuitMLvA

Ching Kwan Lee graduated from the University of California-Berkeley Sociology Department, and is the author of the award winning Against the Law.  Her talk analyzes the peculiarity of outbound Chinese state capital by comparing it with global private capital in copper and construction in Zambia.  Refuting the dominant narratives of "Chinese colonialism" and "south-south cooperation," comparative ethnographic data collected over a 5-year period chronicle the multi-faceted struggles that confront and differentiate these two varieties of capital entailing uneven potentials for post-colonial African development.

There will also be a small workshop on doing ethnography in China at 10AM on the same day. (Please contact Thomas Janoski at tjanos@uky.edu for details)

By placing the Israeli experience in a comparative perspective, I explore the circumstances that led to the debut of present-day special operations forces and the mechanisms that allowed these units to overcome operational and organizational obstacles and ascend to their current prominent status.  

The recent crossing of four different vectors, namely the rise of asymmetrical wars, technological leaps, heightened sensitivity to military casualties, and the professionalization of armed forces provided a highly conducive environment for the rise of Special Operations Forces (SOFs). 

Small teams of professional operators, equipped with cutting edge technologies, can rapidly deploy and carry out missions of strategic significance that in the past required massive military campaigns. 

An analysis of an original global database of SOFs provides support for the trend. Indeed, the last three decades were marked by a steady rise in the size and influence of these actors in the international arena. 

However, a closer look into the data unveils that the seeming linear trend line is a façade, and that in reality, a small number of units account for the alleged global proliferation of this branch. The desire to solve this puzzle brought me to the field and so far I discovered a subsequent list of equally important issues.