2024 Simons Society of Fellows Alumni Symposium

Ashley Villar
Harvard University

Understanding the Origin of Elements from Stellar Death
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Where do the elements come from? The vast majority of elements that make up humans come from the bellies of stars, and are only seeded into the universe via stellar explosions. In this talk, I will explore the nucleosynthetic processes of stars that lead to the formation of most elements, with a particular focus on the heaviest (‘r-process’) elements such as gold. We will explore the potential roles of colliding stars versus accreting, baby black holes in these processes. Finally, we will discuss future missions (e.g., the Vera C. Rubin Observatory and the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope), and how we will combine these upcoming observations with novel machine learning approaches to understand our dynamic universe.
 

Patrick Kennedy
University of Bristol

Squabbling for three billion years: Why family dramas make the world go round
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Humans give each other a tough rap: we’re selfish, greedy, short-sighted, and nepotistic. But let’s get some perspective. Compared to the rest of life on Earth, we’re not so bad: for billions of years, our planet has been one long squabble for existence, more Wall Street than Sesame Street. Like many human squabbles, much of that conflict has occurred within (and between) families. As an evolutionary biologist, I’m endlessly fascinated by the drama and intrigue playing out all around us, from astonishing self-sacrifices to scandalous strategies to get ahead. In this talk, I will argue that the story of life is ultimately the story of family drama—drawing on field experiments with social wasps in Africa and South America to theoretical models exploring the surprising struggles raging between the genes inside our own bodies.
 

Arbel Harpak
University of Texas at Austin

What genetic associations can—and what they cannot—tell us about human variation

Huge datasets now offer unprecedented opportunities to map genetic variation to human trait variation. What does this science tell us about ourselves, our genetic makeup and differences among us? What can’t it tell us? Associations between genetic variation and trait variation can be hard to interpret because they often intricately depend on environmental, physiological and social factors. These dependencies can arise from genuine moderation of genetic effects by context. They can also arise from confounding factors related to environmental or social context. In my talk, I will present results that illustrate the often-critical implications of moderation and confounding by context for understanding human variation, including our learning about recent human evolution.
 

Arkarup Banerjee
Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory

Revisiting the language barrier: A neuroscience perspective

René Descartes posited human language as a defining distinction between humans and animals, introducing the concept of the “language barrier.” Traditionally seen as a clear divide, this barrier emphasized the unique complexity of human language. However, recent advances in neuroscience and large language models (LLMs) challenge this view. By integrating insights from the neuroscience of vocal communication across species, I will reconsider the nature of the language barrier, arguing that while human language possesses unique features, the underlying mechanisms share surprising computational and algorithmic similarities.
 

Bianca Jones Marlin
Columbia University

Nature, nurture and the neuroscience of parenthood

The role of a parent is to promote survival in their offspring. Growing evidence indicates adaptive and learned biological responses to stress experienced in a parent can be passed to the subsequent generation via epigenetic modifications in the germ line. This phenomenon, known as “intergenerational epigenetic inheritance,” suggests parents could unknowingly, but adaptively, prepare their offspring for the unpredictable pressures they have experienced in their lifetimes. The overarching goal of the Marlin Lab is to study the phenomenon of intergenerational epigenetic inheritance, with a primary focus on the olfactory system. We examine how neurons in the main olfactory epithelium of the nose encode odor-associated memories of fear. My lab and others have found that this learning process leads to structural changes in the main olfactory epithelium, potentially making it more sensitive to the fearful odor. Remarkably, the structural changes observed in the main olfactory epithelium are also found in offspring, suggesting that the threatening odor is not only represented in the nose, but also in the gametes of parents. We have uncovered a mechanism of this type of intergenerational epigenetic inheritance: an increase in newly-born cells tuned to the fear-associated odor. Understanding how memories are transmitted biologically, rather than experientially, can have a profound impact on society—providing inroads to earlier intervention and alleviating the burden of mental health crises.
 

Agustín Fuentes
Princeton University

Human nature(s): Science and the many successful ways to be human
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From the moment humans are born until the day they die, they navigate life’s complexities, communicating, arguing, breaking up, making up, eating, suffering, learning and loving. The profound differences in how communities, and individual humans, live these experiences might lead us to question the concept of a “human nature” universally shared across all of humanity. Yet, despite this diversity, there is an underlying consistency to human bodies and human life. This raises a fascinating paradox: How do we acknowledge the deep diversity across humanity while also recognizing the core similarities that characterize human experience? Luckily, there are data and analyses to resolve this paradox, and they reveal that the small individual details of every life matter, and that human biology, culture, histories and beliefs are always tangled together facilitating who we are and why we do what we do. There are eight billion humans spread across the planet doing the ‘human’ thing in multiple ways right now, and most are doing it successfully. This diversity reflects not a single, fixed human ‘nature’ but rather a range of human natures. This talk examines the core scientific evidence for human natures and places it in dialogue with contemporary issues facing humanity.
 

Subhadra Das
Author, Broadcaster, and Comedian

Uncivilised: Tales from the savage academy
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Whatever you may have heard, scientists, at the end of the day, are people. Their ideas are shaped by the society around them, and they see the world through the lens of socialisation, just like the rest of us. As a historian of race science and eugenics, I’m particularly mindful of the ways in which scientific research has, in turn, shaped our society. There have always been biases inherent in the formation and application of scientific ideas, particularly in biology and genetics, which in turn were influenced by earlier sciences like natural history and natural philosophy. When it came to the science of race, this did more than arbitrarily divide and rank people based on arbitrary physical differences; it extended to who was seen as capable of doing science. Science was the means of sorting the civilised from the uncivilised, and, despite myriad advances to the contrary, that barrier has proved difficult to break down. In this talk, I will look at the history of science and Western civilisation. I will look at how each shaped the other, and how the result has seldom been about the search for an objective truth and more about who wields the power to say so.