
Australia, Kenya, Germany, New Zealand, Italy, England, Jordan, Argentina and Chile are just a small sampling of the international locations School of Science globetrotters have called home.

As a young boy, Thulsi Wickramasinghe was fascinated by the cosmos. The future astrophysicist and his grandfather would wake at 3 a.m. and walk along the shore in southern Sri Lanka, discussing the magnificent stars and constellations above them until the rising sun overtook the night sky.

When William Moncrief ’68 and his wife Nancy announced their plans to open a bed and breakfast at the Jersey Shore, no one was particularly shocked. Sure, it was a big change from their 9-to-5 careers in Washington, DC, but Bill’s family and friends already knew he was a man of many talents: Navy pilot, technology management expert—why not add innkeeper to the list?

People and Places in the East African Rift is an interdisciplinary course taught by a physicist and a historian. The course is organized around one fundamental question: what is the relationship between physical landscapes and the human societies that inhabit them? The main goals are for students to understand how unique geological and environmental features came to exist, to analyze how these features affected the various human societies that came to inhabit the regions, and how these landscape features and different societies both evolved through time.
