USD Biology Professor to Present 70th Annual Harrington Lecture
Summers' presentation, “Identifying the Absurd: The Stressful Art of Storytelling,” investigates how scientists experience stress, anxiety and depression, as well as the specific molecular signaling systems and neurocircuitry that make it happen.
“The outcomes of science are too important to be left to the jargon-filled and often incomprehensible scientific literature alone. They should be told to everyone, in the same style of storytelling that makes good fiction fun,” Summers said. “This story is about the stress that we all feel, and the internal machinery that makes it possible.”
Summers has been at USD for 31 years and is the Nolop Distinguished Professor and director of the graduate biology program. He is a stress biologist trained in ecology, evolution, natural history, wildlife biology, comparative reproduction, endocrinology and behavioral neuroscience. Summers is a two-time recipient of the Belbas-Larson Award for Excellence in Teaching and is the most recent established faculty winner of the President’s Award for Research Excellence.
Summers is also a member of the Vermillion Writer’s Group and has been writing fiction for over a decade.
Named in 1966 in honor of Elbert Harrington, professor of speech and dean of the College of Arts & Sciences (1945-1970), the lecture is an annual event featuring a distinguished professor with longstanding service to the College of Arts & Sciences. Each year, a faculty committee in the College of Arts & Sciences recommends to the dean the name of a faculty member to deliver the Harrington Lecture. The faculty member must be a teacher and scholar, and the lecture must be non-technical, blending insight into liberal education with the faculty’s work as a scholar.
