Free Tickets Available for Area High School Students to Attend UB Distinguished Speakers Series Lectures with Sylvia Earle, Greg Mortenson

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- The University at Buffalo is offering Western New York high schools free tickets for students to attend upcoming lectures by Oceanographer Sylvia Earle and Best-Selling Author Greg Mortenson. Both lectures will be held as part of UB's 24th Annual Distinguished Speakers Series.

Earle will speak at UB on Oct. 13 at 8 p.m. in the Center for the Arts; Mortenson will speak on Nov. 10 in Alumni Arena. Both venues are located on UB's North Campus.

Up to 10 complimentary tickets per school are available for the Earle lecture, and up to 30 tickets per school are available for the Mortenson lecture. Ticket requests will be filled on a first-come, first-served basis while the ticket allocations last.

Marine biologist Sylvia Earle has been an explorer-in-residence at National Geographic since 1998, the year Time magazine named her their first "hero for the planet." She has pioneered research on marine ecosystems, led more than 70 expeditions and authored more than 175 publications, including the 2008 National Geographic book Ocean: An Illustrated Atlas. Earle also has played a key role in establishing marine protected areas globally, including the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands National Marine Monument. Earle is this year's UB Graduate Student Choice Speaker. UB's Graduate Student Association is the lecture sponsor of this event; the UB Department of Chemistry Larkin Chair is a contributing lecture sponsor.

Greg Mortenson is the co-author of The New York Times bestseller and 2010 UB Reads book selection, "Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Promote Peace…One School at a Time." "Three Cups of Tea" describes the journey that led Mortenson to establish schools in remote regions of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Mortenson is the co-founder and executive director of the nonprofit Central Asia Institute and founder of Pennies for Peace. He is also the author of the bestselling "Stones into Schools: Promoting Peace with Books Not Bombs, in Afghanistan and Pakistan."

The UB Office of Student Affairs is the annual lecture sponsor of the featured UB Reads author. UB's Center for Educational Collaboration is a contributing lecture sponsor of the Mortenson event.

The free tickets for the Earle and Mortenson lectures are made possible through the support of Hodgson Russ LLP, an affiliate series sponsor of the series, and the Office of Special Events. The free ticket program serves to encourage area students to get excited about science, and to become involved with global issues. The program began in 2004 with a talk by Steven Squyres, a nationally regarded astronomer perhaps best known as the face of NASA's Mars Exploration Rover mission. Since then, free tickets have also been made available to local students for the lectures by physicist and groundbreaking string theorist Brian Greene; former vice president Al Gore; human rights activist and author Ishmael Beah; economist and "Freakonomics" author Steven Levitt; author of "The Kite Runner" Khaled Hosseini; television personality and scientist, Bill Nye; Los Angeles Times columnist and author of "The Soloist" Steve Lopez; and astrophysicist, Neil deGrasse Tyson.

Requests for tickets may be made by the principal or one faculty or staff member who will act as the sole liaison for the school, and who will distribute the students' tickets. Schools can visit http://www.specialevents.buffalo.edu> to register for tickets. The deadline for Earle ticket requests is noon on Oct. 7; the deadline for Mortenson tickets requests is Oct. 20.