“From Anecdote to Evidence: Fatigue and Teamwork in Emergency Medical Services” by P. Daniel Patterson, professor of emergency health care worker safety and associate professor of emergency medicine, School of Medicine
4 p.m. Dec. 5, University Club, Ballroom A

The Provost’s Inaugural Lecture series invites Pitt faculty members to give a lecture marking their recent appointments to endowed chairs. Patterson’s research focuses on safety in emergency care settings.  

“ ‘An Island of Death’: Homo Sacer and Ungrievable Deaths” by YJ Hwang, teaching fellow in the Department of Theatre Arts
Noon Dec. 13, 4130 Posvar Hall

Jeju Island is internationally known as “the Hawaii of Asia” because of its scenic landscapes. But it is not known that this volcanic island is also called “an Island of Death” in connection with the Jeju massacre (1948-1949). This talk thus focuses on the ways in which the victims of the mass killing are enacted in relation to cultural implications of conceptualizing deaths of the Jeju incident. Given that the main characteristic of the Cold War narrative is associated with the reburial of the dead and the finding of missing bodies in the context of modern Korean history, this talk engages with the way in which cultural memory is performed in Jeju Peace Memorial Park through artistic practices and monuments.

 “Grieving in the Unconscious Mind” by Noam Schneck, assistant professor of clinical medical psychology, Department of Psychiatry at Columbia University
Noon-1:30 p.m. Dec. 18, Western Psychiatric Hospital, 2nd Floor Auditorium

Schneck studies the way people adapt to the suicide loss of a loved one. Specifically, his research aims to identify unconscious processes of coping with the loss that help people grow and adapt while also allowing them to remain engaged in current life demands. These unconscious processes are identified using a machine learning based approach to functional magnetic resonance brain imaging called neural decoding. The goal of this research is to ultimately learn how to employ the unconscious mind in helping people recover from tragic loss.