Lecture and Tasting - Tales from the Grove: A Chemist’s View of Olive Oil

Lecture and Tasting -
Tales from the Grove: A Chemist’s View of Olive Oil with Prof. Patricia O'Hara 

Tuesday, November 17
4:00 - 5:30 p.m.
In-person only
at Berkshire Community College

Lecture and olive oil tasting with Patricia B. O'Hara, Amanda and Lisa Cross Professor of Chemistry, Emerita, Amherst College.

Join us for an exploration of the history, cultivation, harvesting and processing of olives and olive oil. What can we learn about the freshness and authenticity of oils based on some simple chemical tests that can protect us from rancid or fraudulent oils? How do we train our senses to appreciate some of the world’s finest extra virgin olive oils and what is the difference between cold press or first press? What are scientists learning about the health benefits of this “liquid gold”? Learn some tips about cooking with olive oil and hear of some of the non‐traditional and surprising uses of this vital substance.

Lecture will be followed by a guided tasting, and then some social time with cheese, bread, and more olive oil following the formal program.

Cost: $35 for OLLI at BCC members,
           $45 for non-members

Patricia O’Hara is the Lisa and Amanda Cross Professor of Chemistry, Emerita, at Amherst College, where she taught for 42 years. While there, she helped to found two interdisciplinary majors: the Biochemistry and Biophysics Program and the Education Studies Major.  She served as Dean of New Students from 2010-2014 and Chair of the Chemistry Department for many years.  She was awarded the Ferguson Teaching Award upon her retirement in 2025. 

Professor O’Hara did her undergraduate studies at Adelphi University in Garden City, NY and her doctoral work at Columbia University. After a post-doctoral appointment at Stanford University, she came to Amherst College in 1983. Her research interest is biophysics; her lab uses fluorescence spectroscopy and single-molecule microscopy to study protein homeostasis. Her more than two dozen scientific publications appear in journals such as Biochemistry, Molecular Immunology, and the Journal of Physical Chemistry and Nature Chemistry.  Her research students have presented and published over thirty Conference Proceedings in the Biophysical Journal. She is most proud of the many honors research students she has supervised and the hundreds of students who have learned to do research in her lab. 

She has also contributed to the literature on curriculum development and pedagogy in chemistry and biochemistry.  Her 2005 article “Turning on the Light: Lessons from Luminescence” in J. Chem Ed. was featured in a retrospective by the journal and has had more than 3000 downloads.  

More recently, she expanded her interest in food science, developing a course in Molecular Gastronomy and writing and teaching about Olive Oil Chemistry.  Her belief that food science can be used to motivate the teaching of science is the basis of her textbook on Food Chemistry in Small Bites, published in 2025, and a chapter titled "Molecular Gastronomy: A Universal Portal to the Molecular Sciences" in the Handbook of Molecular Chemistry (2021).  With collaborator Zeynep Delen and her late husband Richard Blatchly, she published The Chemical Story of Olive Oil: from Grove to Table in 2017 (translated into Turkish in 2020 and Spanish in 2022) and Learning Design from the Olive in 2022. She has been invited to present talks on olive oil chemistry in venues ranging from a town hall in Belianes, Spain (2014), to an assembly of Senators, Congressional Representatives, and Mediterranean Diplomats at the U.S Capitol (2023), to an auditorium in Beirut, Lebanon (2023). 

Sign up today!

Register online or call 413.236.2190 (M-F 9 a.m. - 4 p.m.) to register by phone with a credit card.