Dr. David Waters received his B.S. and D.V.M. degrees from Cornell University and his PhD degree from the University of Minnesota. Until 2014, he served as Professor of Comparative Oncology and Associate Director of the Center on Aging and The Life Course at Purdue University. Currently, Dr. Waters is Director of The Center for Exceptional Longevity Studies at the Gerald P. Murphy Cancer Foundation. Appointed to The National Academies of Sciences – Keck Futures Initiative Scientific Panel on Extending Human Healthspan in 2007, he is nationally recognized for his work on utilizing pet dogs as models of human aging. He is a Fellow in the Biology of Aging, Gerontological Society of America. Dr. Waters is also an expert on the comparative aspects of prostate cancer in men and dogs. His research at the Murphy Cancer Foundation, which targets the underexplored intersection of the fields of aging and cancer, is aimed at developing personalized interventions that promote successful aging and cancer avoidance. As a teacher, Dr. Waters has contributed significantly to Purdue University's Dual Title PhD Program in Gerontology for more than a decade. His course"To See and To Seize Opportunities" offered inter-disciplinary graduate students the opportunity to explore the skills and attitudes that promote self-renewal and peak performance in discovering and educating. In 2005, he was awarded The Great Teacher Award for Exemplary Interdisciplinary Teaching at Purdue. In 2010, his first cross-country scientific expedition to study the oldest-living pet dogs in their homes as models of highly successful human aging –"The Old Grey Muzzle Tour" – was featured in USA Today, AARP Bulletin, and Good Morning America. His TEDx talk"The Oldest Dogs as Our Greatest Teachers: Get the Words Out of Your Eyes" underscores how language limits the scientific method.

What can I know? What should I do? These are some of the fundamental questions asked by persons seeking to perform at their greatest potential. The purpose of this paper will be to provide scientists and non-scientists with a perspective on subjectivity. Conventional education with its emphasis on knowledge content overlooks or ignores subjectivity – how we take and make the world through a process of individual mind-building. This paper will attempt to delineate a framework of attitudes and sensibilities that can help to develop a useful method for making sense of the objects of our experience, achieving the goal of more effective prediction, explanation, and productive action. First, the language surrounding the subjectivity-objectivity tension will be explored, attempting to more clearly differentiate terms such as subjectivism, subjectivity, and intersubjectivity. Then, the role of subjectivity in personal performance will be developed – informed through several entry-points, including: the embodied subject of the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty; the Personal Construct Theory of psychologist George A. Kelly; Thomas Nagel’s “What is it like to be a Bat?”; and the writings of the poet Wallace Stevens. Ultimately, the aim will be to situate subjectivity as key to the business of performance, seeing subjectivity as a process of meaning-making, seeing objectivity as a direction in which understanding can move. Finally, it will be proposed that an essential element to performance is developing a dialogic self-awareness, embracing the underappreciated interplay between body and language and subjectivity so that we might advance confidently and sensibly in our roles as object in the world, subject for the world.