Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at UCSC General Meetings

You can also check the OLLI calendar for meeting time and information about the meeting. (https://olli.ucsc.edu/calendar/index.html).

Normally our members gather monthly, September through May inclusive, except in December, usually on the third Sunday from 10 a.m. to noon in the Colleges Nine and John R. Lewis College Multipurpose Room to socialize, conduct business, and hear a speaker, often a UCSC professor. We greet, meet, and eat (fruit or cake, and coffee or tea), and interact with a speaker of note. 

May 19, 2024 OLLI General Meeting, 10:00am–12pm

Location: College Nine and John R. Lewis College Multipurpose Room, UCSC

Speaker: Donald Smith, Professor of Microbiology and Environmental Toxicology, UCSC

Topic: "Environmental Contributors to Attention Disorders: Causality and Therapeutic Approaches"  

Don Smith, Professor of Microbiology and Environmental Toxicology, has had a distinguished career investigating the toxic metals in our environment. For many years his focus was identifying sources of lead and looking at the effects of lead on human health. He played a major role in showing that California condors were being poisoned by eating animals that had been killed with lead-based ammunition. He has also focused on the effects of another metal, manganese. Miners and welders can be exposed to high levels with detrimental effects. Manganese can be present in high levels in some sources of food and water. In his recent work professor Smith and his colleagues at UCSC have been doing lab studies with mice to see if attention deficits in children may be linked to excess consumption of manganese. Professor Smith is an excellent teacher and this promises to be a very interesting presentation.

Program Chair

Our program chair, who finds and arranges for our speakers, is Barry Bowman. Please send suggestions for future speakers to him at bbowman@ucsc.edu.