The Mautner Perkins Memorial Lecture Series at UCLA were established in 1983 to recognize the importance of scientific thought and to provide a forum for the dissemination of scientific discovery to students and the informed public. The Divisions of Physical and Life Sciences alternate hosting this lecture every other year.
Since its inception, the lecture series has featured distinguished scholars in science and technology. Nobel Laureates, including physicist R.P. Feynman, molecular biologist Paul Berg, and chemist Roald Hoffman are among the renowned scientists who have given lectures for the series.
The objectives of the lectures are to transmit and translate scientific thought and accomplishment to UCLA students as well as the broader Los Angeles community. Traditionally, lecturers are asked to deliver two lectures, one for a public lay audience and the other for UCLA’s scientific community, its faculty and students. Both lectures are open to the public.
The Mautner Series fund seeks to preserve and enhance the value of the lectures by preparing them for publication and, where feasible, subsequent broadcast or for use as teaching materials.
Former UCLA Executive Vice Chancellor Charles F. Kennel said “The Mautners saw the need for a superb lecture series that would bring to campus international leaders in science to discuss their research and its societal impact.” The first Mautner Lecturer was their close friend, Richard Feynman, one of the leading communicators of science. Feynman’s lectures are ones to which UCLA aspires with every lecture series.”
Additionally, there is recognition of the award recipients of a Mautner Graduate Award. The Mautner Graduate Awards recognize currently enrolled meritorious graduate students who are conducting research in the areas related to the topic of each Mautner Research Lecture.
The Mautner Memorial Lectures are held every two years, alternating between the Divisions of Physical and Life Sciences.
Leonard and Marguerite Perkins Mautner
Leonard was born in New York City and moved to Long Island, until he received a scholarship to M.I.T., where he graduated with a degree in electronics. Later, worked in M.I.T.’s radiation lab on war priority projects, then joined the IFF group at the Naval Research Lab in Washington D.C.. Then Leonard moved to LA to start his own company, and became an advisor and lecturer at UCLA’s MBA program, where he started the Mautner Lectures at UCLA in 1983. In the following year he met Marguerite, his wife. After battling cancer for 17 years, Leonard passed away in 2006.
Marguerite was born in Augsburg, Germany, she came to the US in 1936 when family fled Nazi Germany. She grew up in Illinois, went to Northwestern University’s School of Speech and Journalism as a tennis pro, and began her professional career in radio and television in Chicago. She met Leonard Mautner in 1984 and they traveled and shared their generosity together until his passing in 2006. She became a dedicated sponsor to her husband’s Mautner Lecture Series which began the year before they met. Marguerite passed away in April of 2019, at the age of 96.
Past Mautner Lectures
2024
Omar M. Yaghi
James and Neeltje Chair Professor of Chemistry, University of California, Berkeley
Public Lecture: Water Harvesting From Desert Air
Research Lecture: Reticular Chemistry and ChatGPT
2022
Joe Derisi
Professor of Biochemistry and Biophysics, UCSF and President of the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub
Public Lecture: Pandemic Stories – Science and Public Health in the Era of COVID
Research Lecture: Genomics for Infectious and Autoimmune Disease Investigation
2018
Sir Fraser Stoddart, Nobel Laureate
Public Lecture: My Journey to Stockholm
Research Lecture: Engines Through the Ages
2017
Janice Kiecolt-Glaser, Director of the Institute for Behavioral Medicine Research; Distinguished University Professor, S. Robert Davis Endowed Chair; Professor of Psychiatry and Psychology at Ohio State University
Public Lecture: How Stress Kills: The Damage and Some Remedies
Research Seminar: Lovesick: Couples’ Relationships and Health
2015
Barbara Romanowicz
Professor of Geophysics and Director of Seismological Laboratory at UC Berkeley
Public Lecture: Voyage through the earth’s deep interior
Research Seminar: Of mantle plumes and secondary scale convention: recent insights from whole mantle seismic waveform
2013
Elaine V. Fuchs
National Medal of Science Recipient, Professor of Mammalan Cell Biology and Development at Rockefeller University
Public Lecture: Beauty is Skin Deep: The Medical Promise of Skin Stem Cells
Research Lecture: Skin Stem Cells in Silence, Action and Cancer
2011
James E. Hansen
Leading Climate Scientist
Public Lecture: Human-Made Climate Change: A Scientific, Moral and Legal Issue
Research Lecture: Climate Sensitivity
2009
Eric R. Kandel
Kavili Professor of Brain Science in Neuroscience at Columbia University
Public Lecture: We Are What We Remember: Memory and the Biological Basis of Individuality
Research Lecture: Molecular Mechanisms for the Persistence of Memory Storage
2007
Peter D. Lax
Professor of Mathematics, Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences & New York University
Public Lecture: The Connect Between Mathematics and Physics
Research Lecture: The Zero Dispersion Limit
2005
Dr. Eric S. Lander
Director at Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard; Professor of Biology at MIT; Professor of Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School
Public Lecture: Beyond the Human Genome
Research Lecture: Beyond the Human Genome
Before 2005
- Dr. F. Sherwood Rowland, Nobel Laureate, Donald Bren Research Professor of Chemistry at University of California, Irvine
- Dr. Harold Varmus
- Sir Martin Rees, a British cosmologist and astrophysicist
- R.P. Feynman
- Paul Berg
- Roald Sagdeev
- Robert Gallo
- Ted Ringwood
- Ronald Hoffman
- Floyd E. Bloom
The first Mautner Lecturer
Who: Richard Feynman, theoretical physicist and Mautner family friend.
When: 1983