Official portrait of Steven E. Koonin, former Under-Secretary for Science of the United States Department of Energy. Credit: DOE.

Want to know what we should do to address America’s energy challenges?

Come hear the ideas of  Steve Koonin, a former chief scientist at British Petroleum and more recently the Under Secretary for Science at the Department of Energy. He’ll speak at Duke at 5:15 p.m. on March 8, 2012. The lecture will be held in room 2231 of the French Family Science Center.

Koonin, an MIT-minted theoretical physicist and currently a researcher at the Institute for Defense Analyses in Washington D.C., will talk about strategies to incorporate alternative and renewable energy sources into our energy profile. The lecture is free and open to the public.

The talk is part of the university-hosted Symposium on Electroweak Nuclear Physics, a two-day science conference to explore the latest experiments and ideas on matter and how it behaves at ordinary temperatures — quite the opposite of what’s being studied at the Large Hadron Collider and other high-energy particle accelerators.

The symposium is being held in honor of Jefferson Lab deputy director for science R. D. McKeown’s sixtieth birthday.