Shirley Malcom To Discuss DBASSE at Henry and Bryna David Lecture

Shirley Malcom originally studied zoology, earned a Ph.D. in ecology from Penn State, and taught biology at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington for a year. But the animal she knows best is the human one, and in the years since leaving Wilmington in the mid-1970s she’s focused her formidable talents on the intersection of people and science – whether through social and behavioral science, promoting science literacy or working to include all people into the scientific enterprise.

Malcom will address those topics in this year’s Henry and Bryna David lecture, an annual event sponsored by the National Academy of Sciences’ Division of Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education (DBASSE) and Issues in Science and Technology magazine. Her talk, “DBASSE: Where Science and Society Meet,” takes place on October 12.

Malcom is currently senior adviser to the CEO and director of the SEA Change initiative at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, or AAAS. That initiative aims to advance institutional transformation in support of diversity, equity, and inclusion, especially in colleges and universities. She is a trustee of Caltech, a regent of Morgan State University, and serves on the boards of the Heinz Endowments, Public Agenda, the National Math and Science Initiative and the Kavli Foundation. Malcom has received a number of honors over the years, notably election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and receiving the 2003 Public Welfare Medal, the highest award presented by the National Academy of Sciences.

The lecture takes place at 5 p.m. ET on October 12 at the  National Academy of Sciences, 2101 Constitution Avenue Northwest in Washington, D.C. 20418.

The annual Henry and Bryna David lecture has been endowed to bestow an annual award to a leading researcher who has drawn insights from the behavioral and social sciences to inform public policy.

Henry David was a professor at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas, executive director of the Assembly of Behavioral and Social Sciences at the National Academy of Sciences/National Research Council, Pitt Professor of American History and Institutions at Cambridge University, president of the New School for Social Research, dean of the graduate faculty of political and social sciences at Columbia University, and executive director of the National Manpower Council. Bryna David was also active in public policy, working as an assistant to Eleanor Roosevelt during the 1948 UN General Assembly in Paris, as a scholar in residence at the Rockefeller Center in Bellagio, Italy, and as director of the National Manpower Council.

Past David Lectures

Like Wildfire: How Climate Justice Should Change Disaster Response | Michael Méndez

A Coming Youth Wave? Mobilizing Young Voters in a Polarized Political Environment | Sunshine Hillygus