Presidential Lectures

Dr. Joseph J. Fins will address how our evolving knowledge of disorders of consciousness has created an ethical imperative for a population often misdiagnosed, neglected and segregated from society. Meeting the needs of conscious individuals often mistakenly diagnosed as permanently unconscious is an emerging civil rights issue and challenge for basic and clinical neuroscience.

We are still far from elucidating how complex assemblies of neurons — that is, brain circuits — interact to process information. In this lecture, Michael Roukes will outline the immense complexity of such pursuits and describe efforts toward developing new tools for massively multiplexed, multi-physical interrogation of brain activity.

Humanity has pondered the meaning and utility of randomness for millennia. A computational theory of randomness, developed in the past three decades, reveals (perhaps counterintuitively) that very little is lost in such deterministic or weakly random worlds. In this talk, Avi Wigderson will explain the main ideas and results of this theory.

In this lecture, Dr. Beth Stevens will discuss recent work that implicates brain immune cells, called microglia, in sculpting of synaptic connections during development and their relevance to autism, schizophrenia and other brain disorders.

Katepalli Sreenivasan will describe what is known about the convective phenomena in the sun, using results from basic turbulence modeling, numerical simulations, as well as helioseismology.

The Mars Science Laboratory rover, Curiosity, was built to search for and explore habitable environments. In this lecture, John Grotzinger will review Curiosity’s latest discoveries and describe the biological viability of ancient environments on Mars, along with the value of robots in geologic exploration.