Lecture and Reception on November 6, 2025, at Purdue University in West Lafayette, IN.
November 6 at 4:30 am - 4:30 pm
There will be a Lecture om Thursday, November 6, at 5:30pm in West Lafayette, IN, in the lower level St. Thomas Aquinas Church (535 Mitch Daniels Blvd, West Lafayette, IN 47906). The lecture will be entitled “From the Lab to the Altar: A Scientist’s Journey of Faith.” The speaker is Suzanne Bohlson, professor (Molecular Biology and Biochemistry) at UC Irvine.
The lecture will be preceded by a Reception at 4:30pm.
The Lecture is co-sponsored by the Purdue Chapter of the Society of Catholic Scientists along with the American Scientific Affiliation and St. Thomas Aquinas Parish.
Join us as Dr. Suzanne Bohlson, Professor at UC Irvine and President of the Southern California chapter of the Society of Catholic Scientists, shares her journey from irreligious scientist to practicing Catholic. Raised in a family of scientists who lived Gospel values without institutional faith, Dr. Bohlson discovered her scientific vocation studying HIV/AIDS and the immune system. Her path led from prestigious research labs to the University of Notre Dame, where she encountered Catholicism for the first time.
Dr. Bohlson will share how her scientific training, with its emphasis on truth-seeking, careful observation, and intellectual humility, prepared her for faith rather than hindered it. She’ll describe the “perfect storm” of divine providence that surrounded her conversion, including a priest completing his thesis on the harmony between Genesis and the theory of evolution just as she was joining the Church. With warmth and humor, she’ll explore how faith has enriched rather than conflicted with her scientific work, and how the same God she studies in the laboratory is the God she encounters in the Eucharist. This is a story of homecoming, discovering that the transcendent God she has always known was waiting to be found in the Catholic Church. Whether you’re a scientist, a person of faith, or someone asking the big questions about life’s meaning, Dr. Bohlson’s journey offers hope that faith and reason can walk hand in hand toward truth.