Note New Date: Our June Meeting will be a week later than our regular business rhythm in order to de-conflict with Father’s Day!
Join us for our hybrid meeting (both in-person and via Zoom). We will meet in-person at the Peninsula Center Library Community Room. Our meeting starts at 2:30 pm, but join us at 2:00 to network with other like-minded people! We have a revised list of speakers:
We are pleased to host a speaker from H.I.L.L., a South Bay organization that provides local immigrant families with legal assistance, rent, food, and utilities. They have expressed a significant need for gift cards to provide immediate food assistance to those they serve.
We encourage you to donate grocery store, Target, or CVS gift cards. While we welcome cards in any amount, H.I.L.L. has noted that $25 and $50 denominations are particularly helpful for their distribution efforts. Please bring your donations with you to the meeting this Sunday.
We will be joined via Zoom by Congressmember Derek Tran. Derek is running for re-election in Congressional District 45.
Palos Verdes Democrats will be joined via Zoom by a distinguished guest, Dr. Timothy Lyons.
Dr. Lyons is a Distinguished Professor of Biogeochemistry in the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of California. Dr. Lyons’ primary research themes are astrobiology, marine geochemistry, geobiology, biogeochemical cycles through time, and Earth history and paleoclimatology. His career-long interests in anoxic marine environments, early atmospheric oxygenation, and co-evolving life have inspired the development and refinement of diverse geochemical tracers in modern settings for exploration of the ancient ocean and atmosphere and the search for life beyond Earth. Dr. Lyons is a fellow of the Geological Society of America and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the recipient of a National Science Foundation CAREER Award. He has been a visiting scholar at the Royal Netherlands Institute of Sea Research, the University of Queensland, the University of Tasmania (Comet Fellow, 2010), the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology (Hanse-Wissenschafts-Kolleg Fellow, 2007-2008), Cambridge University (Leverhulme Visiting Professorship, 2011), the Institute of Geology and Geophysics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (2012), the Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris (2013), Rhodes University in South Africa (Hugh Kelly Research Fellow, 2014), and Yale University (Visiting Fellow, 2015). He was the first Agassiz Lecturer at Harvard University and a recipient of the William T. Kemper Fellowship for Teaching Excellence at the University of Missouri.
Dr. Lyons has served on numerous steering and organizing committees, including service to the Goldschmidt Conference of the Geochemical Society, the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program, and funding panels spanning four programs within the National Science Foundation (NSF) and four within the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). He is chair of the Geochemistry Committee of the Petroleum Research Fund of the American Chemical Society and works frequently with international funding agencies, including long-standing membership in the College of Reviewers of the Canada Research Chairs Program. He was previously a member of two research teams within the NASA Astrobiology Institute (NAI) and has helped steer the new NASA Astrobiology Roadmap. He is leader of the new ‘Alternative Earths’ NAI team at UC Riverside and a member of the NAI Executive Council. Dr. Lyons was also a member of the U.S. National Research Council Committee on New Research Opportunities in the Earth Sciences at the U.S. National Science Foundation (NROES, a 2012 decadal report).
As world-leader in science, Dr. Lyons will speak on Donald Trump’s massive funding cuts to scientific research and what these cuts will do to the United State’s standing in the world, it’s leadership position lost, scientific and medical advances stalled, cutting-edge advancements of knowledge abandoned ... why and to what purpose? What we stand to lose as a nation.