What happens when faith and science mix?

At 7 p.m. on Wednesday, Aaron Dominguez, the current provost at the Catholic University of America, will be speaking in the South Ballroom of the Memorial Union as part of the Sigma Xi lecture series.

Dominguez will be talking about how his faith influenced the path he has taken in life in his lecture titled “Science, Technology and Faith.”

Every semester the Iowa State Sigma Xi Chapter, the scientific research honor society on campus, chooses a lecturer with a topic of general interest and invites them to the university to speak.

“Sigma Xi has a list of distinguished lecturers that have agreed to give talks,” said Cinzia Cervato, the current president of the Sigma Xi Chapter at Iowa State. “The title of Dr. Dominguez’s public talk appealed to the executive committee and we thought [it] would interest a broad range of students, faculty, staff and members of the general public.”

Dominguez, a particle physicist and a former professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, is also a devout Catholic.

Through his physics research, Dominguez studies the possible origins of the universe. He specializes in experimental high-energy physics and instrumentation, which he has written over 1,000 papers about, but his primary focus in his research is utilizing particle colliders to discover new physics. 

Dominguez received the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Faculty Early Career Development Program grant in 2005, among other awards and grants he has obtained over the years, including another recent NSF agreement for $11.5 million. Dominguez works as the principal investigator for this current NSF project with a team of researchers spanning nine different universities to attempt to improve various United States science technologies. He also took part in the construction of a new generation of particle detectors for an experiment conducted by the CERN Laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland.

“Iowa State as an institution of science and technology is dedicated to educating students to be scientifically literate, and it is the goal of Sigma Xi to promote the importance of scientific research in our society,” Cervato said. “This talk connects science and technology to the spiritual aspects of the speaker’s life and beliefs.”