About the Lecture
The President's Lecture Series serves as a marketplace for ideas, featuring fascinating personalities who share their knowledge, experience, opinions and accomplishments. Discussing timely topics, the series puts diversity first, offering an international lineup of authors and educators, business innovators and political figures.
The Series presents to the region a platform for equal exchange of dialogue and ideas. It began in 1991 with its first lecturer, James J. Kilpatrick, a controversial journalist in the 1950s against desegregation in Virginia's public schools. Kilpatrick spoke on campus in a traditional lecture format, including a question and answer session, which allowed for a source of lively dialogue and free speech, trademarks of the series. Today, the President's Lecture Series maintains this format and is free and open to the public.
Past speakers have included: Dr. Ruth Westheimer, a globally recognized psychosexual therapist; Dr. Patch Adams, the physician and professional clown who was immortalized on film by actor Robin Williams; Oscar Arias, Nobel Peace Prize winner and former President of Costa Rica; actress Mia Farrow; Jean-Michel Cousteau, marine explorer, environmental activist, educator and filmmaker; General Wesley Clark, and Janet Reno, former United States Attorney General.
Dr. Mark Plotkin
February 28, 2013, 7:30pm
Diehn Center for the Performing Arts
Lytton J. Musselman Natural History Speaker
Ethnobotonist and Social Entrepreneur
Educated at Harvard, Yale and Tufts, Dr. Mark Plotkin is an ethnobotanist, who has been working with many of the most ancient and powerful Shamans of the Amazon for much of the past three decades. His organization - the Amazon Conservation Team (www.amazonteam.org) - has partnered with 32 Amazonian tribes to map, manage, and protect 70 million acres of ancestral rainforest. For the efficiency and effectiveness of this unique methodology, Plotkin won the coveted "Social Entrepreneur" designation from the prestigious Skoll Foundation, the first environmentalist to receive this recognition.
A top-rated lecturer for the Young Presidents Organization for over 20 years, Plotkin is the author of numerous books and reports, and played a starring role in the Academy Award-nominated IMAX film "Amazon."
