Messenger Lecturer

Mr. Eric Liu, co-founder and CEO of Citizen University

LECTURES:

Monday, November 16, 2026 from 1:25-2:40 PM
Business for a Better World: Lessons from Live Like a Citizen
Guest Lecturer in AEM 1101 — Dyson Foundations: Business for a Better World
B25 Warren Hall
Open to the Cornell Community | Registration Required

FEATURE LECTURE & Book Signing*
LIVE LIKE A CITIZEN: 8 Ways to Change Your Mindset and Our Country
Monday, November 16, 2026 | 5:30–7:00 PM
Alice Statler Auditorium | Statler Hall

Open to the Public and Cornell Community | Registration 

Join Eric Liu, founder and CEO of Citizen University, for an inspiring exploration of how we can reshape our mindsets, strengthen our communities, and create meaningful change through active citizenship.

Tuesday, November 17, 2026 from 2:30-3:20 PM
The Citizen Entrepreneur: Leadership, Community, and the Common Good
Guest Lecturer in AEM 3385 — Social Entrepreneurship Practicum
Anabel Taylor Hall, B21
Open to the Cornell Community | Registration Required

From Citizen University website: Eric Liu is the co-founder and CEO of Citizen University. He is the author of numerous acclaimed books, including most recently Become America: Civic Sermons on Love, Responsibility, and Democracy — a New York Times New & Notable Book — and Live Like a Citizen: 8 Ways to Change Your Mindset and Our Country, tpublished in October 2026. Liu served as a White House speechwriter for President Bill Clinton and as the President’s deputy domestic policy adviser. He was later appointed by President Barack Obama to the board of the Corporation for National and Community Service. A graduate of Yale College and Harvard Law School, Liu was elected in 2020 to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and co-chairs its Our Common Purpose commission. He lives in Seattle, where he has served on the boards of the Seattle Public Library and the Washington State Board of Education.

University Lecturer

Ziad Obermeyer is the Blue Cross of California Distinguished Associate Professor of Health Policy and Management at the UC Berkeley School of Public Health.

Lecture Title: TBD
Date:  ’26-’27 Academic Year
Time: TBD
Place: TBD

From UC Berkeley webpage: Ziad Obermeyer is the Blue Cross of California Distinguished Associate Professor of Health Policy and Management at the UC Berkeley School of Public Health, where he does research at the intersection of machine learning, medicine, and health policy. He previously was an Assistant Professor at Harvard Medical School, where he received the Early Independence Award, the National Institutes of Health’s most prestigious award for exceptional junior scientists. He continues to practice emergency medicine in underserved parts of the US. Prior to his career in medicine, he worked as a consultant to pharmaceutical and global health clients at McKinsey & Co. in New Jersey, Geneva, and Tokyo.

University Lecturer

Professor Kate Elswit is Head of Digital Research and Professor of Performance and Technology at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, University of London.

Lecture Title: TBD
Date:  February 2027
Time: TBD
Place: TBD

From the nomination: Kate Elswit is Professor of Performance and Technology and Head of Digital Research at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, where she is also Co-Director of the Centre for
Performance, Technology, and Equity (PTEQ), which was founded in 2024 with £5.6 million investment from Research England. Her research sits at the intersection of bodies and technology, from archival data curation and visualization, to performances with breath monitors, to exploratory research in motion capture, computer vision, and AI.

University Lecturer

Gil Eyal is a Professor of Sociology at Columbia University and Director of the Trust Collaboratory at INCITE.

Lecture Title: proposed “AI’s Prosthetic Role in Society”
Date:  March 1, 2027
Time: TBD
Place: TBD

From Columbia University Center for Science and Society webpage: Gil Eyal is a Professor of Sociology at Columbia University and Director of the Trust Collaboratory at INCITE. At Columbia, he teaches sociological theory, sociology of expertise, introduction to sociology, and trust and mistrust in science and experts. He is the author of The Crisis of Expertise and The Autism Matrix (Merton Prize). His work on networks of expertise and the crisis of trust has been supported by a Guggenheim Fellowship, Facebook Research, and currently by the National Science Foundation for research on Long Covid patients. In 2021-22, he directed a Mellon Sawyer Seminar on Trust and Mistrust in Science and Experts. Previously, he was co-director Columbia’s Precision Medicine & Society Program.

University Lecturer

Dr. Britt Wray, director of Stanford University’s “CIRCLE at Stanford Psychiatry”

Lecture Title: TBD
Date:  April 15, 2027
Time: 3:00 p.m.
Place: TBD

From the nomination: “Dr. Wray is director of Stanford University’s “CIRCLE at Stanford Psychiatry,” a
research and action initiative focused on Community-minded Interventions for Resilience, Climate Leadership and Emotional wellbeing. She is the author of Generation Dread: Finding Purpose in an Age of Climate Anxiety (2022), a carefully-researched general audience book on how to support young people as they face eco-anxiety related to climate and environment-related fears. Dr. Wray received in 2023 the top prize in the “Research Scientist: Early Career” category of the SciComm Excellence awards given by the National Academies of Science, Engineering, & Medicine in partnership with Schmidt Futures. Dr. Wray’s work
crosses, among other disciplines, psychology, environmental studies, ethics, and communication.”

University Lecturer

Dr. Hariclia Brecoulaki, Senior Researcher, the Institute for Historical Research, Athens, Greece

Lecture Title: (proposed) “Revealing an Ancient Masterpiece: A Multidisciplinary Study of the Aigai Hunt Frieze”
Date:  Spring 2027
Time: TBD
Place: TBD

From the nomination: Dr. Brecoulaki is a senior member of the National Hellenic Research Foundation in the Institute for Historical Research in Athens, Greece. She earned her PhD from the Sorbonne, Paris, in 2003 and has held several fellowships at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens as well as the University of Cincinnati and the Institute for Aegean Prehistory in Philadelphia. In addition to publishing several highly important studies of ancient Greek painting (including several monographs and influential
articles), Dr. Brecoulaki recently served as PI of a multi-disciplinary project bringing together scientists, art historians, and artists from across the European Union in a new study and reconstruction of one of the most important frescoes to have survived from Ancient Greece – the Hunt Frieze from the Tomb of Philip (father of Alexander the Great) at Vergina in ancient Macedon. This high-profile project involved X-Ray technologies, spectroscopy and spectral imaging, 3D visualization, and AI, alongside archaeological and art-historical analysis and creative reconstructions by a professional painter.

University Lecturer

Agnes Callard is an Associate Professor in Philosophy, University of Chicago.

Lecture Title: proposed topic “Conversational conformism”
Date:  September 30, 2027
Time: TBD
Place: TBD

From the University of Chicago website: Agnes Callard is an Associate Professor in Philosophy. She received her BA from the University of Chicago in 1997 and her PhD from Berkeley in 2008. Her primary areas of specialization are Ancient Philosophy and Ethics.