The Sally McDonnell Barksdale Honors College Fall Convocation features an address by Dava Sobel, who plans to discuss "Celebrating 400 Years of Galileo and His Telescope."

Sobel has spent her career telling the fascinating stories of scientific discoveries and the people who made them. Perhaps her best-known works are "Longitude," a best-seller that relates the story of the lone genius who solved the greatest scientific problem of the time, determining longitude; and the 2000 Pulitzer Prize finalist "Galileo's Daughter," which is based on 124 surviving letters to Galileo from his eldest child. A former New York Times science writer, Sobel also has written several other books, articles for national magazines and a stage play about 16th-century astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus