Honors College
University Forum Speaker Schedule
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In 2025, University Forum will continue the half-century long tradition of bringing incredible speakers to the University and will celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Honors College with Southern Miss alumnus Russell Moore as its first speaker.
Registration is not required and all Forum events are free and open to the public. We are happy, however, to send you a reminder email (that will include an easy-to-use link to attend virtually).
All fall 2025 Forum events will be held in person in the Thad Cochran Center Grand Ballroom on the Hattiesburg Campus. Most Forum events are also available through a livestream broadcast. Links to live events will be posted below the speaker’s bio on the day of the event. (Live streams of Forum events are offered as a courtesy; unfortunately, we cannot guarantee the quality of the live stream and cannot take questions from the online audience. If you are a student and your instructor requires proof of attendance, you must attend the in-person event to have your attendance recorded.)
If you require a sign language translator or any other accessibility accommodations, please contact University Forum at forumFREEMississippi at least one week prior to the event.
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Fall 2025 Speaker Schedule
Russell Moore
Editor-in-Chief of Christianity Today, USM alumnus
September 9, 2025
6:30 p.m.
Thad Cochran Center Grand Ballroom
Russell Moore is Editor-in-Chief of Christianity Today and is the author of Losing Our Religion: An Altar Call for Evangelical America. An alumnus of USM and an ordained Baptist minister, Moore served previously as President of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission and as the provost and dean of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, where he taught theology and ethics.
Nina Tandon
Human tissue repair / Entrepreneur / Biomedical engineer
October 21, 2025
6:30 p.m.
Thad Cochran Center Grand Ballroom
Nina Tandon is the CEO and co-founder of Epibone, a business for growing artificial tissues, like hearts and bones, that can be safely put into the body. Nina Tandon is leading the charge of biology’s industrial revolution by overseeing the world’s first company growing living human bone for skeletal reconstruction. She is a senior fellow at the Lab for Stem Cells and Tissue Engineering at Columbia and currently serves as an adjunct professor of Electrical Engineering at Cooper Union.
Dava Sobel
Author of Longitude
November 4, 2025
6:30 p.m.
Thad Cochran Center Grand Ballroom
Dava Sobel is the author of the international bestseller Longitude, the bestselling Pulitzer Prize finalist Galileo’s Daughter, The Planets, A More Perfect Heaven, And the Sun Stood Still, and The Glass Universe, and co-author of The Illustrated Longitude. She is the recipient of the Individual Public Service Award from the National Science Board, the Bradford Washburn Award, the Kumpke-Roberts Award from the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, and a Guggenheim Fellowship, among other honors. A former New York Times science reporter, and currently editor of the “Meter” poetry column in Scientific American, she lives on Long Island.