The Arnold Arboretum's sesquicentennial Director's Series traces the Arnold’s significance in the landscape architecture movement, value for the people of Boston, and leadership in creating global connections between plants and people.
Panelists include:
Dr. Michelle Kondo, Research Social Scientist, UDSA-Forest Service
Rev. Mariama White-Hammond, Chief of Environment, Energy, and Open Space, City of Boston
Laurence Cotton, Consulting Producer, “Frederick Law Olmsted: Designing...
Caroline Buckee is a professor of epidemiology and the associate director of the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. She is writing a book focused on the impact of gold mining on the epidemiology and control of malaria in the Amazon rainforest while concurrently examining infectious disease epidemiology as a field of study, using malaria as an example. Join her to hear more about her current research.
Technology is now part of our lives in ways that were not possible only 10-20 years ago. Smart devices, like watches, phones, and speakers, can gather vast amounts of information about their users, often without the user’s knowledge or consent. As technology continues to improve, many of these devices may also be leveraged to serve diagnostic functions. Technologies such as Amazon's Alexa and Google's Assistant can ambiently and continually monitor a variety of information about an individual’s location, voice, and movement. As this technology merges with wearables, such as the Apple...
Artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly permeating many facets of our lives, raising both hope and concern about possibilities for our future. AI is transforming domains as disparate as science, medicine, commerce, government, law, the military, and the arts, and in doing so, it is forcing us to grapple with practical, political, and philosophical questions about humans and the nature of human interaction. The Harvard Radcliffe Institute Science Symposium, featuring speakers from disparate disciplines and industries, will examine AI, its impact, and its ethics by exploring current and...
Join the Harvard Museum of Natural History in celebrating Earth Day with engaging sustainability-themed virtual events and activities for all ages. Join the conversation as Harvard students and experts weigh in on our most pressing environmental challenges, on cutting-edge research, and on promising paths to a more sustainable future. Introduce young minds to environmental science with our live museum animals and HMSC Story Time. Find out how to reconnect with nature and record the biodiversity in your local area. Or, simply indulge in our staff recommendations for...
Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard—Online
Thea Riofrancos’s current project, “Brine to Batteries: The Extractive Frontiers of the Global Energy Transition,” explores the politics of the transition to renewable energy through the lens of one of its key technologies: lithium batteries. Based on multisited fieldwork following lithium’s global supply chains from the point of extraction in the Chilean desert, “Brine to Batteries” will be the first scholarly account of the rapidly moving processes shaping the contours of the next energy system—and those of our planetary future.
Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard—Online
Alexey Golubev, assistant professor of Russian history and digital humanities at the University of Houston, is working on a new book project: a history of Soviet efforts to produce mass scientific literacy after World War II, when tens and later hundreds of thousands of members of the Soviet intelligentsia were recruited to communicate scientific knowledge to the public through popular science lectures, publications, public experiments and debates, and television shows.
This mass scientific literacy campaign resulted in a diverse and autonomous network of people and ideas in...
Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Knafel Center, 10 Garden Street, Cambridge
Xenotransplantation is a promising strategy to address the shortage of organs for human transplantation, though concerns about pig-to-human immunological compatibility and the risk of cross-species transmission of porcine endogenous retroviruses (PERVs) have impeded the clinical application of this approach. In this lecture, Luhan Yang, cofounder and chief scientific officer of eGenesis will explain how CRISPR is being used to create pigs with advanced immunological modifications to address immunological and functional compatibility issues.
Geological Lecture Hall, 24 Oxford Street, Cambridge, MA
Christopher A. Walsh, Bullard Professor of Pediatrics and Neurology, Harvard Medical School; Chief, Division of Genetics and Genomics, Boston Children’s Hospital; Investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute; Associate Member, Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT
Despite major scientific advances in sequencing the genomes of species through the animal kingdom, it has been remarkably difficult to identify the genes that enable the unique cultural, aesthetic, and reasoning capabilities of humans. Christopher Walsh will discuss how research on specific genes...
Epidemic disease spreads quickly in our interconnected, globalized world. This symposium looks at new ways of tracking epidemics using big data and social networks to predict and stem the rise of emergent diseases.... Read more about Contagion: Exploring Modern Epidemics