NSF director to deliver ‘Critical Conversation’

France A. Córdova, director of the National Science Foundation, will visit UB April 3 as the featured speaker at this year’s “Critical Conversations,” the presidential series showcasing distinguished individuals at the forefront of their fields who are helping to shape understanding of vital issues facing the world today.

Córdova will deliver the keynote address at 11 a.m. in The Buffalo Room, 10 Capen Hall, North Campus. A question-and-answer session will follow Córdova’s talk.

As the 14th director of the NSF, Córdova oversees the only government agency charged with advancing all fields of scientific discovery, technological innovation and STEM education.

With an annual budget of $8.1 billion (FY 2019), the NSF is the funding source for approximately 24 percent of all federally supported basic research conducted by America’s colleges and universities.

Córdova is an astrophysicist whose scientific contributions have been in the areas of observational and experimental astrophysics, multi-spectral research on X-ray and gamma ray sources, and space-borne instrumentation. She is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and is a national associate of the National Academies.

She is also a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and the Association for Women in Science (AWIS).

Córdova is a recipient of NASA’s Distinguished Service Medal, the agency’s highest honor, and has been recognized by the Kilby International Awards Foundation, an organization that identifies “significant contributions to society through science, technology, innovation, invention and education.”

She is president emerita of Purdue University, and chancellor emerita of the University of California, Riverside, where she was a distinguished professor of physics and astronomy. She was vice chancellor for research and professor of physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Prior to her career in academia, she served as NASA’s chief scientist.

Córdova is the latest in a list of distinguished speakers in the Critical Conversations series. Other speakers were AAU President Mary Sue Coleman; internationally acclaimed political scientist Theda Skocpol; Ed Lazowska, one of the world’s foremost scholars in the area of high-performance computing and communication systems; David Relman, a leader in research on the human microbiome; and John Borrazzo, a leader in maternal and child health.