CNN’s Miles O’Brien to Speak at LSU’s Upcoming Risk Symposium

Two Emmy winners are among the speakers at LSU event

BATON ROUGE – CNN anchor and Emmy winner Miles O’Brien will join an impressive list of speakers at LSU’s upcoming international symposium on risk and exploration, Oct. 28-30.

“Risk & Exploration: Earth as a Classroom,” will be held on LSU’s campus and is free and open to the public and the media. O’Brien is scheduled to speak on Monday, Oct. 29, from 9:05 to 9:45 a.m. Central time and will serve as moderator for a panel discussion titled “Risks of Nature: Impact of and Response to Hurricane Katrina,” which is slated for 10:40 a.m. until noon. The panel will feature such guests as Baton Rouge Mayor-President Melvin “Kip” Holden, LSU Police Chief Ricky Adams and NASA-Michoud official Stephen A. Turner.

Other speakers at the symposium will include world-renowned naturalist and Emmy winner Jim Fowler of “Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom,” private commercial space explorer Greg Olsen, president of The Explorers Club Daniel Bennett, chairman of the Mars Institute Pascal Lee and several NASA astronauts including John M. Grunsfeld and Leroy Chiao.

“Risk and Exploration: Earth as a Classroom” will examine how risk factors into the exploration of – and beyond – our home planet. The event will be targeted toward space, oceanic and terrestrial explorers, as well as others who encounter risk in their daily lives, including entrepreneurs, firefighters and police.

O’Brien is CNN’s chief technology and environment correspondent, and has anchored various newscasts for CNN and Headline News, including “Live From” and “American Morning.” He has covered such major news events as Hurricane Katrina, the war in Iraq and the crash investigations of several major plane crashes, including US Air 427, TWA 800, Egyptair 990 American 587 and the accidents that took the lives of John F. Kennedy Jr., Payne Stewart and Sen. Paul Wellstone.

Much of his time in the news business has been spent covering NASA and space-related stories, including the Columbia Space Shuttle tragedy, John Glenn’s return to space in 1998, NASA’s Mars Climate Orbiter and Polar Lander in 1999, and the launch of the first multinational crew to live aboard the international space station in 2000. During that same year, he produced, shot and wrote a one-hour documentary, “Terminal Count: What it Takes to Make the Space Shuttle Fly,” on the process of preparing a space shuttle for flight.

O’Brien is also a pilot who has logged flight time in many different types of aircraft.

He has won a number of individual national and international journalism awards, and has worked as part of teams that have won Peabody and Emmy Awards.

“Risk and Exploration: Earth as a Classroom” will be held with the financial sponsorship of Northrop Grumman Corp. and Aerojet, with additional sponsorship from The Explorers Club, the Association of Space Explorers, the Space Generation Advisory Council and the Challenger Center for Space Science Education.

Co-chairs for the event will be Astronaut Leroy Chiao, who is the Smiley and Bernice Romero Raborn Distinguished Chair and Max Faget Professor in Mechanical Engineering at LSU, and Keith Cowing, president of SpaceRef Interactive Inc.

For more information on the symposium or to register, visit www.riskexplore2007.com.

Contact Kristine Calongne
LSU Media Relations
225-578-5985
kcalong@lsu.edu