The NAU Honors Program is hosting the 35th Western Regional Honors Council Conference at the new High Country Conference Center at Flagstaff from April 10-12.
Aptly named Honors at its Peak, the conference—the first at the new facility—will “showcase the talents of nearly 300 participants from honors programs all over the West and Southwest,” said Anne Scott, interim director of NAU’s Honors Program.
Attendees will include honor students and their mentors examining honors education from a variety of vantage points, including interdisciplinary and cross-cultural perspectives, and from research in the hard sciences and literary analyses to semesters abroad and service learning.
“The conference will provide a wonderful opportunity for attendees to witness intelligent, engaged students and for their mentors to share and celebrate their ideas, research, creativity and visions,” Scott said.
The conference’s keynote address is “Stem Cell Research: New Frontiers of Ethics, Law, and Policy” by Christopher Thomas Scott.
Christopher Scott, an expert in embryonic stem cell research at Stanford University, is author of Stem Cell Now: A Brief Introduction to the Coming Medical Revolution, published by Penguin USA.
Another conference highlight is the NAU Honors Program’s Flagstaff-As-Text project, which uses the National Collegiate Honors Council’s Place-as-Text program as its model. During the project, conference attendees will divide into groups for an afternoon to set out on “walkabouts” to study various quadrants of the Flagstaff community and then write about their experiences.
NAU’s Honors celebration will culminate during the university’s Undergraduate Student Symposium, April 17 and 18, which is open to the public. The symposium will feature highlights from each college on the Flagstaff campus as students share their creative ideas, research and discoveries. Times vary and all events are free and open to the public.
For information on the regional honors conference, go to www.nau.edu/honors, or contact Scott at Anne.Scott@nau.edu or (928) 523-2441.