FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE (1/06)
Contact: Lynn Stewart or Kelsey Johnson, Centenary News Service, 318-841-7265

Science Writer Mark Fischetti Returns to Centenary as Attaway Fellow

	Mark Fischetti will give a series of talks at Centenary the week of Feb. 6.

SHREVEPORT, LA — Attaway Fellow in Civic Culture Mark Fischetti will give two public talks and visit several individual classes at Centenary College Feb. 6-10.

On Tuesday, Feb. 7 at 7 p.m. in Kilpatrick Auditorium in the Smith Building, Fischetti will present "New Orleans: Now What?" and open up a Q-and-A discussion to grapple with pressing social issues.

Fischetti will also give a talk called "Beating Bird Flu" Thursday, Feb. 9 at 11:10 a.m. in Kilpatrick. He will clarify key issues about pandemics and will discuss emergency preparedness and the public health debate this challenge poses.

Fischetti will address students in First-Year Experience classes to discuss his positions and conclusions in the Scientific American article, "Protecting New Orleans" (Feb. 2006). In addition to lecturing in FYE, communication and business classes, he will also speak to psychology and neuroscience majors about prescription medications and microbiology students about bird flu. Members of the campus community may attend these classroom talks with the permission of the instructors.

On Wednesday, Feb. 8 at 7 p.m., Fischetti will challenge students for a second time to a ping pong tournament in the Moore Student Union Building. This event has been dubbed the Fischetti Memorial Ping Pong Tournament (aka “The Centenary Open”).

Fischetti is a veteran science writer and a contributing editor to Scientific American magazine. He has written for The New York Times, Smithsonian magazine and many other publications. His 2001 article, "Drowning New Orleans," in Scientific American predicted the widespread disaster that a hurricane like Katrina would impose around New Orleans and described comprehensive environmental projects that would rejuvenate the Mississippi delta. After Katrina hit, Fischetti appeared as an expert on CNN, NBCs Meet the Press with Tim Russert, the History Channel, NPR News and international media. He has just published "Protecting New Orleans" in Scientific American (Feb. 2006), which presents engineering solutions to protect the city and delta from future storms.

Fischetti also co-authored The New Killer Diseases (Crown, 2003), which included early warnings about bird flu, and Weaving the Web (HarperCollins, 1999), written with Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the World Wide Web. He is a former managing editor of IEEE Spectrum, the world's largest engineering and technology magazine. His 2002 article, "Why Not a 40-mpg SUV?" in Technology Review also presaged the current debate over how to improve the fuel efficiency of American-made vehicles. He also is co-editor of Scientific American Mind, a magazine covering the latest in neuroscience and psychology. In 2005, he received an honorary doctorate from Centenary. Fischetti is the first Attaway Fellow to be asked to serve a second residency.

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