This town talk will be presented by Lukasz Joachimiak, Associate Professor, UT Southwestern Medical Center. Tau is a protein in brain cells that normally helps support their internal structure. In more than 25 brain diseases, including Alzheimer’s, tau can misfold and clump together into harmful...
This town talk will be presented by David Lacy, University of Buffalo. How did the atoms in the universe come together to form life? At the heart of this mystery is the conversion of small molecules into the building blocks of life, driven by metallocofactors—enzyme-like...
This town talk will be presented by Matthias Heyden, Arizona State University. Water is far more than a refreshing drink — its unique molecular properties make life possible. By forming a dynamic network of weak chemical bonds, water acts as both a selective solvent and...
Creating with AI is a hands-on workshop that teaches you how to develop exceptional marketing content while preserving your brand voice. If you’ve been overwhelmed by the surge of AI tools and aren’t sure what’s actually useful, this workshop cuts through the noise. You’ll see...
This town talk will be presented by Derek Posselt, Principal Scientist, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. If you live on planet Earth, you have had to worry about the weather at some point. Most of us have heard some version of the expression: "If you don't...
Lucy Hutyra, Boston University Our city trees offer well-known benefits—from cooling overheated neighborhoods to sequestering carbon—but the story is far from simple. This talk examines how trees grow in the challenging urban environment and the ecological trade-offs they face. We’ll explore how cities might balance...
Ann McDermott, Columbia University For proteins, aka “the building blocks of life”, shape is ultimately important. Shape, more than other properties, confers function, information about protein shapes is coveted in the development of new medicines and diagnostics. Most proteins are somewhat flexible, and there are...
Milan Delor, Columbia University Moore's law - the long-standing trend of computer chips getting constantly faster and cheaper by doubling the number of transistors on a chip every two years - is coming to a worrying end. The hunt for new materials and processes that...
Kade Head-Marsden, University of Minnesota There is an exponential cost to obtaining molecular information pertinent to important processes such as catalysis, photosynthesis, and energy transfer and storage. While quantum computing showed early promise for reducing the scaling of these problems, practical realization of this promise...
Guillermo AcunaFriborg University A scientific revolution is happening at the smallest of scales—one where we fold DNA, the molecule of life, into intricate nanoscale shapes. This field, called DNA origami, turns DNA into a programmable building material, allowing us to craft structures just billionths of a...
