Posts by Andrew Maynard

If you have’t seen it yet, the College of Global Futures has a fabulous new promo video that captures the essence of what we’re about and how our three schools come together to make the whole more than the sum of the parts. The video is designed to convey the urgency and importance of what we do, and how we empower our students to be designers of the future we aspire to.

This summer we took my science fiction movie-based course on socially responsible and ethical innovation online. This is an exciting departure from the in-person course, and one that has led to a number of innovations in how the course is taught. It’s also meant that I’ve needed to capture some of the essence of that course on video.

For over a year now there have been conspiracy theories swirling around that COVID was designed and engineered in a Chinese lab, that the research has its origins in the US, and even in some cases that Anthony Fauci–Director of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases–is the evil mastermind behind all of this! The timing here is especially relevant to me as I co-teach an undergraduate class on socially responsible and ethical innovation.

What exactly is the future, how are we connected to it, and what is our responsibility to it? These are questions that the new podcast Future Rising grapples with as it takes listeners on a journey that starts with the Big Bang, and ends with our responsibility to future generations within an increasingly complex world.

What have pendulums, the future, and Iron Man, got in common? More than you might at first think! Several years ago now, I had the pleasure of being the inaugural Charles and Rita Gelman Professor of Risk Science at the University of Michigan. As is often the case with such positions, I was asked to give a public lecture to mark my inauguration.

Eight weeks ago, Mission: Interplanetary hit the podcast airways. Looking back over our first season, we’ve had some amazing conversations around the future of humans in space!

This is hot off the press, but it was fantastic to see my good colleague and College of Global Futures member Dr. Mahmud Farooque testifying before the House Subcommittee on Research and Technology yesterday as they discussed the National Science Foundation for the Future Act — an act that gets to the absolute heart of what we do in the College of Global Futures.

It’s amazing to think that, this time last year, we were still adjusting to the realities of a global pandemic, people were waking up to the realities of systemic racial injustice, and the ASU College of Global Futures didn’t even exist! It’s been a roller coaster of a year in which, on top of everything else, we had the audacity to take two existing schools: the School of Sustainability and the School for the Future of Innovation in Society; add a third–the School of Complex Adaptive Systems–and build a new college around them that creates a unique environment for educating and equipping the future-builders of tomorrow.

It’s probably fairly obvious from my work, but I spend a lot of time thinking about how academic work is made as accessible and useful to others as possible. And so I get excited when I see PhD students embrace the idea of translating or “mobilizing” their research as part of their scholarship.