Professor of Biology Darcy Russell will be a part of the Charles Kopke Lecture taking place at 9 p.m. on Tuesday in Rice Auditorium. The event is being held in conjunction with the Student Activities Council’s Last Lecture Series and the inaugural events for Baker’s 29th president, Lynne Murray.

The speech choir, under the direction of Professor of Communication Studies Susan Emel, will also perform.

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Before inauguration events were put on the university calendar, a last lecture event had already been in the works.

“It was already established that a student had organized it and already recruited Dr. Russell and recruited Dr. Emel and the speech choir to perform that evening so under no circumstances were we going to change that,” Jerry Weakley, vice president for endowment and planned giving, said.

Because past last lectures have really been the “last” for the speakers, including former President Pat Long and former Campus Minister Ira DeSpain, Weakley approached Russell with the idea of adding Kopke’s name to the event to avoid any confusion.

Kopke, who honors a BU professor every year with the Kopke Award for Distinguished Teaching, will be in attendance. Russell had no problem changing the name of the lecture series.

“He has just done so much for the faculty that I thought it would be very nice if we honored him in return by calling this lecture series after him,” Russell said.

Weakley thinks it is fitting to have Russell speak at the event.

“She is one of his honorees so it works perfectly and so is Dr. Emel, and so there are two faculty members he has honored and they are both presenting that evening,” Weakley said.

Russell said if it were her own last lecture, she would be talking about cellular viruses or something related to her field of study. Instead, she chose a topic she felt more people would relate to.

“I decided that I would talk about how important I think it is for people to have role models in their life,” Russell said. “I am going to talk about three of mine and why I chose them and how I believe that they have helped me in my life.”

Russell hopes that those in attendance will take something out of the lecture.

“One of premises is that life is very short and if we start from scratch we kind of run out of time to live it well,” Russell said. “There are so many great patterns and role models out there that if we learn about them and if we start down a path that they have modeled for us, we get where we want to go [faster] which is hopefully a life well lived.”