OLLI Courses

It’s hard to read the news these days without encountering reports of the threats of infectious diseases, from turkeys contaminated with Salmonella and romaine lettuce carrying E coli that occurred last Thanksgiving, to the tens of thousands of cases of cholera and diphtheria that are ongoing in the starving population in Yemen. Outbreaks of measles and mumps are now becoming commonplace, driven by the anti-vaccination movement. It might be time to panic, but stop by here first for the facts. We will discuss the pathogens that cause these and other infections, how and why they spread, how/if they can be treated or prevented, and the political and economic turmoil that they cause.

Deborah Gold practiced Infectious Diseases for 31 years, diagnosing and treating patients with all kinds of infections, including tuberculosis, leprosy, HIV, syphilis, Lyme, malaria, dengue, meningitis, and infections of heart valves and bone. She was a hospital epidemiologist for 15 years which involved surveillance of hospital infections, infection prevention, outbreak investigation and interfacing with county and state departments of health and the CDC. She was also active in teaching more than a generation of medical residents, a number of whom have gone on to become Infectious Diseases specialists themselves. During her 30 plus years in practice, Dr. Gold was a popular speaker and delivered over 50 lectures to her colleagues which were always standing room only!

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"To have seen Italy without seeing Sicily is not to have seen Italy at all, for Sicily is the clue to everything” (Goethe) Sicily calls itself the “Crossroads of the Mediterranean”, but a crossroads is a much-trampled place. Sicily sits like a cork strategically plugging the center of the Mediterranean, so no people have been as stepped upon; no people have as many different ancestors written in their faces, their language, their customs, their beliefs. Her history is Mediterranean history. Hers is an epic populated with heroes from Aeneas to Falcone, and monsters from Cyclops to Totò Riina, and it is on the wings of her stories that we will travel more than three thousand years through the history of Sicily.

Douglas Kenning (PhD, Edinburgh) has taught at universities in Tunisia, Japan, and Italy. Besides a university professor, he has been a biologist, actor, army officer, Manhattan taxi driver, academic administrator, and writer. He divides each year between the Bay Area, lecturing on Mediterranean histories and cultures, and Sicily, where he runs Sicily Tour, a small tour guide business.

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The exhibit "Monet: The Late Years, at the de Young Museum, February 16-May 27, 2019, features 50 paintings from the final phase of Monet’s career to his death in 1926. Inspired by the diverse and changeable environment of the garden at his Giverny home, motifs such as the wisteria-covered Japanese footbridge, lily pond, weeping willow trees, irises, daylilies, and agapanthus growing at the water’s edge were among the subjects he painted with increasingly gestural brushstrokes. This course will examine works that balance representation and abstraction and study the artist whose unique way of perceiving nature led the way to twentieth-century modernism.

Maureen O’Brien De Geller received her B.A. and M.A. from Dominican University of California where she presently teaches courses in Western and Non-Western Art History. She has been a docent with the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco since 2006.

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This course will provide a broad overview of the the use of psychological profiling, exploring its methodology, its history (from hunting medieval witches to modern serial offenders), and its scientific underpinnings. Practical application of theory and methods to case studies will teach students to reason logically and draw evidence-based conclusions about offenders.

Mary Juno earned her MSc in Forensic Science from the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, Scotland, and her BA in Biological Anthropology from San Francisco State University. Juno worked for many years as a CSI at the Oakland Police Department where she processed hundreds of major crime scenes. She has conducted research at the NYPD Latent Fingerprint Lab, and currently teaches forensic science and criminal justice courses at SFSU, SJSU, and CCSF.

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