Friday Courses   

Despite tremendous advances in technology and in treatments of many cancers, the outcomes for far too many cancers and individuals remain unacceptable. One of the root causes of this is that many cancers exhibit tremendous heterogeneity across populations and at the cellular level within a single individual. Newly developed single cell omics techniques are leading to critical insights into cancer cell biology at the population and individual level that have the potential for revolutionizing cancer care. This webinar will focus on both the challenges and the opportunities associated with this potential revolution.

Conspiracy theory beliefs are notoriously persistent. Yet we are able to substantially reduce belief among believers by leveraged developments in generative artificial intelligence (AI). When we engage conspiracy believers in personalized evidence-based debunking dialogues with AI models such as GPT, we reduced conspiracy belief by ~20%. The effect remained 2 months later, generalized across a wide range of conspiracy theories, occurred even among participants with deeply entrenched beliefs, and occurred even if participants were led to believe they were talking to a human expert instead of an AI. These findings suggest that many conspiracy theory believers can revise their views if presented with sufficiently compelling evidence.

From hydrothermal vents and frosty peaks to sulfuric caves, Earth’s most extreme places are home to microscopic life with extraordinary talents. In this talk, Dr, Tierney will share stories from the field and the lab through the Two Frontiers Project, a nonprofit that hunts for “microbial superpowers” that could help tackle pollution, increase crop yields, and improve human health. We will explore how these invisible ecosystems work, why they matter for everyday life, and how citizen scientists and students can help map this hidden world.

Electron transfer is the basis of most cellular processes, ranging from photosynthesis to cellular respiration. These processes have evolved over billions of years to be highly efficient, far surpassing engineered systems. Our research harnesses this natural efficiency by integrating materials science with synthetic biology to develop versatile, low-cost, and user-friendly technologies, ranging from inexpensive diagnostics for infectious disease to improved catalysis for sustainable conversions.

Human beings are complicated, and every person is at least slightly different. Most drugs work for only a fraction of patients. The five major medical conditions in developed countries are cardiac diseases, cancers, autoimmune diseases, infectious diseases, and aging. For decades we have imagined that personalized diagnoses and treatments could extend healthy, active lives for additional decades. The oldest person in the world recently died in France at about 117, showing what might be possible. I will describe unbiased proteomics—a method we invented thirty years ago, explaining in plain English, how this approach could fundamentally change our health for the better.

What happens when the dust of ancient civilizations collides with the grit of modern academic life? Thomas E. Levy’s The Boomer Archaeologist is a thrilling excavation of the past and an unflinching look at the personal and professional upheavals of a life in archaeology. Through vivid graphic storytelling, Levy guides readers on expeditions across Israel, Jordan, Greece, and beyond, where every dig site becomes a lens for exploring identity, belonging, and purpose—capturing the rush of discovery alongside the disillusioning shifts in elite American universities over three decades. More than a career memoir, it is a meditation on tribes—ancient and modern, academic, and cultural, chosen and inherited—that resonates with anyone piecing together meaning from the past while grappling with the present. A candid postscript reflects on how the events of October 7, 2023, reshaped fieldwork and scholarly life in the region.

If you are reading this, you almost certainly are embedded in our infrastructural systems: electricity, water and sewage, transportation, telecommunications, and more. This talk is an overview of these shared systems: where they came from, what they have in common, how they shape our lives and give us agency to act in the world. We will also talk about why we can no longer take them for granted and look towards how we can make them more resilient, equitable, and sustainable.

Dr. Chapman will present the exciting story behind the research to virtually unwrap the carbonized papyrus scrolls from the ancient city of Herculaneum. The scrolls were buried and carbonized by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD, and since their discovery in 1752, various attempts have been made to open them, with disastrous results. Hundreds of them remain unrolled and unread. In 2024, after more than twenty years of research and a global, $1 million AI contest called the Vesuvius Challenge, Professor Brent Seales and his team were able to reveal for the first time—and purely via computational methods—sixteen columns of text from within an unopened Herculaneum scroll. This talk will provide a behind-the-scenes look at how the decades of work Dr. Seales the open-source software development competition cracked open this window into the ancient world.