MAY PROGRAMS
Friday Forum
May 1 from 4pm to 6pm
Speaker is Aaron Stein. His topic ‒ The Third Gulf: The Conflict with Iran.
Aaron Stein discusses a regional war that few in the Middle East planned for. After decades of tension with Iran, the joint attack by the United States and Israel ignited the largest air war in the region in decades, with Iran firing thousands of missiles and drones at America’s regional allies. The war’s impact spilled outside the region, causing energy prices to surge and tightening the global market for oil and gas to near unprecedented levels.
Aaron Stein is President of the Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI) and served as FPRI’s Director of Research and Director of its Middle East Program. Before joining FPRI in 2019, he was a resident senior fellow of the Atlantic Council and held fellowships at the Geneva Center for Security Policy (Geneva, Switzerland), Royal United Services Institute (London, UK), and the Center for Economics and Foreign Policy Studies (Istanbul, Turkey). Aaron received his PhD in Middle East and Mediterranean studies at Kings College, London. He authored The US War Against ISIS: How America and its Allies Defeated the Caliphate (Bloomsbury, 2021), and his commentary has been published in Foreign Affairs, Survival, RUSI Journal, War on the Rocks, and The American Interest. He also co-hosts the Arms Control Wonk podcast, a leading series on arms control, disarmament, and nonproliferation.
With appetizers, wine, and non-alcoholic drinks.
Monday Quarterback Luncheon
May 4 from 12:30pm to 2pm
Roberta Kangilaski is our Quarterback.
Thursday Roundtable Luncheon
May 7 from 12:30pm to 2pm
Speaker is Innmate Michael Weisberg. His topic ‒ Darwin after Darwin: The Durability of Evolutionary Theory.
Charles Darwin’s ideas led to both scientific and philosophical revolutions in biology. On the Origin of Species (1859) offered new ways to explain diversity, disparity, adaptation, and maladaptation. His ideas have been praised, distorted, weaponized, and more than once, declared dead. Today, evolutionary theory remains the bedrock of modern biology, medicine, and our understanding of what kind of creatures we are. Michael traces the powerful arc of Darwin’s ideas, from the intellectual and cultural turbulence they caused in his time and now as he weighs the question of why, after nearly two centuries of scrutiny, they still hold.
Michael Weisberg is the Bess W. Heyman President’s Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Penn and Deputy Director of Perry World House. A climate diplomat and policy researcher, philosopher of science and academic leader, he negotiated and achieved collective outcomes in the complex landscape of climate, ocean, and development issues at the highest levels of international diplomacy. As an expert on the climate needs of small island states, he serves currently as an advisor to Jamaica’s permanent representative to the United Nations and to the Fiji and Palau negotiating teams at the Conference of the Parties (COP), the supreme decision-making body of the United Nations Climate Change Convention. Michael was a leading voice in the development of the “mosaic of solutions” addressing loss and damage due to climate change, yielding major breakthroughs on the topic at COP27 and COP28 in 2022 and 2023.
Michael Weisberg is the author of Simulation and Similarity: Using Models to Understand the World (Oxford University Press, 2013), coauthor with Walter Perez of the landmark photographic study Galápagos: Life in Motion (Princeton University Press, 2018), and a contributing author to the sixth and seventh Assessment Reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
Monday Quarterback Luncheon
May 11 from 12:30 pm to 2pm
Skip Schwarzman is our Quarterback.
THURSDAY Club Dinner
May 14 with Member Mixer at 5:30pm, presentation at 6:15pm, followed by dinner
Speaker is Carl H. June, MD. His topic ‒ Cellular Immunotherapies: Pioneering Cancer Treatment.
Carl June is quick to say that a passion for understanding the science of cancer has been fundamental to the success of his pioneering research while also crediting collaboration and luck. He maps the three-decade course of his complex project of developing CAR-T cell therapy, which enables the human immune system to detect and destroy blood cancer cells. The therapy requires removing a patient’s own disease-fighting T cells, engineering them to produce proteins called chimeric antigen receptors (CARs), “growing” the reprogrammed cells over weeks in highly specialized facilities until there are hundreds of millions of them, then infusing them into the patient.
Dr. June continues to push the boundaries of immunotherapy with his research team at Penn, now numbering about 200, and with the newly formed company Dispatch Biotherapeutics, which he cofounded. Two current goals are to develop CAR-T cell therapy for solid tumors and to discover if CAR-T cells can be produced in a patient’s body rather than in laboratories.
Carl H. June is the Richard W. Vague Professor in Immunotherapy in the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine and Director of the Center for Cellular Immunotherapies at the Perelman School of Medicine, as well as Director of the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy at Penn. After graduation from the U.S. Naval Academy and Baylor College of Medicine, he trained at the World Health Organization in Geneva, Switzerland, and the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle. Since coming to Penn in 1999, he and his coworkers have produced more than 500 research publications. He is the recipient of numerous major awards and honors ‒ local, national, and international ‒ including election to the National Academies of Medicine and Science and to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Friday New Initiatives Salon
May 15 from 6pm to 8pm
InLiquid Executive Director Rachel Zimmerman: Everyone Is a Collector
Is your home full of books, art, souvenir spoons, Funko Pops? Rachel Zimmerman presents “Everyone Is a Collector,” a PNC Arts Alive program that invites people to share their collection stories. Whether it be matchbooks or Impressionist art, she’ll lead discussion of the objects we hold dear and how they tell our personal stories.
Rachel Zimmerman is a photographer and independent curator based in Philadelphia. She is the founding artistic and executive director of InLiquid, a nonprofit launched in 1999 as a website and built since then into an arts organization with more than 300 artist members that produces over 40 exhibitions each year at its flagship gallery in the Crane Arts Building and at satellite locations throughout Philadelphia. Rachel serves on art advisory committees of the Center for Emerging Visual Artists and the Main Line Art Center and is a board member of the Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance. Her photographs are held in private collections across the United States and Europe and in permanent institutional collections, including those of the George Eastman Museum, Temple University, and Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.
Monday Quarterback Luncheon
May 18 from 12:30pm to 2pm
Russell Cooke is our Quarterback.
Tuesday Movie Night
May 19 at 6pm; feature at 6:30pm
With snacks and drinks including light fare, popcorn, chips, nuts, soda, beer, and wine.
La Grande Illusion
Director Jean Renoir, 1937, France, 1 hour 53 minutes, b/w, French, German, Russian & English w/ English subtitles
La Grande Illusion follows two French officers of different social classes captured during WWI and placed in German POW camps, where unlikely bonds form across enemy lines. Jean Renoir’s humanist anti-war classic explores class, nationalism, and shared humanity without depicting battle, focusing instead on dignity, camaraderie, and the fading aristocratic order. Acclaimed as one of cinema’s masterpieces, it’s a poignant, thoughtful, and essential watch.
Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels declared La Grande Illusion “Cinematic Public Enemy No. 1” and ordered the prints to be confiscated and destroyed, with Vichy authorities banning the film in 1940, pour la durée des hostilités (for the duration of hostilities). When the German Army marched into France in May 1940, Goebbels ordered the film’s prints and negative to be the first things seized.
Thursday Roundtable Luncheon
May 21 from 12:30pm to 2pm
Speaker is Vijay Kumar. His topic ‒ Three Myths About Robots and AI in the Physical World.
Robots have had traction in popular imagination since Czech writer Karel Čapek introduced them, and the word robot, in his 1920 play Rossum’s Universal Robots. They became science fiction favorites, notably with Isaac Asimov, who in 1942 introduced his Three Laws of Robotics as guidance for robot behavior ‒ pointedly, do no harm to humans. Now, with the solid presence of robot and AI in our environment, robotics expert Vijay Kumar sees the need to address a triad of unrealistic ideas about their impact.
Vijay Kumar is the Nemirovsky Family Dean of Penn’s School of Engineering and Applied Science, with appointments in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics, the Department of Computer and Information Science, and the Department of Electrical and Systems Engineering. He and his research group work on creating autonomous ground and aerial robots, designing algorithms for collective behaviors, and on robot swarms. Dr. Kumar held multiple editorial positions with journals in his field and received many awards and honors for his contributions in robotics and automation, including the 2018 Robotics and Automation Pioneer Award and the 2020 Robotics and Automation Field Award from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, and the 2025 Test of Time Award from the Robotics Science and Systems Foundation for his foundational work in advancing aerial multi-robot systems. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2013, to the American Philosophical Society in 2018, and to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Inventors in 2022.
TUESDAY Quarterback Luncheon
May 26 from 12:30pm to 2pm
Rick Pasquier is our Quarterback.
Thursday Roundtable Luncheon
May 28from 12:30pm to 2pm
Speaker is Ryan Peters. His topic ‒ Forged Under Pressure: Leadership Lessons from Navy SEAL Training.
Few environments test the limits of human performance more than Navy SEAL (Sea, Air, and Land) training. Drawing on more than two decades as a SEAL officer, Ryan Peters offers an insider’s view of this demanding world, with accounts of training, combat deployments, and command assignments to explain the processes of building elite teams, assessing how trainees perform under sustained stress, and developing leaders. The maxims: failure is not an option, teamwork is non-negotiable, and leadership is earned daily.
Captain Ryan E. Peters, with 22 years of service as a Navy SEAL officer, is currently the commanding officer of a task force based in Virginia. A graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, he completed Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL training in 2005 and conducted multiple combat deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan. He holds a law degree from Rutgers and an MBA from Cornell. In his civilian career, he is a vice president at Holman Enterprises and a former commercial litigation attorney with Pepper Hamilton. He has also served in the New Jersey Legislature and is active in numerous civic and nonprofit leadership roles.