Keynote Speakers

GENERAL SESSIONS AND KEYNOTE SPEAKERS

CSTA Annual Meeting and Opening Session
Friday, November 30, 2018, 9:40am-10:10am

Join us for the CSTA Annual Meeting of members presided over by the 2017-2019 president Jill Grace. Learn about how CSTA has taken a leadership role in all aspects of the implementation of CA-NGSS at the state level.

Keynote Presentation - Why Should We Trust Science?
Friday, November 30, 2018, 10:10 am - 11:10 am

Professor Naomi Oreskes, Harvard University

Doctors tell us that vaccines are safe and scientists tell us climate change is real, but how do they know that? Many people are confused about the safety of vaccines, the reality of climate change, and other scientific matters. How is an outsider to make sense of competing claims? In this lecture, Professor Naomi Oreskes argues that we should trust science, but not for the reasons most of us think. Moreover, scientists sometimes make mistakes. There are clearly conditions that undermine scientific integrity, and we need to be cognizant of what those conditions are and how to recognize when they occur. Good science teaching should include discussion of the conditions under which science is likely to be trustworthy and the conditions under which it may not be—in other words, not just what we know but how we know it.

Closing Keynote Address - Climate Change: How Do We Bend the Curve?
Sunday, December 2, 2018, 8:30 am - 9:30 am

Dr. V. Ram Ramanathan, Professor, Climate Sciences, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UCSD

Climate change, if left unchecked, can soon morph into an existential threat. Fortunately, there is still time to avoid catastrophic changes by bending the pollution emissions curve, provided the top-down policy actions such as the Paris Agreement, are supported by bottom-up actions. To motivate others towards such bottom-up actions, I will describe three actions I am taking for bending the curve: 1) Develop an education program that has been launched in California which will be scaled to rest of the nation and the world, to empower a million undergraduates with tools to solve the problem; 2) Form an alliance between science, policy, religion and health care providers who can reach out to the public with facts, the urgency and the available solutions; 3) Formed a California collaborative for Climate Change Solutions with academic leaders from Caltech, CSU, Stanford and University of California to conduce demonstration projects of scalable solutions.

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