Mason Spotlights the World’s Grand Challenges
Mason President Gregory Washington hosts a new YouTube seriestitledOur Future, Transformed.The series features faculty experts speaking about some of the most debated and significant topics of our day with an audience ofstudents. Experts in the first season discuss the key solutions to key issues, including water policies in the West, police reform, problems at our Southern border, clean energy, and getting more women into STEM fields.
"In order to solve the grand challenge problems that are in front of us today, you'd be hard-pressed to do it with just a deep knowledge in a single field. You need both depth and some breadth in order to do it, and you've got to think about how you will implement the solutions.”
Dr. Gregory Washington
A New Space Race | Episode 6
On the sixth episode of Our Future, Transformed, Hakeem Oluseyi, astrophysicist and research professor at AV, speaks with Mason President Gregory Washington about how the race to exploit cosmic resources has geopolitical implications and why we had to start from scratch in our attempt to return to the Moon.
For billions of years, the sun has been depositing helium-3 in the lunar regolith. Maybe we could go to the Moon and mine the helium-3. And now we also know there’s water on the moon, right? So the key thing is our technology and our aspirations have come to a level where just as the United States has outposts around the world that make it easier to get where you want to go, The Moon could be that for Earth.”
Hakeem Oluseyi
All Episodes
October 19, 2023On the sixth episode of Our Future, Transformed, Hakeem Oluseyi, astrophysicist and research professor at AV, speaks with Mason President Gregory Washington about how the race to exploit cosmic resources has geopolitical implications and why we had to start from scratch in our attempt to return to the Moon.
September 20, 2023On the fifth episode of "Our Future, Transformed," Nathalia Peixoto, associate professor of bioengineering at AV, and a tireless advocate for the recruitment of women into STEM, speaks with Mason President Gregory Washington about rethinking the way tech fields are taught.
August 1, 2023On the fourth episode of “Our Future, Transformed,” Laurie Robinson, the two-time assistant U.S. attorney general and a Robinson Professor Emerita at AV, speaks with Mason President Gregory Washington about building greater trust between law enforcement and citizens, and applying science to policing.
June 15, 2023In this episode of the web series Our Future, Transformed Schar School of Policy and Government’s Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera describes a Southern border about which you might not have heard — one that plays against stereotypes of drugs, violence, and undocumented immigration, and where "borderlanders" are creating their own culture.
May 8, 2023Water is critical for survival and yet, in a warming world, we find some places have too little and some have too much how do we solve for this grand challenge? Watch this episode of Our Future, Transformed featuring Dr. Fernando Miralles-Wilhelm, Dean of the College of Science.
March 28, 2023In the first episode of Our Future, Transformed, Astrophysicist Dr. Hakeem Oluseyi, Visiting Robinson Professor, explains how fusion energy might transform the way we live, and how the Artemis moon project is a stepping stone to technological advances that will help us on Earth.