The 34th annual Karen E. Wetterhahn Science Symposium will be held at the Hanover Inn on Wednesday, May 27. Computer scientist Xia Zhou will open the symposium with a keynote address, followed by an undergraduate research poster session.
Zhou directs the Mobile X Laboratory at Columbia University, where she serves as an associate professor of computer science. Her recent research in mobile computing focuses on developing next-generation communication and sensing systems, and examining their applications in health, AI security, robotics, and human-computer interaction.
“Professor Zhou’s work on mobile computing, human-centered design, and privacy‑preserving technology is incredibly relevant to the next generation of AI systems,” says Morgan Hamilton, assistant director of Scholars Programs, Undergraduate Research, and Fellowships at Dartmouth, which sponsors the annual symposium.
Zhou’s keynote address will explore how sensing technology can be designed to establish trust—an increasingly urgent question as deepfakes and AI-generated content make it harder to distinguish the real from the synthetic. She will share her lab’s efforts to develop trustworthy sensing systems via fabric and light that address real-world challenges.
Before joining Columbia in 2022, Zhou was a faculty member in the Department of Computer Science at Dartmouth. Her work has earned recognition across the field, including the 2018 Karen E. Wetterhahn Memorial Award for Distinguished Creative or Scholarly Achievement from Dartmouth’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences and the 2024 10-Year UbiComp Impact Award for a Dartmouth-led study that tracked student mental health using smartphones.
Following the keynote address, the recipients of the annual Christopher Reed Science Competition, which recognizes students presenting senior honors thesis STEM research, will be announced.
The student poster session, which is open to the public, will immediately follow and run until 7 p.m. Undergraduate students will present posters on topics across the sciences, including measuring the carbon storage capacity of Vermont streams, analyzing dwarf galaxies, and building apps to track emotional spending.
“The symposium is a celebration of all things STEM at Dartmouth,” says Hamilton. “For some students, this is their first opportunity to present research publicly. For others, it might be their third or fourth time presenting, and their posters really tell the narrative of their research journey here on campus.”
The symposium is named for the late Karen E. Wetterhahn, a professor of chemistry who co-founded the Women in Science Project in 1990. In addition to her international reputation as a research chemist, Wetterhahn was known to students and colleagues as a dedicated teacher and mentor.
This year’s symposium is also sponsored by the Class of 1976, which celebrates its 50th reunion this summer.
“As the first co-educational class at Dartmouth, the Class of 1976 is proud to support the Wetterhahn Science Symposium,” says Naomi Kleinman ’76, president of the Class of 1976. “The women in our class were pioneers in enhancing and expanding a learning environment unaccustomed to their perspectives. As we approach our 50th reunion, it is our honor to support the next generation of undergraduates in their STEM pursuits to ensure that all students continue to have opportunities to learn, excel, and succeed.”