Séminaire par Pier Luigi GENTILI
Thursday 19th September 2019 - 11 am - Mathis Room
Pier Luigi Gentili, Researcher of Department of Chemistry, Biology and Biotechnology, University of Perugia in Italy fera une présentation intitulée: "Designing and Teaching a Novel Interdisciplinary Course on Complex Systems to Prepare New Generations to Address 21st-Century Challenges"
The fate of the Earth is in the hands of humanity, now more than ever. The scientific knowledge and technologies confer humans the power of perturbing the fragile stability of climate, ecosystems, societies, and the delicate psycho-physical well-being of every human. The job of today’s young people will be to get humanity through the coming period of peril and opportunity. Since today’s young people will collectively determine whether civilization survives or not, the goal of the current educators is to give them the foundations for making smart and wise choices.
The challenges of the XXI century are global because they involve everyone on the Earth; they require interdisciplinary approaches and systemic strategies to be tackled. Every XXI century challenge requires interdisciplinary efforts because they regard complex systems. Examples of complex systems are both the unicellular and multicellular living beings; human brains; human immune systems; ecosystems, human societies; the macro-economy; the climate and the geology of our planet. It is fundamental that the new generations are acquainted with the features of complex systems.
Chemistry education must be reimagined if we want that the new generations of chemists are ready to face the challenges of the XXI century effectively.
In my view, it is urgent that we give students in chemistry the opportunity to learn the theories and tools suitable to deal with complex systems. In this contribution, I propose a novel interdisciplinary course on complex systems for upper-division undergraduate or graduate or Ph.D. students.
I describe how to organize such a course, its possible contents, how it addresses chemistry learning objectives, and which additional skills and understandings the students in chemistry gain by attending it, with respect to the traditional courses. My goal is to spark discussion and reflection among chemists about the importance of this novel interdisciplinary course on complex systems, and how to implement it
