Central College and Pella Corporation will welcome astronomer with the National Radio Astronomy Observatory and research professor in the astronomy department at the University of Virginia Scott Ransom for a conversation with Harry Smith, a 1973 Central graduate and award-winning broadcast journalist.

Ransom will speak on Thursday, September 11th at 7 pm in Douwstra Auditorium on Central’s campus. The event is free and open to the public and campus community. The event will be more than a lecture, allowing students to hear from two leaders in their fields, as they dive into the power of discovery, curiosity and the future of science.

Ransom earned a Hertz Foundation Fellowship for his Ph.D. while still a cadet at West Point. After completing a master’s degree in astronomy at Harvard University, he served nearly six years as a U.S. Army field artillery officer. He then returned to Harvard, where he completed his Ph.D. in 2001 with a dissertation on new techniques for finding binary pulsars. Following a postdoctoral fellowship at McGill University in Montreal, he joined the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in 2004 as a staff astronomer.