Profs and Pints Meetup-Metro DC

Profs and Pints DC presents: “Who Are the Houthis?” a guide to understanding Yemen’s rebel group and their impact on world politics, with Elana DeLozier, an adjunct professor of international relations courses at University of Virginia and the executive director of The Sage Institute for Foreign Affairs.

[Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at https://events.ticketleap.com/tickets/profsandpints/dc-houthis .]

Join longtime Yemen expert Elana DeLozier for a talk that will give you a much greater understanding of that country’s Houthi rebels and how they grew from a local resistance movement into a group capable of reshaping global trade.

She’ll give you a crash course on a conflict you probably haven’t been following—Yemen’s long-running civil war—and discuss the role played in it by the Houthi movement that arose in the mountains of that country’s north.

From there you’ll learn how the Houthis emerged as a threat to global trade and came into direct conflict with the United States.
We’ll look at the strategic importance of the Red Sea, the Bab al-Mandeb, and the Strait of Hormuz—the maritime chokepoints that have dominated headlines—and why they matter so much. We’ll also discuss the key players protecting the world’s trade routes and how geography still plays an outsized role in shaping global affairs.

You’ll walk away with both a better understanding of one of today’s most under-covered conflicts and a new appreciation for how the ripples from events in faraway waterways can reach our shores. (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. The talk starts 30 minutes later.)

Image: A 2015 Houthi protest in response to a Saudi-led coalition’s airstrike on Yemen (Voice of America photo).

Profs and Pints DC presents: “How to Feel Worthy,” with Marisa G. Franco, psychologist, assistant clinical professor at the University of Maryland’s Honors College, and New York Times best-selling author of Platonic and the forthcoming book Worth: The New Science of Self-esteem and Secure Attachment.

[Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at https://events.ticketleap.com/tickets/profsandpints/dc-feel-worthy .]

If you don't feel worthy, you can achieve great success but still feel like a failure. You can find great love and still feel unlovable.

Sometimes the very things that should make us feel worthy only make us feel worse. Studies reveal that if we don't feel worthy, we are more likely to deflect compliments and affiliate with people who treat us negatively. Fascinatingly, when positive events happen in our lives, we only feel sicker.

But there is a way forward.

Join Dr. Marisa G. Franco, who previously gave outstanding Profs and Pints talks on friendship, for an interactive evening built to help you shift long-held negative beliefs about yourself.

She’ll describe how self-worth is stubborn, because our brain is invested in maintaining the same sense of self-worth that we developed in childhood. It does this to protect us, so that we don’t trick ourselves into feeling better and get further crushed should the harms of our past—rejection, bullying, neglect—happen again.

You'll learn about the paradox of self-worth and how the very things that should make you feel more worthy--people who love you, great success—can actually only make you feel worse. You worry that you can't live up to others' expectations and you experience more anxiety.

Dr. Franco will discuss the foundation of self-worth and how, as researchers put it, “memories are the database of self-esteem,” with low self-worth stemming from memories of being rejected, bullied, or otherwise harmed.

We’ll delve into research-backed ways to improve self-worth. Although we can't change the past, cutting-edge research on memory reconsolidation finds that we can change how the past lives within us. As researchers put it, memories are made to predict the future, not to record the past, which means the emotional impact of memories can be updated every time we revisit them. You’ll learn how to do so during this talk.

Being on hand will help both those who have struggled with their sense of self and those who think they have it figured out. (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. The talk starts 30 minutes later.)

Image: From “Triple Self Portrait” by Rick Beerhorst (Creative Commons) .

Profs and Pints DC presents: “Psychedelic-Assisted Therapy,” on findings, debates and trends in the use of psychedelic substances to treat trauma and other conditions, with Whitney Marris, instructor at the University at Buffalo’s School of Social Work, certified psychedelic-assisted therapy facilitator, and consultant to clinical trials.

[Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at https://events.ticketleap.com/tickets/profsandpints/dc-psychedelic-assisted .]

Psychedelics are rapidly moving from the margins into the mainstream, and questions abound as the sociocultural and legal landscapes surrounding them shift. President Trump’s recent executive order expanding access to psychedelic drugs for certain conditions and accelerating research on them has both heightened interest and added to confusion.

Learn more about the so-called “Psychedelic Renaissance,” and get help separating the hope from the hype surrounding it, with Whitney Marris, a leading trainer and facilitator of psychedelic therapy who has used it to treat trauma survivors, military veterans, and people with cancer.

She’ll present foundational information on what we know about how psychedelics work. You’ll learn how psychedelic-assisted therapy differs from “trip sitting” and about what we know about the effects of “microdosing” versus “macrodosing.” We’ll examine what has been demonstrated to be helpful versus harmful before, during, and after a dosing session intended to support significant, sustainable change.

Marris also will discuss the historical and cultural context of the use of psychedelic medicines for healing, and she’ll describe the ethical challenges that arise as such practices move from counterculture to clinic. We’ll look at emerging and evolving findings in the field, as well as at the roles being played by various financial interests and ideologies in determining the direction of psychedelic-assisted therapy and research on its outcomes.

Attendees will gain an awareness of the need for new professional standards and regulatory guardrails related to such work, and they’ll leave knowing key questions to ask potential providers of psychedelic-assisted therapy. (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. The talk starts 30 minutes later.)

Image by Canva.

Profs and Pints Northern Virginia presents: “The Fly Room,” on a pioneering lab that gave rise to genetics on the wings of a common household pest, with William deJong-Lambert, professor of history at Bronx Community College.

[Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at https://events.ticketleap.com/tickets/profsandpints/nv-fly-room .]

In 1910, the zoologist and embryologist Thomas Hunt Morgan peered into a bottle full of red-eyed fruit flies and found among them an exception: One with eyes that were white. That simple observation would lead him and a group of students to embark on a course of research in which they used a roomful of flies to upend scientific assumptions and provide a new understanding of how our species and others came to be. When scientists today talk about X or Y chromosomes or use the term “gene pool,” they are carrying forward the work of Morgan’s lab, nicknamed the Fly Room.

Learn about the huge contributions of Morgan’s team of researchers—and gain insights into the nature of scientific progress—with Dr. William deJong-Lambert, a historian of science and the author of the new book The Fly Room: The Story of the Scientists Who Discovered Genetics and Reinvented Evolution.

He’ll set the stage by describing how Morgan came of age at a time when science still looked backward. Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection had been eclipsed and overshadowed by doubt, Mendel’s laws had yet to be rediscovered, and DNA would not be understood for another half century.

We’ll look at how the focus of Morgan’s research, the common fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, is a prime example of how the study of even the simplest life forms can offer us tremendous insights into our own species. A constant presence around us since prehistoric times and in many ways as domesticated as dogs and cats, fruit flies share about 75 percent of our disease-causing genes and get cancer, diabetes, Down’s, autism and Parkinson’s disease. With 6-to-8 week life spans, they serve as time machines for observing what might happen to us over centuries.

Dr. deJong-Lambert will discuss how the talents and personalities of those inside and outside the Fly Room helped determine whether they’d be credited with major scientific advance. One of Morgan’s research assistants, Alfred Sturtevant, would end up drawing the first-ever map of a chromosome. Another, the prickly Hermann Joseph Muller, went on to win his own Nobel Prize by proving that X-rays mutate genes. One of many followers of the Fly Room’s work, J.B.S. Haldane, invented the “soup” metaphor to explain creation and became one of three scientists who invented biostatistics. Outside rivals of the Fly Room who refused to accept its findings related to genes and chromosomes went down dead-end roads with their research.

You’ll emerge from the talk with a greater understanding of how and why science advances. You might even end up with newfound, grudging respect for fruit flies in your kitchen. (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. The talk starts 30 minutes later.)

Image: A female Drosophila melanogaster. (Photo by Hannah Davis / Wikimedia Commons.)