The Scientech Club upcoming events

Memorable Engineering Stories (November 16, 2026)

Mon, 16 Nov 2026 17:00:00 GMT

Speakers: Theresa Minton, Eric Peterson, Hank Wolfla

Adventure stories are not limited to cowboys and comic book superheroes. We will hear from three Scientech Club engineers about their experiences.

Theresa Minton will tell you how a network engineer new to Indiana government used knowledge, perseverance, and willingness to ruffle quite a few bureaucratic feathers to remove unused circuits from the state’s communications bill and save more than 1.5 times her salary.

Eric Peterson will tell us how railway engineers build and maintain the ‘magic carpets made of steel’ that Arlo Guthrie sang about. He will also cover some special projects he was involved in.

Hank Wolfla will explain how engineers help surgeons and other medical personnel achieve results for their patients. Those patients included a dog who needed a pacemaker.

Theresa Minton is a retired network engineer with a degree from IUPUI (Purdue). She was the winner of the red ribbon for the 2026 Liar’s Contest at the Indiana State Fair.

Eric Peterson is a retired engineer with a BS in civil engineering and MS in Business Administration from Michigan Technological University. He is also a Scientech Club board member.

Hank Wolfla retired from a career in clinical engineering and hospital administration. He has a degree in clinical engineering from Purdue University. He is an emeritus member and past president of the Scientech Club.

Engaging Students in STEM while Building Pathways to Space (November 23, 2026)

Mon, 23 Nov 2026 17:00:00 GMT

Speaker: Ashley Tiberi

Asley will describe how Near Space Education engages students from all backgrounds with opportunities through hands-on and interactive experiences to school aged kids to learn how to program, test and fly micro bit computer boards on a high altitude balloon to the edge of space.

Ashley is the Programs and Operations Coordinator for Near Space Education, a program sponsored by the Scientech Foundation.

Lesser Known Facts about 1776 and the War for Independence (November 30, 2026)

Mon, 30 Nov 2026 17:00:00 GMT

Speaker: Jim Willson

When we think about our American War of Independence, it is easy to remember the Boston Massacre, the Tea Party, Lexington, Concord, and Bunker Hill, but after that things just get hazy - just how did we win that war against the most powerful army in the world ? As this talk will show it was capitalizing on some fortuitous events and A LITTLE BIT OF HELP FROM OUR FRIENDS !!!!

Jim Willson received his BSCE from Purdue University and his MBA from Northwestern. He is retired from his career as an engineer for Honeywell Energy Retrofit. He is a long time Scientech Club member and a past president.

Triangles (December 07, 2026)

Mon, 07 Dec 2026 17:00:00 GMT

Speaker: David DeBrota

Three sides, three angles, a myriad of applications. A lightweight reminder of geometry, the only math class you ever liked. Calculus jokes are derivative. Algebra jokes are formulaic. Trigonometry jokes tend to be graphic.

Our speaker promises a fun talk with lots of graphics and images. There will be some equations, theorems, and, yes, TRIGONOMETRY. Calculators and slides rules are optional, not required.

David is a longtime member and recurring presenter at Scientech. He likes to talk about science, technology, engineering, and medicine.

Annual Meeting and Nobel Prize in Medicine (December 14, 2026)

Mon, 14 Dec 2026 17:00:00 GMT

Speaker: Bill Halsema and Dr. Rashid Khairi

The first part of the meeting will be to conduct required annual business of the Scientech Club including the election of officers and board members for 2027. President Bill Halsema will conduct the meeting.

Dr. Rashid Khairi will discuss the 2025 Nobel Prize in Medicine was awarded jointly to Mary E. Brunkow, Frederick J. Ramsdell, and Shimon Sakaguchi 'for their discoveries concerning peripheral immune tolerance."

Dr. Rashid Khairi is a retired Endocrinologist and long-time Scientech Club member..

No Meeting - Christmas (December 21, 2026)

Mon, 21 Dec 2026 17:00:00 GMT

No Meeting - New Years (December 28, 2026)

Mon, 28 Dec 2026 17:00:00 GMT

Robotics Meets AI: What Robots Can Really Do Today—and What Comes Next (January 18, 2027)

Mon, 18 Jan 2027 17:00:00 GMT

Speaker: Nikolaus Correll

Professor Correll will examine the rapidly changing state of robotics and the growing convergence of robots with artificial intelligence. He will distinguish between what today’s robots can actually accomplish and what remains largely experimental or aspirational, and explain why recent advances in generative AI, foundation models, and Vision-Language-Action systems may represent an important turning point. He will discuss the particular difficulty of teaching machines to perceive, manipulate, and act reliably in the physical world; the surge of interest in humanoid and general-purpose robots; and the continuing importance of specialized industrial robots. The presentation will also consider human-robot cooperation, reliability and safety, and the technological and economic obstacles that must still be overcome before broadly capable robots become commonplace in workplaces and homes.

Nikolaus Correll, Ph.D., is the Viola D. Hank Professor of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering at the University of Notre Dame, where he is helping lead the university’s expanding work in physical artificial intelligence and robotics. Professor Correll earned his electrical engineering degree from ETH Zürich and his Ph.D. in computer science from the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), followed by postdoctoral research at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. His honors include an NSF CAREER Award and a NASA Early Career Faculty Fellowship.

"Does This Treatment Cause That Outcome"? Assessing a treatment effect in modern randomized clinical trials. (January 25, 2027)

Mon, 25 Jan 2027 17:00:00 GMT

Speaker: Dr Stephen J Ruberg

Clinical trials are meant to be scientific experiments to assess the effect of a new or experimental treatment versus a control (e.g., placebo or another active treatment). There are well-accepted approaches for making rigorous scientific and statistical comparisons between experimental and control treatments – blinding, randomization, pre-specified criteria for success. However, individual patients must be (a) treated in a manner that is appropriate for their particular disease circumstances (ethics), and (b) allowed to leave a clinical trial at any time (exercise free will). Consequently, patients may not take their assigned treatment as defined by the clinical trial procedures, and there is often incomplete data on patients. How can we still make inference about whether an experimental treatment provides sufficient efficacy and safety information for regulatory approval (e.g., FDA or European medicines Agency, etc.)?

Dr. Ruberg has spent 40+ years in pharmaceutical drug development. In that time, he has held senior level positions in Statistics and Data Management as well as leadership roles for teams of drug developers. In his last 10 years at Lilly, he was the founder and Distinguished Research Fellow for Advanced Analytics, a group of highly trained and experienced professionals in statistics, mathematics, computational chemistry, econometrics and other quantitative/computing sciences. The group tackled some of the most complex and important problems facing Lilly using leading-edge quantitative and computing approaches.

The Heart of the Matter: Genetic Counseling and Inherited Cardiovascular Disease (February 01, 2027)

Mon, 01 Feb 2027 17:00:00 GMT

Speaker: Layne Wells-Copeland, MGC, CGC

Genetic testing is reshaping the landscape of modern medicine, including how we diagnose and manage cardiovascular diseases. This talk traces the foundations of inherited heart rhythm disorders and genetic counseling along cultural and anthropological throughlines and explores the implementation of genetic testing in cardiac arrhythmia syndromes. Case examples and patient stories help to illustrate the role of precision medicine in public health.

Layne Wells-Copeland, MGC, CGC is a cardiovascular genetic counselor at Indiana University Health & Riley Hospital for Children in Indianapolis, IN. She is a graduate of the Vanderbilt University Master of Genetic Counseling program, where her graduate thesis work explored the implementation of postmortem genetic testing following sudden cardiac deaths in Tennessee, in hopes of shaping future care practices and policy development. As a genetic counselor, her research interests include inherited heart disease, postmortem genetics services, health equity, biomedical ethics, and public health.

Lung Cancer Screening (March 01, 2027)

Mon, 01 Mar 2027 17:00:00 GMT

Speaker: Peter Gunderman

This talk will be focus on what happens after a lung scan is done. It will cover what the CT scan itself can tell us beyond lung cancer, including information about heart disease, bone health and body composition that is hiding in plain sight in scans that are already being performed.

Peter Gunderman, MD, MA, is an Assistant Professor of Radiology and Imaging Director of Lung Cancer Screening in the Department of Radiology at Indiana University School of Medicine, where he specializes in cardiothoracic imaging. He has a particular research interest in opportunistic screening, the practice of extracting additional clinically meaningful health data from CT scans that are already being performed. His work has been published in national medical journals and covered by outlets including The Conversation. He practices at Indiana University Health in Indianapolis.

Societal Consequences of Scientific Misconduct (April 12, 2027)

Mon, 12 Apr 2027 16:00:00 GMT

Speaker: Stanley Spinola

This talk will examine the public health consequences of both unethical medical experiments and scientific misconduct. The Mengele twin studies and other Nazi medical experiments directly affected Eva Moses Kor and thousands of others but led to ethical codes governing human research. After the US had achieved measles elimination status in 2000, a study asserting an association between the MMR vaccine and autism has played a major role in the increase in cases of measles in the US. The speaker will examine the roles that unethical experiments, scientists, institutions, and journals played in the false association between the MMR and autism.

Stanley M. Spinola received a B.A. in Biology from Brown University in 1974 and a M.D. from Georgetown University in 1978. He completed a residency in Internal Medicine and Pediatrics at the University of North Carolina in 1982 and served in the National Health Service Corps in rural North Carolina from 1982 to 1984. He completed a fellowship in Adult and Pediatric Infectious Diseases at the University of North Carolina in 1987. From 1987 to 1993, Dr. Spinola was on the faculty at the State University of New York at Buffalo. He came to Indiana University School of Medicine in 1993 to join the Division of Infectious Diseases and was the Division Director from 1995 to 2010 and the Chair of Microbiology and Immunology from 2010-2019. He retired in January 2026 and is currently a Professor Emeritus of Medicine, Microbiology and Immunology, and Pathology and Laboratory Medicine. His NIH funded research focused on how bacteria cause disease in humans and the ethics human research.