LECTURESHIPS

Kotz Lecture
Dr. Roald Hoffmann of Cornell University delivered the inaugural Kotz Lecture at SUNY Oneonta in September 2011. His presentation, titled “Indigo, a Tale of Craft, Religion, History, Science, and Culture,” focused on the history and importance of indigo pigment in world affairs and how it has served remarkably to intertwine fashion, power and chemistry.

Born in Zloczow, Poland in 1937, Hoffmann immigrated to the U.S. in 1949. He earned a Ph.D. in chemistry from Harvard University in 1962 and has been a member of the Cornell University faculty since 1965. In 1981, Hoffmann won the Nobel Prize in chemistry, an honor he shared with Dr. Kenichi Fukui of Japan’s Kyoto University.

The Kotz lecture is made possible by the John Kotz Fund for Innovations in Science Education. Endowed in 2005, the Kotz Fund was named in honor of SUNY Oneonta Distinguished Teaching Professor Emeritus John “Jack” Kotz, co-author of one of the most popular general chemistry textbooks in the nation. Dr. Kotz’s children, David and Peter Kotz, established the fund to support lectures and seminars on basic or applied science and science education.

Kaufmann Lecture
Global warming expert Dr. Eban Goodstein delivered SUNY Oneonta’s 12th annual Cornell-Gladstone-Hanlon-Kaufmann Lecture on Environmental Education and Communication in October 2012. Goodstein directs two national educational initiatives on global warming, C2C and The National Climate Seminar, and is the director of the Bard Center for Environmental Policy at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y. In recent years, he has coordinated more than 2,500 climate education events, and his book “Economics and the Environment,” now in its sixth edition, is a widely used college text.

The Cornell-Gladstone-Hanlon-Kaufmann Annual Lectureship on Environmental Education and Communication was established by Virginia and William Kaufmann through a gift to the College at Oneonta Foundation in 1999. The lecture series is named in honor of several families from the Oneonta and Stamford areas who exemplified an enduring love and appreciation for the natural resources of the Catskill region. Virginia Kaufmann was a 1944 SUNY Oneonta graduate.