Seminars

Youth sport can support growth, physical health and community, but year-round schedules, early specialization and social-media pressure can also make participation stressful. Meredith Whitley examines changes in sports culture amid rising youth mental-health difficulties and presents a seven-part framework for healthier sport environments. The lecture considers how young athletes can develop life skills while retaining enjoyment of the game. Whitley’s research includes designing and evaluating school and community sport programmes and developing US mental-health guidelines for youth sport. Speaker: Meredith Whitley, PhD, Professor of Sport-Based Youth Development at Adelphi University and Research Fellow at Stellenbosch University’s Centre for Sports Leadership. Organized by the Alan Hu Foundation. Tuesday 13 October 2026, 17:30–18:30 America/Los_Angeles (Pacific Daylight Time). Free online Zoom webinar, with a 15-minute question-and-answer segment advertised. Register using REGISTER NOW on the official lecture page at least one day beforehand to receive the Zoom link. Simultaneous Chinese and Spanish interpretation is available.

Yun Xia presents macrophage–kidney assembloids that address missing immune and vascular components in stem-cell organoids. Directed differentiation, self-organization, genetic perturbation, xenotransplantation and single-cell analysis reveal immune–epithelial interactions. Macrophages from the same parental cells acquire resident phenotypes; diabetic and polycystic kidney models show context-dependent effects on inflammation, epithelial injury and disease progression. Minoru Takasato addresses kidney organoids’ missing urinary outflow by generating bladder tissue from human pluripotent cells. Stepwise differentiation passes through endoderm, hindgut and cloaca; FGF4 posteriorization and growth-factor screening promote urothelial identity. The resulting sacs contain stratified urothelial cell types, stretch and form a barrier, supporting developmental, disease and future therapeutic studies. Online via Zoom. Tuesday 13 October, 11:00–12:30 SGT (Asia/Singapore). Both talks share this session; individual start times are unspecified. Register through the organizer page. Professional, trainee or student status in stem cells, regenerative medicine or an adjacent field is required; organizer approval and recording restrictions apply.

Nicolas Mathevon examines the evolution of vocal communication through an analysis of songs from more than 3,000 passerine species. The study organizes their acoustic diversity into eight basic motifs and relates motif use to social organization, morphology, mating systems and sound transmission. Tropical forest conditions favor simpler signals such as flat whistles that travel effectively through dense habitat. In temperate regions, dense populations, short breeding seasons and stronger sexual selection favor complex signals such as rapid trills, despite their greater degradation during transmission. The resulting global pattern reflects a changing balance between environmental constraints and selection for complex communication. Online on 30 September 2026, 17:00–18:00 CEST (Europe/Paris; UTC+2), with an optional 15-minute discussion afterward. Open worldwide through Zoom. Use the join information on the organizer's page; its optional registration form subscribes attendees to seminar updates. Organized by LINGUAE's Animal Linguistics Seminar, with Emmanuel Chemla, Lucie Ravaux and Philippe Schlenker. Online via Zoom; public joining instructions on the organizer’s seminar page.

Merav Ahissar examines how expertise emerges through learning the statistics of task-relevant stimuli. Slow learning builds familiarity with stable regularities, such as syllable patterns in language, while fast adaptation supports flexible responses to changing situations, including surprising social interactions. The talk considers atypical learning dynamics in dyslexia and autism and how these may explain difficulties in linguistic and social skill acquisition, respectively. The discussion draws on Gertsovski and Ahissar, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 2026. Speaker: Merav Ahissar, Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Brain Sciences, Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Organized by Cornell Cognitive Science. Friday 25 September 2026, 15:00–16:30 America/New_York (EDT). Attend online through the public Join via Zoom link on the official event page; the link opens Zoom’s app and browser join options. Cornell advertises the source event as hybrid, but this listing covers the verified online attendance route.

Mariana Wolfner presents research on the molecular changes in eggs, sperm, and females that coordinate successful reproduction, drawing on genetic and physiological studies of fertilization. This NIH Wednesday Afternoon Lecture Series event is offered in person and through NIH VideoCast.

MIT Biology Colloquium Series talk by David Bilder (University of California, Berkeley), hosted by Yukiko Yamashita, on invertebrate oncology and the ancient evolutionary origins of tumor-host interactions.

This English-language webinar examines advances in organoid research, production, and drug discovery. Hideya Sakaguchi covers the developmental-biology origins of neural organoid research and its potential for drug discovery, followed by a keynote from Thomas Mitchell of The Organoid Company and a live question session.

Yuko Munakata presents evidence challenging capacity-only accounts of self-control and explains how experience, effort, and expected payoff shape executive-function engagement and later outcomes.

Rachna Reddy studies relationships among wild chimpanzees and bonobos to investigate adolescence as a period of both vulnerability and resilience. Drawing on more than a decade observing chimpanzees, the presentation brings together biological, anthropological, psychological and neuroscientific perspectives through cross-species empirical research. It connects questions about development in our closest living relatives with understanding the human life course; Reddy’s fellowship work also includes a coming-of-age novel informed by the lives of the chimpanzees she studies.

Although stress can be considered as an ongoing process that helps an organism to cope with present and future challenges, when it is too intense or uncontrollable, it can lead to adverse consequences for physical and mental health. Social stress specifically, is a highly prevalent traumatic experience, present in multiple contexts, such as war, bullying and interpersonal violence, and it has been linked with increased risk for major depression and anxiety disorders. Nevertheless, not all individuals exposed to strong stressful events develop psychopathology, with the mechanisms of resilience and vulnerability being still under investigation. During this talk, I will identify key gaps in our knowledge about stress vulnerability and I will present our recent data from our contextual fear learning protocol based on social defeat stress in mice.

The Nature versus Nurture debate has generally been considered from the lens of genome versus experience dichotomy and has dominated our thinking about behavioral individuality and personality traits. In contrast, the role of nonheritable noise during brain development in behavioral variation is understudied. Using the Drosophila melanogaster visual system, I will discuss our efforts to dissect how individuality in circuit wiring emerges during development, and how that helps generate individual behavioral variation.

Cellular crosstalk is an essential process during brain development and is influenced by numerous factors, including cell morphology, adhesion, the local extracellular matrix and secreted vesicles. Inspired by mutations associated with neurodevelopmental disorders, we focus on understanding the role of extracellular mechanisms essential for the proper development of the human brain. Therefore, we combine 2D and 3D in vitro human models to better understand the molecular and cellular mechanisms involved in progenitor proliferation and fate, migration and maturation of excitatory and inhibitory neurons during human brain development and tackle the causes of neurodevelopmental disorders.

David Reich examines how sequencing DNA from ancient human remains has changed the reconstruction of population history. Genetic evidence from past cultures can reveal relationships and movements that are difficult to infer from living populations alone, sometimes challenging interpretations based on archaeology, language and written history. The lecture explores what these discoveries imply for understanding shared and complex human ancestries, and how knowledge of the past could inform the study of human health. A discussion with Carl Zimmer connects the research to the interpretation and communication of evidence about human history. The programme extends the paleogenomic research associated with the 2022 medicine prize through recent work on ancient and modern human DNA.

Digital platforms generate unprecedented traces of human behaviour, offering new methodological approaches to understanding collective action, polarisation, and social dynamics. Through analysis of millions of digital traces across multiple studies, we demonstrate how online behaviours predict offline action: Brexit-related tribal discourse responds to real-world events, machine learning models achieve 80% accuracy in predicting real-world protest attendance from digital signals, and social validation through "likes" emerges as a key driver of mobilization. Extending this approach to conspiracy narratives reveals how digital traces illuminate psychological mechanisms of belief and community formation. Longitudinal analysis of YouTube conspiracy content demonstrates how narratives systematically address existential, epistemic, and social needs, while examination of alt-tech platforms shows how emotions of anger, contempt, and disgust correlate with violence-legitimating discourse, with significant differences between narratives associated with offline violence versus peaceful communities. This work establishes digital traces as both methodological innovation and theoretical lens, demonstrating that computational social science can illuminate fundamental questions about polarisation, mobilisation, and collective behaviour across contexts from electoral politics to conspiracy communities.