Last Lecture Series 2025
Over 300 graduating seniors helped to choose who they would like to hear from one last time. We are thrilled to announce the lecture lineup of Christianna Bennett, Ron Hedden, Benjamin Weissman, Wes Turner, and Sarah Parker Ward.
Patterned after the Last Lecture Series made famous by Dr. Randy Pausch, Rensselaer’s Class of 2025 will celebrate their last lecture with five talks on diverse topics. Each lecture will be approximately 15 minutes, with a reception to follow. Lucky attendees will leave with a copy of Dr. Pausch’s book, The Last Lecture.
The Rensselaer community is welcome at this event, with preference given to graduating seniors and graduate students. We encourage you to invite a faculty member to attend with you.
Thursday, May 8, 2025 | CBIS Auditorium
2:00 p.m.
Christianna Bennett, School of Architecture: Other Tomorrows
Christianna Bennett is a landscape designer and instructor in Upstate New York. She advances landscape knowledge through applied theory, landscape practice, and architectural pedagogy. Christianna is invested in recognizing and uplifting the voices and messages of marginalized communities and is dedicated to deepening American discourse on how to repair environmental and social harms through techniques of environmental psychology and trauma-informed practice. Her work aims to improve environmental literacy and advance social justice. To learn more about her work, please visit: https://www.christianna-bennett.com/
Ron Hedden, School Of Engineering: Envisioning the Impact of Your Career
Prof. Hedden joined the faculty at RPI in January of 2018 after serving as an Associate Professor in the Dept. of Chemical Engineering at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, TX from 2009-2017. Dr. Hedden's past research and teaching interests covered both Chemical Engineering and Polymer Science, with emphasis on soft materials and nanomaterials in engineering applications.|
In his role as Professor of Practice at RPI, Prof. Hedden teaches both Chemical Engineering courses and Core Engineering courses. His research interests comprise innovations in undergraduate education, especially the use of Virtual Reality in the classroom and laboratory.
Benjamin Weissman, School of Humanities, Arts, & Social Sciences: Not Everything Is Anything, Sometimes Stuff Just Is
Benjamin Weissman is a lecturer in the Cognitive Science department. He teaches introductory courses in Cognitive Science and Linguistics and advanced courses in Psycholinguistics and Cognitive Psychology; he loves discussing the cognitive processes underlying everyday phenomena with his students. His research, including a number of studies on emoji, explores how context influences the processing and production of language.
Wes Turner, School of Science: Combinatorics and Community
Wesley Turner has been faculty in the Computer Science Department since 2016, and he has been the Director of the Rensselaer Center for Open Source (RCOS) since 2018. He jokes that, despite long periods away, he has been at RPI in some capacity in every decade since the 1980s, first as an undergraduate student, then graduate student and finally faculty. When not at RPI, he had an active career in industry doing research and development in diverse areas such as medical image exploitation, cancer detection and characterization, and industrial simulation most of which involved open-source software resources. His most interesting project was perhaps on forensic facial reconstruction, where he helped develop software to virtually recreate faces for human skeletal remains using a statistical skin depth model. At RPI he specializes in teaching large classes for the Computer Science Department including Computer Science 1, Operating Systems, and his favorite class, RCOS.
Sarah Parker Ward, Lally School of Management: The Power of Compassion & Showing Up for Hard Conversations
After a decade in digital marketing, Sarah returned to academia to channel her passion for communication and well-being into end-of-life care studies. She holds a Ph.D. in Emerging Media and is trained in mindfulness meditation and as a death doula. Outside of the classroom, her work centers on improving advance care planning, building grassroots deathcare networks, and advocating for policies that support personal autonomy.
As a mom of three, Sarah’s love for lifting the next generation is unwavering. She’s taught marcom at SUNY Potsdam and Boston University, and now lectures at the Lally School of Management. Here she encourages students to leverage theory, analytics, and novel technologies as drivers of compassionate connectivity in the marketplace. For Sarah, the best innovations meet real needs—and the most powerful communications meet people where they are.
Join us for these insightful talks and a reception to follow. You’re welcome to attend as many lectures as you’d like!
