Seminars

Gašper Tkačik explores whether the language of information in biology can become a predictive scientific theory. The lecture connects information transfer from DNA to proteins, positional signals that guide cell fate during development, neural information processing, and the storage and inheritance of information in evolving genomes. It brings physics, information theory and quantitative biology together to examine these processes across biological scales. Tkačik is Professor at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria. Shinya Kuroda provides commentary; Arisa Ema moderates. Online via Zoom Webinar. Wednesday 14 October 2026, 14:00–15:00 JST (Asia/Tokyo; UTC+9). Public advance registration is required through the organizer’s event page. The lecture is in English with Japanese interpretation. Organized by Tokyo College, The University of Tokyo Institutes for Advanced Study.

Shantanu Jadhav presents work on coordinated hippocampal-prefrontal activity and the neural mechanisms that support memory-guided cognition and decisions. The seminar draws on systems electrophysiology and circuit analysis to connect distributed network dynamics with behavior.

Ilaria Ferlenghi discusses a career spanning structural biology, cryo-electron microscopy, vaccine research and development, and the growing role of artificial intelligence and machine learning in scientific innovation and entrepreneurship.

Real-time measurement of local biomolecule concentrations in living tissue requires sensors that are stable, selective and minimally invasive. This seminar examines single-walled carbon nanotubes, whose durable near-infrared fluorescence and sensitivity to their surroundings support optical biosensing. Biopolymer functionalization gives the nanotubes biological compatibility and selectivity for particular molecular targets. Spectroscopy, microscopy and machine-learning-assisted analysis are used to characterize sensor interactions and extract biological information, with applications spanning live-cell imaging, wearable sensing and continuous monitoring.

Takaki Komiyama will discuss how cortical circuits maintain information about the value of behavioral options across trials and transform past experience into future choices. The talk draws on longitudinal imaging and circuit manipulation in mice to examine distinct neuronal populations and local and long-range interactions in history-dependent decision-making.

Clarice D. Aiello examines evidence that quantum effects influence biological function, including magnetic sensing used in animal navigation, cellular metabolism and enzyme activity, and the capture of light energy in photosynthesis. The talk reviews proposed biophysical mechanisms and their implications for human, plant and environmental biology, while considering the difficulty of connecting observations from nanometre scales to whole organisms. A central question is whether quantum mechanics can be established or ruled out as the explanation for physiologically relevant effects, and whether those effects can be controlled for useful applications. Potential directions include biomimetic electromagnetic probes, quantum-computing architectures that operate at room temperature, improved solar-energy devices and new therapies. Progress will require work across disciplines and scales, with theory and experiment developed together.

Tom Nowakowski explains lineage barcoding and single-cell sequencing approaches for reconstructing neural stem-cell family trees and early wiring programs in developing mouse and human brains.

Lindsay N. Oberman reviews evidence for transcranial magnetic stimulation protocols in autism spectrum disorder. The seminar first explains how TMS works and how it can probe the brain mechanisms associated with autism. It then presents NIH research using repetitive TMS as an experimental therapeutic tool, examining its effects on both brain function and behaviour to guide the development of potential interventions. Online via Duke Zoom. Wednesday 7 October 2026, 16:00 EDT (America/New_York; UTC−4). Register through the event-specific Register Here link on the Duke Autism Seminar Series page to receive remote access. The presentation will not be recorded. Accommodation requests should reach the organizer at least ten days before the event. The speaker directs NIMH’s Developmental Clinical Neurophysiology and Neurostimulation Research Program.

Paul S. Weiss (UCLA) explores low-energy interactions and balanced cycling in natural systems as models for efficient synthetic devices and recycling. Because the relevant energies fall below visible-photon energies, tunnelling spectroscopy and imaging are used to probe these processes. Replicating biochemical cycling and low-energy transport could reduce the energy needed for devices and materials recovery. The work seeks missing physical principles, including spin conservation in chiral molecules and polarizability in biological and synthetic systems. This perspective has led to thermal-control advances in scale, speed and magnitude. Atomic-resolution imaging, spectroscopy and functional measurements help build precise structures while revealing heterogeneous nanoscale behaviour. The talk relates these advances to the physical, electronic, mechanical, thermal and chemical connections between materials and their surroundings that determine future nanomaterial measurements and devices.

This public discussion examines the factors that help preserve brain health during aging. Researchers working on neuroscience, brain stimulation, the microbiome and brain health consider how stress, everyday behavior and social and environmental conditions can affect resilience over a lifetime. The panel discusses emerging evidence about early vulnerability, possible interventions through lifestyle changes and stress management, and more targeted approaches. It also addresses the limits of current knowledge and the uncertainties that remain when translating these findings into ways to protect cognitive health.

Navigation and memory require coordination between map-like allocentric representations and body-centered egocentric actions. Aaron Wilber examines how the parietal–retrosplenial–anterior thalamic–hippocampal network performs these transformations, and how disrupted coordination contributes to spatial deficits in aging and Alzheimer’s disease. Rat sequence-task experiments reveal bidirectional hippocampal–parietal interactions across route-centered, place and egocentric representations. Because that task does not isolate reference-frame use, the laboratory developed a freely available task separating egocentric, allocentric and transformation conditions. Validation indicates that parietal cortex and anterior thalamus are required for transformation; ongoing work examines population states associated with each condition. The talk then connects impaired hippocampal–cortical communication during sleep to navigation deficits in 3xTg-AD mice, reporting recovery of circuit function and cognition after early, circuit-targeted 40 Hz entrainment. Related investigations examine this network during waking navigation. In TgF344-AD rats, egocentric impairments appear before transformation deficits, addressing the shortage of rodent studies of reference-frame coordination in Alzheimer’s disease.

How do humans stabilize an inverted pendulum, and why does a balanced pole eventually fall? Drawing on 25 years of fingertip pole-balancing research, this talk examines neural correction delays: longer poles move more slowly relative to the nervous system’s response time. Delay-differential models can stabilize the upright position, yet skilled people still experience falls. The proposed explanation is microchaos arising from interactions among delay, sensory dead zones and frequency-dependent force encoding. A region of transient falling solutions lies next to stable microchaotic dynamics. Such microchaos is absent in virtual frontal-plane balancing tasks, while models of standing postural sway lack the corresponding transient regime. The comparison suggests that human falls, unlike pole falls, are more plausibly associated with medical events or slips and trips.

Anthony Letai discusses how understanding programmed cell death can guide the selection of cancer treatments. The seminar explains how apoptotic signalling can be measured and how these measurements can identify drugs capable of killing cancer cells. Hybrid: New Research Building Auditorium, Georgetown University Medical Center, Washington, DC, and Zoom. Monday 5 October 2026, 16:30–17:30 EDT (America/New_York; UTC−4). Use the attendance registration form or the event’s Zoom link on the organizer page. Organized by Georgetown’s Distinguished Scientist Seminar Series. Letai is Director of the National Cancer Institute. An in-person reception follows the seminar.

To orchestrate complex behaviors in mammals, the cerebral cortex must continuously transmit its processing results to subcortical regions. While internal cortical processing relies on highly selective sparse codes, these descending cortical output streams employ an enigmatic dense code, characterized by high firing rates and low feature selectivity. This dense population code presents a profound paradox: how can downstream regions extract precise, cognitively relevant signals when most cortical output neurons can be active at any moment? We address this paradox by testing the hypothesis that cortex does not lose information when switching to a dense code. Instead, it utilizes a mechanism for sparse-to-dense coding transformations discovered by my laboratory: thalamocortical synapses target specifically the dendritic initiation zone for calcium action potentials (APs), which enables cortical output neurons to transmit multiple information streams simultaneously via a multiplexed 1-2-3 AP syntax. I will provide first evidence that this remarkable synaptic specificity and coding syntax generalize across long-range pathways. Information coupling via an anatomically and biophysically distinct dendritic nexus may hence be a ubiquitous mechanism for sparse-to-dense coding transformations in cortex. Dissecting these mechanistic origins of cortical output streams is only now possible due to a unique in vivo – in silico approach, perfected over two decades, that my laboratory developed for bridging the gaps between dendritic and population-level computations

Richard Huang investigates how DNA nanostructures deform under uneven hydrodynamic forces, a question relevant to drug delivery, vaccines and biosensors. Coarse-grained molecular dynamics and mechanical models first examine linear and circular DNA in extensional flow. Drag concentrates tension near the middle of linear duplexes, disrupting base pairs and causing overstretching. Deforming minicircles straighten along their sides while concentrating bending into opposing tips and localized kinks. Models based on DNA elasticity and hydrodynamic-force distributions explain these responses, then extend to wireframe DNA origami to study force transmission and how local structural transitions produce whole-particle deformation. The results inform structures designed for stability or controlled deformation in flow. Online via Zoom. Friday 2 October 2026, 12:00–13:00 EDT (America/New_York; UTC−4). Open the Zoom link on the official event page; the audience explicitly includes the public. Richard Huang is affiliated with MIT. Organized by MIT Department of Mathematics — Computational Research in Boston and Beyond Seminar.

Picower Institute Colloquium on the Brain and Cognition featuring Christopher Harvey, PhD, of Harvard University, held in Singleton Auditorium (46-3002) at MIT Building 46, 43 Vassar Street.

Cryopreservation constrains manufacturing and clinical delivery of immune cells such as NK and T cells. DMSO protects against freezing but becomes toxic at physiological temperatures; associated infusion morbidity can require washing or divided dosing that diminishes therapeutic effectiveness. This talk presents an alternative in which reversible, cytocompatible hydrogels encapsulate cells before freezing without DMSO. The speaker examines evidence that encapsulation cushions osmotic stress, suppresses kinetic and phase transitions, and reduces injury caused by extracellular ice growth and fusion. The discussion covers recovery efficiency, function after thawing, control of biological stress responses, and the challenges of extending the approach to clinical-scale cell preservation.

Ivo D. Dinov examines augmented intelligence as a partnership between people and computational systems. The talk traces the technical and philosophical development of neural networks, then introduces complex-time, or kime, representations and the inference methods they support. Applications include medical imaging, healthcare and economic forecasting. It also considers the academic mission, societal consequences of AI and tensions between rapid technical development and human values, framing mathematical AI methods as extensions of human reasoning. Free hybrid seminar hosted by Wayne State University's Institute for AI and Data Science, AIDaS: CAD Seminar Series. Wednesday 30 September 2026, 14:30–15:30 EDT (America/Detroit; UTC−4). Attend in Room 1146, Faculty/Administration Building, 656 W. Kirby, Detroit, MI 48202, USA, or use the Zoom link on the official event page. Researchers, practitioners, students and faculty are welcome; the organizer encourages in-person attendance.

Peter Meikle, Bernie Pope and Tingting Wang present the Australian Cardiovascular disease Data Commons (ACDC). Some heart attacks occur without established risk factors, and repeat events remain common despite optimal treatment. ACDC addresses this gap by securely pooling multi-omics, imaging and longitudinal outcomes from approximately 400,000 people in 18 Australian cohorts. The webinar explains cloud infrastructure, data harmonisation and federated standards based on Gen3; how integrated genomic, multi-omics and imaging cohorts support new risk markers and polygenic risk-score testing; and how the platform can move diagnostic research towards clinical practice. Meikle and Wang are at the Baker Heart and Diabetes Institute; Pope is at Australian BioCommons. Online via Zoom. Wednesday 30 September 2026, 12:00–13:00 AEST (Australia/Melbourne; UTC+10). Free, with advance registration through the official event page. Intended for life scientists, bioinformaticians, cardiovascular clinicians, data custodians and medical data scientists. Parts may be recorded; the Australian BioCommons Code of Conduct applies. Organized by Australian BioCommons.

Mansi Chhajed examines how the move from home sleep patterns to disrupted hospital sleep relates to cognitive outcomes after surgery. The session combines longitudinal sleep measurements with clinical assessments of postoperative delirium to identify baseline markers of vulnerability and consider practical ways to improve recovery. It connects sleep architecture, biological and environmental influences, and preoperative risk with proactive, sleep-informed patient care. Chhajed is a Clinical Research Coordinator at Massachusetts General Hospital. Online via Zoom Webinar. Tuesday 29 September 2026 at 14:00 ET / 13:00 CT (America/New_York; EDT, UTC−4). Organized by the Sleep Research Society — Virtual Seminar Series. Follow Register Today on the organizer's page to the event-specific Zoom form, which requests name and email. The form is publicly accessible; advance registration supplies webinar access.