Welcome to the Field and Faith Forum with Geneva at the University of Iowa.
Geneva offers an integrated Christian Faith for the whole university.
Geneva is a ministry that makes space for the big questions of life and faith to foster discourse, uniting university and local communities to pursue goodness, truth, and beauty together.
The Field and Faith Forum is one of the places where we devote ourselves to the integration of faith with disciplines across the university. In this episode, we talk faith and science. We’ll have more events coming at you this fall, so stayed tuned.
This fall, one of the threads that will connect each one of the Field and Faith Forums is the future. We live in a time that has an unprecedented level of anxiety about the future, from nuclear war to climate change to fears of another pandemic, and, most pressingly, the threat of Artificial Intelligence.
Christians also think about the future, and the word we use for that is “eschatology”— the study of the “Last Things” when Christ will come back and the dead will rise incorruptible in the kingdom. In other words, whatever is threatening about the immediate future, Christians hope in an ultimately good future.
Meet our guest, Dr. Fred Skiff
Frederick Skiff formerly held one of the University of Iowa’s endowed chairs in laser physics — a top academic post named for donors who funded it (called the “Harriet B. and Harold S. Brady Chair in Laser Physics”). He’s spent his career studying plasma, sometimes called “the fourth state of matter” — the super-hot, electrically charged gas you find in things like stars, lightning, and fusion reactors.
He trained at some of the best physics programs around: an undergrad degree from Cornell, then a PhD from Princeton as a Hertz Fellow (a prestigious fellowship for applied science). After that he did research in Switzerland, then spent about a decade at the University of Maryland before landing at the University of Iowa in 1998.
Along the way he’s picked up some serious honors — a Sloan Fellowship, a “Presidential Young Investigator” award from the National Science Foundation (a big early-career recognition), and Fellow status in the American Physical Society, which is a mark of high standing among physicists. He’s also taken on leadership roles: chairing a national physics division, running Iowa’s physics department for six years, and advising the Department of Energy on the future of nuclear fusion research.
His actual science focuses on plasma waves — essentially how energy ripples through this charged gas — and how to measure and detect what’s happening inside it. That kind of work matters for fusion energy research here on Earth, but also for understanding things happening in space, like the plasma around stars and in the space between them.
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