CONWAY, Ark. (March 25, 2019) – Guest lecturer Dr. Luís Bettencourt
will visit Hendrix College this week as part of the Buthman Endowed Visiting
Scholar and Lectureship Program. His lecture, “The Challenge of Global
Urbanization” will take place Thursday, March 28, 2019, at 6 p.m. in the Bertie
Wilson Murphy Building on the Hendrix campus. The event is free and open to the
public.
Over the next few decades, most nations in the world are
expected to urbanize to levels similar to the U.S. today, where over 80 percent
of people live in cities. These processes will generate a world that is more
connected, more dynamical, wealthier, more creative, and more challenged from
the point of view of resources and environmental impacts. Bettencourt’s lecture
will address why and how these processes are happening now, and discuss some of
their consequences, including a new context of international policy for
sustainable development.
Bettencourt is the Pritzker Director of the Mansueto Institute
for Urban Innovation and Professor of Ecology and Evolution at the University
of Chicago, as well as an External Professor of Complex Systems at the Santa Fe
Institute. He was trained as a theoretical physicist and obtained his
undergraduate degree from Instituto Superior Técnico (Lisbon, Portugal) in
1992, and his Ph.D. from Imperial College (University of London, UK) in 1996
for research in statistical and high-energy physics models of the early
Universe. He has held postdoctoral positions at the University of Heidelberg
(Germany), Los Alamos National Laboratory (Director’s Fellow and Slansky
Fellow) and at MIT (Center for Theoretical Physics). He has worked extensively
on complex systems theory and on cities and urbanization, in particular. His
research emphasizes the creation of new interdisciplinary synthesis to describe
cities in quantitative and predictive ways, informed by classical theory from
various disciplines and the growing availability of empirical data worldwide.
He is the author of over 100 scientific papers and several edited books, and his
research has been featured in leading media venues, such as the New York Times,
Nature, Wired, New Scientist, and the Smithsonian.
About Hendrix College
A private liberal arts college in Conway, Arkansas, Hendrix
College consistently earns recognition as one of the country’s leading liberal
arts institutions, and is featured in Colleges That Change Lives: 40
Schools That Will Change the Way You Think About Colleges. Its academic
quality and rigor, innovation, and value have established Hendrix as a fixture
in numerous college guides, lists, and rankings. Founded in 1876, Hendrix has
been affiliated with the United Methodist Church since 1884. To learn more,
visit www.hendrix.edu.