Leading international academics give public lectures

Friday, 6 July 2012

Two leading international academics will give free public lectures at the University of Adelaide next Friday 13 July.

Eminent economist Professor Jagdish Bhagwati, Professor of Law and Economics at Columbia University, New York, will present the 56th Joseph Fisher Lecture, and leading statistician Professor Peter Donnelly, Director of the Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics at the University of Oxford, will present the 2012 Sir Ronald Fisher Lecture.

Well-known for his advocacy of freer international trade, Professor Jagdish Bhagwati will speak on 'Multinational Corporations and Development: Changing Perceptions', raising new views of the impact multinational corporations have on their host countries.

Professor Bhagwati is Senior Fellow for International Economics at the Council on Foreign Relations and Co-Chair of the High-Level Expert Group on Trade appointed by the governments of Britain, Germany, Indonesia, and Turkey.

He has been economic policy adviser to the Director-General of GATT (1991-93), special adviser to the UN on globalisation, and external adviser to the World Trade Organization.

The Joseph Fisher Lecture, organised by the University's School of Economics, has been presented at the University almost every other year since 1904. The lecture and a medal for the top accounting student each year were provided by an endowment to the University in 1903 by prominent Adelaide businessman Joseph Fisher. This year the Lecture is part of the Economic Society of Australia's Eminent Speaker Series, sponsored by the Crawford School of Public Policy.

An outstanding public speaker, Professor Peter Donnelly's lecture is on 'Statistical and population genetics in the genomic age: opportunities and challenges', which will look at the underlying statistics that are helping make sense of vast amounts of human genetic information and its relationship to human disease and human recombination.

Professor Donnelly grew up in Australia, was a Rhodes Scholar and is now Professor of Statistical Science at Oxford.

He played a major role in the HapMap project, an international collaboration that followed the Human Genome Project in studying genetic diversity in worldwide populations. He chairs the Wellcome Trust Case Control Consortium, a large-scale global collaboration studying the genetic basis of more than 20 common human diseases in over 60,000 people.

The Sir Ronald Fisher Lecture was endowed in 1989 by Emeritus Professor PA Parsons, a former student of the renowned geneticist and statistical scientist R.A. Fisher.

The lectures will be held at 3.30pm (Peter Donnelly) and 5.30pm (Jagdish Bhagwati) on Friday 13 July in the Napier Lecture Theatre G04, Napier Building, North Terrace Campus, University of Adelaide. All are welcome.

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