ADHC Colloquium Series

11:30am - 2:30pm & 1:30pm - 4:30pm | Van transportation provided from Martinson Honors Hall

Passaic River Boat Tour (Study Tour 1)

Join us for an exciting boat tour as we explore the Passaic River! Van transportation will be provided from Martinson Honors Hall to the meeting point at Riverfront Park (the “Orange Sticks”) on Raymond Blvd., Newark. We will then travel upriver to the decommissioned Boonton Line bridge (to be repurposed for the Essex-Hudson Greenway), then downriver to Newark Bay and the Newark Bay bridge before turning back to the dock. Along the way, we will discuss the history of the river, including the Morris Canal, Superfund status/Diamond Shamrock site, community opposition to the Covanta incinerator, the city’s ongoing work to create and expand Riverfront Park (and other public access efforts on the Hudson and Passaic County waterfronts. We will also observe ongoing industrial, commercial, residential and transportation infrastructure redevelopments - and discuss how they affect the river’s ongoing (albeit slow) recovery. These tours will be led by Captains Bill Sheehan and Hugh Carola of Hackensack Riverkeeper.

There are 2 timeslot options for this study tour on 9/12. Interested scholars should register for their preferred timeslot through the Suitable app. 

Leadership & Civic Engagement Colloquium

This honors study tour is part of the Life on the River event series.

8:30am - 1:00pm | Bus transportation provided from Martinson Honors Hall

Great Swamp Stream Exploration: Headwaters of the Passaic River (Study Tour)

Visit our 73-acre forested wetland site which surrounds the Silver Brook, feeder stream of the Great Brook, which flows on into the Great Swamp Refuge and the Passaic beyond.  We recently completed a large wetland restoration at the site to reconnect the forest to the floodplain, increase important vernal habitats and help mitigate against downstream flooding.  We will walk along the stream and use our amazing topographic model of the Passaic river region to put it all together. We'll share the work our organization (Great Swamp Watershed Association) is doing in restoration and our water testing results.  This forest provides important ecosystem services for the region and helps protect the habitats of the Great Swamp Refuge which lie downstream from the site.

Leadership & Civic Engagement Colloquium

This honors study tour is part of the Life on the River event series.

2:30pm - 4:00pm | Jim Wise Theater, Kupfrian Hall

American River “A Journey Down the Passaic” - Documentary and Book Discussion

Join us for a lively discussion as we explore the Passaic River with Mary Bruno, author of An American River: From Paradise to Superfund, Afloat on New Jersey's Passaic and Scott Morris, documentary director of American River through a conversation moderated by Neil M. Maher. 

Mary Bruno spent her childhood along one of the most neglected waterways in America – New Jersey’s Passaic River. Decades later, she returns to kayak the river of her youth and tell its story. American River is 86-minute documentary film that follows Ms. Bruno and guide Carl Alderson on a 4-day, 80 mile adventure down the Passaic, from its pristine source in a wildlife refuge to its toxic mouth in Newark Bay. The river’s extraordinary history, geology and ecology are revealed as the kayakers navigate challenges, travel through urban landscapes and head towards the industrial disaster that poisoned the Passaic for the past 60 years. 

Scholars will have an opportunity to view the documentary in advance of this colloquium on September 17 at 7pm in the NJIT Campus Center Atrium or through the NJIT library’s digital collection. This colloquium is required for all first year Dorman Scholars. 

Scott Morris is the Producer, Director and Editor of American River. He is an accomplished independent filmmaker based in the New York/New Jersey area for 40 years.  Recent work includes Saving The Great Swamp: Battle to Defeat The Jetport currently distributed by American Public Television, and From The Ashes: The Life and Times of Tick Hall, also distributed by APT and featuring talk-show host Dick Cavett.  American River is his first feature-length documentary.  For more info, visit www.scottmorrisproductions.com.

Mary Bruno earned a masters degree in aquatic ecology in 1979. After spending several years studying bogs in northwestern Ohio and streams in South Carolina, she decided to try to become a writer. Since then, she worked as a fact checker at Inside Sports magazine and as an award-winning staff writer, editor and editorial director for a variety of print and online publications, including Newsweek, Seattle Weekly, ABCNEWS.com and Grist.org. Mary wrote the first regular sports column for a women’s magazine — as a contributing editor for New York Woman. Over the years, her work has also turned up in Redbook, ESPN magazine, The Stranger, International Wildlife, Crosscut.com, the Canadian Journal of Botany, the penguin exhibit at the New York Aquarium and the collections A Road of Her Own: Women’s Journeys in the West (Fulcrum Press, 2002) and Green Time (2003). Her first book, An American River, is an environmental memoir about growing up along New Jersey’s Passaic. She’s currently at work on a book about aquifers and inner lives.

Moderator: Neil M. Maher is a Professor of History in the Federated History Department at the New Jersey Institute of Technology and Rutgers University at Newark.  His books include Apollo in the Age of Aquarius(Harvard, 2017) and Nature’s New Deal (Oxford, 2008), and his writing has also appeared in popular media such as New York Times, The Washington Post, and Yes magazine.  He is currently working on an environmental justice history of Newark, New Jersey.

Leadership & Civic Engagement Colloquium

ADHC / HCSLA Colloquium

Co-sponsor: NJIT’s Community Data Equity AI Lab (Community-DEAL), which has been funded for three years by NJIT’s Collaborative Research and Innovation Strategic Partnership (CRISP)

This honors colloquium is part of the Life on the River event series.

11:30am - 1:00pm | Virtual

When the World Becomes Your Classroom: Stories from Lives Not Grades

What if your classroom was a neighborhood in need of hope, a refugee camp, a war zone, or a disaster site? Lives Not Grades follows students who step out of the university bubble and into some of the world’s toughest crises, where innovation and empathy collide. Join director Daniel Druhora as he shares stories of engineering hope and building impact in the face of global challenges.

Daniel Druhora is an educator and filmmaker who co-leads the Global Challenges Innovation Lab at USC, where he helps young people launch social innovation enterprises that tackle humanity’s toughest problems. An Emmy Award–winning storyteller, he directed Lives Not Grades, a documentary about students stepping beyond the classroom to confront real-world challenges. His recent films include Cloudwalkers, which explores the visionary spirit of computer science pioneers, and Frequency of Hope, a powerful portrait of addiction and recovery in Alaska. Through teaching and filmmaking, Daniel inspires the next generation to see the world as a canvas for creativity, compassion, and impact.

Scholars will have an opportunity to view the documentary in advance of this colloquium on September 25 at 7pm in the Martinson Honors Hall game room or through PBS.

Leadership & Civic Engagement Colloquium

Global Studies Colloquium

This honors colloquium is part of the Life on the River event series.

8:30am - 12:00pm | Bus transportation provided from Martinson Honors Hall

Paterson Great Falls & Passaic River (Study Tour)

The story of Paterson and its Great Falls demonstrates how the natural and cultural diversity of the area helped fuel the economic and social growth of a young nation. This walking tour will explore how the natural world inspired a founding father, entrepreneurs, immigrants, poets and artists to build the nation's first industrial city and changed the world. From the formation of the falls to the modern era, connect with the places, products, and people which transformed our daily lives.

Leadership & Civic Engagement Colloquium

This honors study tour is part of the Life on the River event series.

11:30am - 1:00pm | Campus Center Atrium

AI Digital Surveillance and Immigration

Speaker: Dr. Richard Frankel, Associate Dean of Experiential Learning Programs, Director of the Civil Litigation and Dispute Resolution Program, Professor of Law, Drexel University

U.S. immigration and citizenship laws determine who is granted or denied national membership. In recent years, artificial intelligence and digital surveillance have emerged as central components of this system. Technologies such as facial recognition, data monitoring, and predictive algorithms are increasingly used in border enforcement, visa processing, and deportation decisions. While these tools can enhance efficiency and security, they also raise ethical concerns around privacy, algorithmic bias, and due process underscoring the growing tension between immigration control and civil liberties in the digital era. This workshop will explore these issues in depth, examining how emerging technologies are reshaping immigration enforcement and what ethical frameworks are needed to guide their use. This colloquium is co-sponsored by the Office of Inclusive Excellence. 

Dr. Richard Frankel is a professor and founder of the Federal Litigation and Appeals Clinic at Drexel University’s law school. His work focuses on the immigration, prisoner rights, civil justice, and federal courts (and the ethics behind these topics). The clinic primarily handles immigration cases, representing indigent clients, and has previously worked on employment discrimination, prisoner civil rights, family law, and environmental cases. 

Professor Frankel’s scholarship has appeared in top law journals including the University of Chicago Law Review and the Washington University Law Review. His article “Corporate Hostility to Arbitration” won the 2022 Pound Civil Justice Institute Scholarship Award. He previously taught at Georgetown Law and litigated civil rights and consumer protection class actions in Washington, D.C. A Yale Law School graduate, he clerked for federal judges on the D.C. District Court and Ninth Circuit. At Drexel, he serves on the Teaching and Learning Center Advisory Board, mentors through CANOPI, and is a former Provost Fellow.

Global Studies Colloquium

Leadership & Civic Engagement

4:00pm - 5:20pm | GITC 1400

Introduction to Generative AI

Speaker: Amy Hoover, Ph.D., Department of Informatics, Matthew J. Hill ‘99H Honors Faculty Fellowship in Ethics and the Digital Future; Assistant Professor of Informatics, NJIT

Join us for this Honors Faculty Fellows colloquium which is an introduction to the spring 2026 honors course CS 474 - Introduction to Generative AI.  This course covers current topics and trends in generative artificial intelligence including principles behind building and training a variety of generative, language, and multimodal models. Students will iteratively design and implement course projects for hands-on experience with these emerging technologies. These projects will draw on Python programming skills and machine learning optimization techniques. 

Amy Hoover is an Assistant Professor of Informatics at NJIT. Formerly she was a postdoctoral researcher in the Playable Innovative Technologies Lab (PLAIT) at Northeastern University with Gillian Smith and Casper Harteveld and was formerly a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Digital Games at the University of Malta with Georgios Yannakakis.

Dr. Hoover’s research acknowledges that humans and computers excel in different areas of the creative process, and draws on these unique talents to build systems that harness the power of each. Conceptualizing creativity as a search in a structured space of computational artifacts, she researches constructing such search spaces and search methods to solve a given problem or produce a desired experience, with effective search and modes of human-computer collaboration as core concerns. While her doctoral work focused on developing representations and collaborative environments for composing music, during her postdoctoral positions she has been extending these ideas to build and study video games from both AI and human-computer interaction perspectives. Dr. Hoover’s combined doctoral and postdoctoral work intersects with data science, human-computer interaction, and many areas of artificial intelligence. In the future she plans on developing methods for designing games and facilitating human-computer collaborations that focus on solving problems in domains.

ADHC / YWCC Co-sponsored colloquium 

Honors Faculty Fellows colloquium

11:30am - 2:30pm & 1:30pm - 4:30pm | Van transportation provided from Martinson Honors Hall

Passaic River Boat Tour (Study Tour 2)

Join us for an exciting boat tour as we explore the Passaic River! Van transportation will be provided from Martinson Honors Hall to the meeting point at at Riverfront Park (the “Orange Sticks”) on Raymond Blvd., Newark. We will then travel upriver to the decommissioned Boonton Line bridge (to be repurposed for the Essex-Hudson Greenway), then downriver to Newark Bay and the Newark Bay bridge before turning back to the dock. Along the way, we will discuss the history of the river, including the Morris Canal, Superfund status/Diamond Shamrock site, community opposition to the Covanta incinerator, the city’s ongoing work to create and expand Riverfront Park (and other public access efforts on the Hudson and Passaic County waterfronts. We will also observe ongoing industrial, commercial, residential and transportation infrastructure redevelopments - and discuss how they affect the river’s ongoing (albeit slow) recovery. These tours will be led by Captains Bill Sheehan and Hugh Carola of Hackensack Riverkeeper.

There are 2 timeslot options for this study tour on 10/10. Interested scholars should register for their preferred timeslot through the Suitable app. 

Leadership & Civic Engagement Colloquium

This honors study tour is part of the Life on the River event series.

4:00 - 5:20 | Martinson Honors Hall, IDS1

Python + Microcontrollers = Magic (No Wizards Needed!)

Speakers:

Ashish Borgaonkar, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor, School of Applied Engineering & Technology

Jaskirat Sodhi, Ph.D.

Senior University Lecturer, School of Applied Engineering & Technology

In this hands-on workshop you will have fun learning how to use Python to make microcontrollers do cool stuff. No magic tricks—just easy coding and awesome gadgets you’ll actually build. Perfect for students who want to get hands-on and creative! Ready for more? Keep the fun going by registering for ENGR330 (Applications of Microcontrollers & IoT devices) in Spring 2026!

Dr. Ashish D. Borgaonkar is an Assistant Professor of Engineering Education at NJIT. His primary research focuses on the translation of advanced research topics into engineering education and curriculum, as well as preparing the next-generation STEM workforce through student academic enrichment and workforce development training programs. For this, he has received multiple federal, state, local, and foundation grants. In addition, he has also been involved in sponsored research projects in water and wastewater treatment, waste management, transportation engineering, civil infrastructure, and stormwater management for flood and pollution control. He is the Founding Director of NJIT's Grand Challenges Scholars Program, endorsed by the National Academy of Engineering. He has also worked on several research projects, programs, and initiatives to help students bridge the gap between high school and college as well as to prepare students for the rigors of mathematics. He has developed and taught several engineering courses, primarily in first-year engineering, civil and environmental engineering, and general/interdisciplinary engineering. He has won multiple awards for excellence in instruction; most recently, the ASEE-MAS 2025 Distinguished Teaching Award, the Excellence in Lower Division Undergraduate Instruction, and the Saul K. Fenster Award for Innovation in Engineering Education.

Dr. Jaskirat Sodhi is a Senior University Lecturer in the Newark College of Engineering (NCE) at NJIT. He is also the Program Coordinator for the Mechanical Engineering Technology program in the School of Applied Engineering and Technology at NJIT. Dr. Sodhi has a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from NJIT and a Bachelors of Engineering (B.E.) in Aeronautical Engineering from Panjab University, India. Dr. Sodhi was recently bestowed with the prestigious NJIT Master Teacher designation. Additionally, Dr. Sodhi has won numerous teaching awards including the NJIT Excellence in Teaching Award for Lower Division Instruction, the Newark College of Engineering Saul K Fenster Innovation in Engineering Education Award and the Newark College of Engineering Excellence in Teaching Award. Dr. Sodhi is actively involved in American Society of Engineering Education (ASEE), specifically in the First Year Program Division (FPD) in leadership roles. He has published his work in multiple peer reviewed journals and conference proceedings.

In order to participate in this workshop scholars will need to bring their laptops. 

ADHC / NCE Colloquium

Honors Faculty Fellows Colloquium

2:30pm - 4:00pm | GITC 1400

Leveraging AI/ML to Cheaply Enable Real-time or Near Real-time Simulations in Computational Physics

Speaker: Dr. Steven Rodriguez, U.S. Naval Research Laboratory

This talk will go over the state-of-the art on how to leverage AI/ML to enable real-time or near real-time simulations in computational physics. Special focus will be given on how recent algorithmic advances in reduced-order modeling are bringing the power and capabilities of supercomputers to smaller devices like laptops, tablets, and even phones. A discussion will be given on how these advances are paving the way for more robust and reliable analyses within the context of optimization, uncertainty quantification, and control. Relevant examples relating to computational fluid dynamics and additive manufacturing (3D printing) will be presented.

Dr. Steven Rodriguez is a computational and applied mathematician at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (NRL). His primary research fields are on methods development for computational physics and reduced-order modeling. He is also the lead developer of NRL’s SoPHMORe, a smoothed particle hydrodynamics and meshless reduced-order modeling in-house code. His work spans a wide range of applications including meshless optics, turbulence, hypersonics, magneto-hydrodynamics, multiphase and free-surface flows, and elasto-plastic simulations. Before NRL, Dr. Rodriguez has held positions at NASA, NASA JPL, and the University of Washington as a visiting scientist. He was also recently awarded the SIAM MSEC early career award and the prestigious DOD LUCI research grant.

ADHC / NCE Colloquium

11:30am - 1:00pm | Agile Strategy Lab, Central King Building

Race in Medicine: Data or Distraction?

Speaker: Dr. Andrea Deyrup, Professor of Pathology, Duke University School of Medicine

Despite the fact that modern humans do not have biological races, associations between various diseases and socially defined races have been taught to generations of healthcare professionals. Such race-based medicine can lead to patient harm and to the exacerbation of health disparities in the United States and other racialized societies. In this session, the scientific flaws of racialized medicine will be analyzed and approaches to correcting this information will be presented.

Dr. Andrea Deyrup received her undergraduate degree from Princeton University in the  department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology before joining the University of Chicago for her PhD, MD and residency. She trained in soft tissue pathology with Sharon Weiss at Emory University. Since 2015, Dr. Deyrup’s career has focused on medical education. At that time, she joined the faculty of the Duke Pathology Department as Course Director of the first-year medical school pathology. She is a founding member of the Academy of Distinguished Pathology Educators of the Association of Pathology Chairs and received the Michele Raible Undergraduate Medical Education Award in 2023. She participated in the 2020-21 Duke Teaching for Equity Fellows Program and was a member of the Duke School of Medicine Health Professions Anti-Racism Task Force. She is one of the co-editors of the new Robbins Pathology textbook, Essential Pathology and of the 11th edition of Robbins and Kumar Basic Pathology. She is actively committed to antiracism efforts and to improving discussion of health disparities in medical education.

Medical Humanities Colloquium

ADHC / HCSLA Colloquium

Women With STEAM Colloquium

2:30pm - 4:00pm | NJIT Makerspace

Workshop Operations and Prototyping Support for Hard-Tech Startups

Speaker: Joseph Oliveira

By day, I manage a workshop at HAX in Newark, helping deep tech startups turn their bold ideas into prototypes. By night, I’m an amateur rocketeer—building everything from quadcopters to high-power rockets. What connects those two worlds is my passion for showing what’s possible when modern manufacturing and imagination come together. In this talk, I want to share a bit of that journey—and why I believe anyone with the right tools can turn an idea into reality.

ADHC / NCE Colloquium

11:30am - 12:50pm | Martinson Honors Residence Hall, IDS2

Community and Garden

Speakers: Erin Pellegrino and Charlie Firestone

Learn about the new ADHC course Community and Garden (ARCH 483), offered as a Dorman’s Honors College elective and service learning course in Spring 2026.

This course engages students in a real-world partnership with Weequahic High School and community leader Hashim Bennett to envision the future of a celebrated Newark community garden. Beginning with the site’s existing planters and structures, students will collaborate with high school students, teachers, and neighborhood stakeholders to imagine how the garden can evolve into a resilient hub for education, gathering, and environmental stewardship.

Through a combination of community engagement, master planning, and hands-on design/build, students will learn how to listen, co-create, and implement meaningful change. The course culminates in the development of a phased master plan for the garden’s long-term growth—integrating new infrastructure such as greenhouses, outdoor classrooms, and social spaces—while also executing small-scale interventions like garden beds, benches, or pathways that provide immediate benefit to the site.

Running in parallel with the architecture studio Beyond the Shed, the course situates design as a collaborative process rooted in action, empathy, and reciprocity. Students will leave with skills in community engagement, participatory design, and strategic planning, and with firsthand experience of how design/build can foster both environmental and social resilience in Newark’s neighborhoods.

Erin Pellegrino is a strategist, designer and registered architect with a decade of experience in the fields of design, business development and creative consulting. She is the founder and principal of Matter, a design/build firm that solves problems that span from brand and digital experiences to the built environment. Her practice has completed award-winning work in architecture, product and brand design and has been recognized globally for their work. She is also the co-founder of Out of Architecture, a career resource network and advising agency that helps designers explore non-traditional methods of practice. She is the co-author of the book, Out of Architecture: The Value of Architects Beyond Traditional Practice published by Routledge in 2022. Erin has taught widely in architecture and design fields at universities including Harvard, Cornell, Parsons, The City University of New York and the New Jersey Institute of Technology. At NJIT, she has re-started and leads NJIT’s design/build program alongside Charlie Firestone. She holds a M.Arch II from Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, a Bachelor of Architecture from Cornell University and her MBA from Quantic School of Business and Technology.

ADHC / HCAD Colloquium

Honors Faculty Fellows Colloquium

Leadership & Civic Engagement Colloquium

11:30am - 1:00pm | Campus Center Atrium

Industrial Newark, Its History and Legacy

Speakers:

• Miriam Ascarelli, Senior University Lecturer, Humanities & Social Sciences, NJIT, will discuss the Morris Canal in Newark and how it impacted the area that became NJIT.
• Moshe Kam, Dean, Newark College of Engineering, NJIT, will share insights on the early history of the Newark Technical School.
• Neil M. Maher, Professor of History, Federated History Department, NJIT, will delve into the story of the Diamond Alkali Plant and its role in sparking the creation of an environmental justice movement in Newark.
• Georgeen Theodore, FAIA, Professor, Hillier College of Architecture and Design, NJIT, will focus on Newark's industrial heritage and its connection to urban redevelopment.

Miriam Ascarelli is a longtime journalist whose freelance work has appeared in publications such as FSB.com (the online arm of Fortune Small Business), New Jersey Monthly, and The New York Times. Prior to joining academia, she was a full-time reporter and editor at news organizations in the Midwest and the Northeast. She is a former president of the New Jersey chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists and the author of the book, Independent Vision: Dorothy Harrison Eustis and the Story of the Seeing Eye (Purdue U. Press, 2010). She is the recipient of a 2023 NJIT faculty seed grant that uses historic maps to explore the evolution of Newark from its beginnings as a Puritan farm village to a post-industrial city trying to reinvent itself. Miriam is the faculty advisor to The Vector, NJIT’s student newspaper, and has been teaching at NJIT since 2008. She was the recipient of the 2025 Jordan Hu College of Science and Liberal Arts Excellence in Scholarship Award and the 2023-24 NJIT Nexus of Excellence award for Excellence and Impact in Community Engagement. Miriam earned her M.A. from Rutgers University-Newark in English in 2006 and her B.A. in English from Earlham College in 1984. 

Moshe Kam is an engineering educator currently serving as the Dean of the Newark College of Engineering at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. He studies system theory and control, decision theory, detection and estimation, robotics and navigation, decision fusion, data fusion, and distributed detection. Dean Kam's recent studies of applications include (1) automatic tracking and motility analysis of human sperm in time-lapse images; and (2) real-time hypoxia prediction in humans who operate in high altitudes for prolonged durations. His major recognitions include: C. Holmes MacDonald Outstanding Teaching Award (HKN); NSF Presidential Young Investigator; Fellow of the IEEE “for contributions to the theory of decision fusion and distributed detection"; IEEE Haradan Pratt Award. Dean Kam earned his Ph.D. from Drexel University in 1987, his M.S. from Drexel University in 1985 and his B.S. from Tel Aviv University in 1976.

Neil M. Maher is a Professor of History in the Federated History Department at the New Jersey Institute of Technology and Rutgers University at Newark.  His books include Apollo in the Age of Aquarius(Harvard, 2017) and Nature’s New Deal (Oxford, 2008), and his writing has also appeared in popular media such as New York Times, The Washington Post, and Yes magazine.  He is currently working on an environmental justice history of Newark, New Jersey. Neil received his Ph.D. from New York University (US History) in 2001, his M.A. from New York University (US History) in 1997 and his B.A. from Dartmouth College (History) in 1986.

Georgeen Theodore, FAIA is an architect, urban designer, and professor at New Jersey Institute of Technology’s College of Architecture and Design, where she coordinates the Master of Urban Design program. Georgeen is a founder and principal of the award-winning architecture, urban design, and planning practice Interboro Partners. She earned her Master of Architecture in Urban Design with Distinction from Harvard University (Architecture, Urban Design) in 2002, her Bachelor of Architecture from Rice University in 1994, and her B.A. from Rice University (Architecture) in 1992.

ADHC / HCAD / HCSLA / NCE Co-Sponsored Colloquium

Leadership & Civic Engagement Colloquium

This honors colloquium is part of the Life on the River event series.

11:30am - 5:00pm | Bus transportation provided from Martinson Honors Hall

United Nations, NYC (Study Tour)

Visit the United Nations in the heart of New York City! This guided tour offers an exciting opportunity to discover UN Headquarters. One of the multilingual Tour Guides will take you on a brief journey through the corridors of international diplomacy. You will learn about the history and work of the United Nations and visit the famous General Assembly Hall and Security Council Chamber.

Global Studies Colloquium

7:00pm - 10:00pm | Jim Wise Theatre, Kupfrian Hall

The Last Days of Judas Iscariot - Theater performance and talk back

Written by Stephen Adly Guirgis

Set in a time-bending, darkly comic world between heaven and hell, The Last Days of Judas Iscariot reexamines the plight and fate of the New Testament’s most infamous and unexplained sinner. 

Tickets must be purchased for this performance. 

8:30am - 10:00am | Martinson Honors Hall, IDS 1 & 2

Board of Visitors Roundtable Networking

Scholars will have the opportunity to learn from and network with Board of Visitor members of the Honors College in a roundtable format.

2:30pm - 4:00pm | Weston Lecture Hall 1

Design Empires: The Business and Legacy of Albert Dorman

Speaker: Aaron Cayer, Assistant Professor of Architecture, Cal Poly Pomona

Today, architecture, engineering, and construction firms command more capital than entire nations and employ more people than most cities. Within them, designers are responsible not just for buildings, but entire urban systems, including their infrastructures, legal codes, and  economies. This colloquium traces the origins of one such firm, today known as AECOM, which was co-founded by Albert Dorman in 1990. Tracing Dorman’s early career and the legacy of his firm, the colloquium draws from Incorporating Architects: How American Architecture Became a Practice of Empire, a recent book about the rise of corporate architecture firms in the US.

Aaron Cayer, PhD, is a historian, writer, and Assistant Professor of Architecture at Cal Poly Pomona. His research about architecture firms and politics has been recognized and supported by international awards and fellowships, including most recently a 2025 Carnegie Fellowship and a 2024 Rome Prize. Cayer received his PhD in Architecture History from UCLA as well as undergraduate and graduate degrees in architecture from Norwich University in Vermont. His recent book, Incorporating Architects: How American Architecture Became a Practice of Empire (UC Press, 2025) traces the rise of US-based architecture and engineering corporations, including AECOM, as well as their impact on professions and politics after World War II.

ADHC / HCAD Colloquium

11:30am - 1:00pm | Agile Strategy Lab, Central King Building

Startup Wars: An Interactive Simulation and Competition

Put your entrepreneurial skills to the test in the Startup Wars Competition. This exciting, hands-on simulation lets students step into the shoes of startup founders, launching and scaling a mobile app business from the ground up. Compete against your peers as you make real-world decisions in marketing, product development, finances, and user growth. The event kicks off with remarks from Dr. Kathy Naasz, a research professor at the Martin Tuchman School of Management and director of the Center for Student Entrepreneurship. Participants must bring a laptop to fully engage in the simulation. 

ADHC / MTSM Colloquium

11:30am - 1:00pm | Ballroom A, Campus Center

Honors Interdisciplinary Research Forum (HIRF)

Scholars from ENG 102 Honors, STS 205 Honors, ENTR 210 Honors, and STS 325 Honors will discuss their research from this semester. Engage with scholars as they showcase their digital posters and cast your vote for the top presentations. This forum will be highly interactive and an excellent opportunity to exchange ideas while learning about an array of research taking place across campus.