Software engineering leader Leigh Fanning to deliver lecture at Ouachita Oct. 20
October 05, 2015 - Cimber Winfrey
Ouachita Baptist University will host Dr. Leigh Fanning, president of Versiera, LLC,
a software engineering enterprise, as part of the university’s endowed Birkett Williams
Lecture series on Tuesday, Oct. 20.
Fanning is the great-great-granddaughter of Dr. John W. "Jack" Conger, Ouachita's
founding president. Her lecture, “Ethics and Implications: Remembering the Private
Citizens We Once Were,” will be held at 7:30 p.m. in Mabee Fine Arts Center’s McBeth
Recital Hall on Ouachita’s campus and is free and open to the public.
The lecture series is held each semester and rotates among Ouachita’s seven academic
schools. This semester, the J.D. Patterson School of Natural Sciences invited Fanning
as the guest lecturer.
“Dr. Fanning has been very successful in her career and has a multidisciplinary background
in science, computer science and business,” said Dr. Tim Knight, dean of the Patterson
School and professor of biology. “Her experiences are so diverse that students from
many different majors and backgrounds will find her interesting.”
Fanning earned a Bachelor of Science degree in engineering physics from the University
of Colorado at Boulder in 1987. Following over a decade of work in industry, she earned
her master’s degree in computer science from the University of New Mexico (UNM) in
2007 in the area of computational biology. In 2014, after starting Versiera, she joined
the UNM Molecular Computing Group where she earned her Ph.D. in computer science.
Fanning currently is cofounding a startup in genomics to commercialize technologies
she developed within her Ph.D. research. Her other interests include programming languages,
cyber-privacy, combinatorics, representation methods and information theories.
Knight encourages students of all disciplines, especially computer science and business
majors, to attend the lecture in hopes that they will gain a broader view of entrepreneurship
and future career opportunities.
Ouachita’s Birkett Williams lecture series was established in 1977 as a gift from
the late Birkett L. Williams, a 1910 Ouachita graduate. The lecture series gives students
the opportunity to extend their liberal arts education outside of the classroom by
inviting leading scholars and public figures with diverse backgrounds to Ouachita’s
campus.
For more information, contact Dr. Tim Knight at [email protected] or (870) 245-5528.
By Cimber Winfrey
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