Ready to Get Inspired?

Join us for MPC's STEM Talks! 

Learn about the unique journeys of notable scientists, engineers, and mathematicians at these interactive sessions designed to engage, energize and encourage students, faculty, staff, and local community members who are interested in the STEM disciplines! These presentations are FREE and open to the community.  Hope to see you there!

Alexis Scott-Boster

Educator, Entrepreneur, Engineer and Founder of AMS Academic Solutions

February 23, 2023 (Thursday) 6-7 pm: "Hidden Women in STEM: Breaking the curse of invisibility"

Did you know many extraordinary women in STEM feel Invisible in their fields? In collaboration with the Student Equity Office, Umoja and the HSI-STEM EMC2 grant, MPC welcomes Alexis Scott-Boster to the Monterey Campus to share her valuable lessons on breaking the invisibility curse. She will discuss her struggles in an area where there are few representations for people like herself, and how she moved beyond the challenges of invisibility to succeed. Alexis is known as a “Triple E” which is to say she is an educator, entrepreneur, and engineer. She holds an MS in Math and has been teaching math for over 20 years. This presentation is an extension of her 2017 TEDx Talk. 

Enrico Ramirez-Ruiz

Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics at UC Santa Cruz

April 6, 2023 (Thursday) 6-7:30 pm: "Cosmic Alchemy in the Era of Gravitational Wave Astronomy") 

The source of about half of the heaviest elements in the Universe has been a mystery for a long time. Although the general picture of element formation is well understood, many questions about the astrophysical details remain to be answered. Here I focus on recent advances in our understanding of the origin of the heaviest and rarest elements in the Universe.

Enrico Ramirez-Ruiz is a Professor and the Vera Rubin Presidential Chair at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC).  After studying at the University of Cambridge, he was the John Bahcall Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Since joining the UCSC faculty in 2007, Ramirez-Ruiz has won a number of awards for his research, including a Packard Fellowship, the NSF CAREER Award, the Radcliffe Fellowship at Harvard, the Niels Bohr Professorship from the Danish National Research Foundation, the HEAD Mid-Career Prize from the AAS and the Bouchet Award and the Dwight Nicholson Medal from the American Physical Society.  He is a fellow of the American Physical Society and  member of the Mexican Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Professor Ramirez-Ruiz is eager to understand our origins and disruptive events in the night sky. He works with computer models to understand the cataclysmic death of stars and recently led efforts to uncover the origin of the heaviest elements in the Universe. Ramirez-Ruiz tests out his theories with complex computer simulations that defy the boundaries of human experience and the assumptions we make about the Universe. He has authored or co-authored about two hundred and eighty research papers, two dozen in Science and Nature. He has lectured, broadcast and written widely on science and is a highly decorated teacher and research adviser. As the director of the Lamat Institute, he works vigorously to support the promotion and retention of women and historically marginalized students in STEM.