Seminars—Spring 2007

February 6

E.O. Wilson, Harvard naturalist, entomologist, sociobiologist
Topic: conserving biodiversity
Note: This seminar will take place at the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology (Fellows only)

February 8

Rebecca Saxe, MIT assistant professor of cognitive neuroscience
Topic: Mind reading: how we know what others think and feel

February 13

Discussion among Knight Fellows: Recalibration
(Fellows only)

February 15

Annual meeting of the AAAS in San Francisco, February 15-19. (no seminar)

February 17 (Saturday)

Attending the AAAS annual meeting? Join the Knight Science Journalism Fellowships for a reception Saturday, February 17 from 5:00-6:30pm in the Peninsula Room of Hotel Nikko (222 Mason Street, San Francisco, CA 94102)

February 20

Matthew Wilson, MIT professor, Picower Institute
Topic: The role of sleep and dreaming in memory formation

February 22

Philip Rightmire, paleoanthropologist at Binghamton University (SUNY), visiting professor at Harvard.
Topic: Introduction to human evolution with emphasis on new discoveries.
Note: This seminar will take place at Harvard.
(Knight Fellows only)

February 27

Shop Talk
Rick Weiss, Science Reporter for The Washington Post

March 1

Whitehead Institute Mini-symposium

David Page, Whitehead director and MIT biology professor
Topic: The biology of sex determination
David Bartel, Whitehead member and MIT biology professor
Topic: RNA interference
Note: this seminar is from 3pm—5pm at Whitehead. (Fellows only)

March 6

Seth Lloyd, MIT professor of mechanical engineering, and author of the book Programming the Universe: A Quantum Computer Scientist Takes on the Universe
Topic: Introduction to quantum mechanics and quantum computing

March 8

Jack Szostak, Howard Hughes Medical Institute molecular biologist
Topic: Recreating the origin of life

March 13

Karl Iagnemma, MIT principal research scientist, department of mechanical engineering
Topic: MIT mechanical engineer who does robotics and is also a critically acclaimed fiction writer

March 15

Shop Talk
The embargo system: Does it help or hurt journalism?

March 19-23

Great Global Crises Boot Camp
(no seminars this week)

March 26-30

MIT Spring Break (no seminars this week)

April 3

Noam Chomsky, MIT linguist and political activist
Topic: Linguistics and the rest of the world

April 5

Claude Canizares, MIT Professor of Physics, and Associate Director for MIT of the Chandra X-ray Observatory Center
Topic: A visit to the Chandra Space Telescope control center
(Fellows only)

April 10

Seth Raphael, MIT Media Lab grad student
Topic: The role of magic tricks in eliciting the sense of wonder

April 12

Seth Shulman, science journalist, author and Vannevar Bush Fellow ('85-86)
Topic: The subject of Seth's new book, Undermining Science: Suppression and distortion in the Bush Administration

April 17

MIT Patriot's Day Vacation

April 19

George Whitesides, Harvard University professor of chemistry
Topic: Frontiers in nanotechnology

April 24

Robert Weinberg, Whitehead Institute member, and MIT professor of biology
Topic: New insights to how cancer works

April 26

Visit to the MIT Institute of Soldier Nanotechnologies
(Fellows only)

May 1

Roundtable discussion with Fellows from the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology Clinical Investigator Training Program
Note: this seminar is from 3pm—5pm
(Knight and CITP fellows only)

May 3

Elly Nedivi, MIT associate professor, Department of Brain and Cognitive Science
Topic: How the brain remodels itself, despite dogma to the contrary

May 8

Charles Marshall, Harvard professor of biology and geology
Topic: the nature and causes of evolutionary innovation and extinction

May 10

Phil Hilts, former Washington Post and New York Times science writer
Shop Talk on investigative science journalism

May 15

Boyce Rensberger and Carey Goldberg, former Knight Fellow
Re-entry: What to expect when you return to the real world. (Fellows only)