Brinson Lectures

The Brinson Lecture is held every year to present cutting-edge science in an event that is free and open to the public. These lectures are made possible by a generous gift from the Brinson Foundation to the University of Chicago. Recent speakers in this prominent series include Nobel Laureates Kip Thorne and John Mather, pioneering exoplanet scientist Sara Seager, and Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal.

May 11, 2023 Jane Rigby, "Era of the Webb Telescope"
May 17, 2022 Carlos Frenk, "How our universe was made: All from nothing"
April 9, 2019 Sara Seager, "Exoplanets and the Search for Habitable Worlds"
May 17, 2018 Richard Ellis, "Let There Be Light: The Observational Quest for the First Galaxies"
April 25, 2017 Nergis Mavalvala, "The Warped Universe: the one hundred year quest to discover Einstein's gravitational waves"
February 9, 2016 Francis Halzen, "Ice Fishing for Neutrinos"
November 5, 2014 Victoria M. Kaspi, "Neutron Stars, a Cosmic Gift"
October 15, 2013 Andrea M. Ghez, "The Monster at the Heart of the Milky Way"
October 2, 2012 David Charbonneau, "The Fast Track to Find an Inhabited Exoplanet"
November 1, 2011 John Mather, Nobel laureate, "History of the universe in a nutshell: from the Big Bang to life and the end of time"
April 11, 2011 Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal, "From Big Bang to Biospheres"
October 21, 2009 Kip S. Thorne, California Institute of Technology, "The Warped Side of the Universe: From the Big Bang to Black Holes"
October 2, 2008 Wendy Freedman, "Astronomy in the New Millennium: New Windows on the Cosmos"