Location: Cambridge, MA

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Location: Boston, MA / Reggie Lewis Center

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Location: Cambridge, MA

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Location: Boston, MA / Reggie Lewis Center

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About the Conference

The MIT Sloan & HBS Latin American Business Conference 2026 is a student-led event hosted at the MIT Sloan School of Management, in collaboration with Harvard Business School.

Come join us this Friday and Saturday, 6-7 March 2026, at the annual Latin American Business Conference, led by MIT Sloan and Harvard Business School MBA students.

Theme: "Shaping Leaders, Powering Innovation Redefining Leadership in the Age of Technology"
Date: Friday and Saturday, 6-7 March, 2026
Time: Agenda Coming Soon
Location: Kresge Auditorium @ MIT

Topics:
- Bridging Progress: Infrastructure as a Catalyst for Latin America's Development
- Strategic Resources, Strategic Leadership: Mining in Latin America
- From Hype to Impact: How AI is Rewriting the Rules of Business in Latin America
- Fintech and the Future of Money: Reinventing Banking in Latin America
- Backing the Future: Venture Capital Shaping Latin America's Next Growth Cycle
- Inside Global Affairs: Perspectives from Latin American Diplomats
- Entrepreneurship and Entertainment: Lessons from Latin America's Entertainment Global Rise
- Leading with Impact: Women Redefining Business in Latin America
- Workshop: How to Build When Rules Keep Changing

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Stop by to make a paper snowflake in the south lobby and contribute to a cozy, collaborative winter installation in the MIT Welcome Center. Available 9:30am - 4pm.

Keep an eye out for origami snowflakes made by the brilliant people at OrigaMIT.

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Title: Athletes, Equality & DiplomacyDate: March 6, 2026, 10:00–11:30 AM ESTWhere: Online (Zoom Registration Link: https://mit.zoom.us/meeting/register/K1xD3FjiQ6KbpReKezqcxw)Speakers: Gregory Nagy, Leonard Muellner

【Abstract】

Leonard Muellner will discuss the political and social functions of Ancient Greek athletics in a cross-cultural perspective. Ancient Greece was a highly differentiated political space, consisting of a wide variety of city-states each with different religious calendars, law codes, constitutions, etc. These communities were in principle in a state of war with one another (understanding that 'war' could be ritualized combat rather than actual fighting), so that enabling participation in games across the city-states required a global truce. Greeks derived a common identity from their participation in athletics. However, there were no team games, only one person was awarded a prize in each contest, and the skills involved were at their core individualized warrior skills in a ritualized (that is, theoretically, non-fatal) context. Muellner will go on to compare this elitist way of gaming with the way sport functions in other cultures, including contemporary settings historically derived from it.

The word stadium—or stadion in ancient Greek—originally did not refer to any colossal structure built for sports events. Rather, it referred to a sacred distance that was measured out for the first time in a sequence of athletic events held in honor of the god Zeus at Olympia, site of the ancient Olympics. That event was a footrace. As we see it represented in the ancient vase-painting that we show as the featured image for this presentation. But such footracing was not only for male athletes. As argued by Gregory Nagy, partly on the basis of an ancient bronze figurine, featured as a secondary illustration, there was also footracing, in honor of the goddess Hera, for girls selected from three age classes ranging from younger to older. At both male and female athletic events, as also argued, the humanism in the ritual dimension of athletics shines through.

This forum series was made possible with support from MITHIC and the Literature Section at MIT! We look forward to seeing you at our events!

The GHI Team

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Title: Graph-Based Algorithms for Similarity Search: Challenges and Opportunities

Abstract: Over the last few years, graph-based approaches to nearest neighbor search have attracted renewed interest. Algorithms such as HNSW, NSG, and DiskANN have become popular tools in practice. These algorithms are highly versatile and come with efficient implementations. At the same time, their correctness, performance guarantees, and functionality remain poorly understood. In this talk, I will discuss the challenges and opportunities presented by this class of algorithms.

Biography: Dr. Piotr Indyk is the Thomas D. and Virginia W. Cabot Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he has been a faculty member since 2000. He earned his undergraduate degree from the University of Warsaw in 1995 and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University in 2001. His research interests include algorithms for high-dimensional geometric problems, as well as sublinear-time and streaming algorithms. In 2012, he received the Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award for his work on locality-sensitive hashing. He is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering.

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Zoom link: https://mit.zoom.us/j/91933017072

Title: Multiobjective Optimization for Allocating Livers for Transplantation

Abstract: Organ allocation requires ethical balancing of multiple viewpoints and different notions of benefit, and this talk will describe how multiple objective optimization problems in organ allocation policy should be modeled and understood. The Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network is eliminating a hierarchical category-based priority system in favor of a weighted combination of multiple objectives, but designing the weights by committee vote might fail to converge on an acceptable system. Using simulation optimization, we explore alternative designs to choose an allocation score that, for example, could minimize waitlist deaths while assuring comparable transplant rates for relevant subgroups (e.g. by age, race, ABO blood type, urban/rural). Our findings are directly applicable to liver allocation policymaking, using an approach that optimizes outcomes and supports transparency, an ethical cornerstone in transplantation.

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The ABD is proud to offer you the following lunch time showing with Debby Carr!

Escape the snow and ice and enjoy spectacular photographs of “Birds and Mammals of Tanzania” in a slide presentation put together by Debby Carr, who is a Senior Planner in the MIT Facilities Department. In November, Debby travelled to Tanzania with a local birding group and tried her hand with a new camera and zoom lens to capture the colors and diversity of birds and mammals in the Tanzanian national parks.

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Title: Recent Infinite-Dimensional Algebras from Physics

Abstract: In this talk, I will present several scattering-amplitude formulas arising in quantum field theory and explain how they lead to new infinite-dimensional algebraic structures. In particular, I will discuss recent developments in celestial holography, where soft and collinear limits of gauge-theory amplitudes give rise to infinite-dimensional Lie algebras, non-linear Lie algebras, and related symmetry structures. This talk is based on ongoing work.

Zoom: https://mit.zoom.us/j/91800438944. For the Passcode, please contact Pavel Etingof at etingof@math.mit.edu.

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Location: Medford, MA

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Reception at 5:30pm | Screening at 6pm | Registration is required.

Synopsis: Through the eyes of those who live it, this documentary spotlights the fight to end sex trafficking and human exploitation across North America. At its heart is the Survivor Model—a transformative approach that decriminalizes prostituted individuals while imposing strict penalties on pimps, traffickers, and sex buyers.

Discover the courage it takes to escape “the life” on and off the track and the momentum needed to end sex trafficking for good. The Right Track is a must-watch for anyone invested in human dignity and justice.

For questions about the event and accessibility, please contact wgs@mit.edu.

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This event is made possible by the Consortium for Graduate Studies in Gender, culture, Women, and sexuality, MIT Program in Media, Arts, and Sciences, and MIT Women’s and Gender Studies.

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Location: Cambridge, MA

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Location: Cambridge, MA

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Location: Boston, MA / Reggie Lewis Center

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Location: Cambridge, MA

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Location: Boston, MA / Reggie Lewis Center

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About the Conference

The MIT Sloan & HBS Latin American Business Conference 2026 is a student-led event hosted at the MIT Sloan School of Management, in collaboration with Harvard Business School.

Come join us this Friday and Saturday, 6-7 March 2026, at the annual Latin American Business Conference, led by MIT Sloan and Harvard Business School MBA students.

Theme: "Shaping Leaders, Powering Innovation Redefining Leadership in the Age of Technology"
Date: Friday and Saturday, 6-7 March, 2026
Time: Agenda Coming Soon
Location: Kresge Auditorium @ MIT

Topics:
- Bridging Progress: Infrastructure as a Catalyst for Latin America's Development
- Strategic Resources, Strategic Leadership: Mining in Latin America
- From Hype to Impact: How AI is Rewriting the Rules of Business in Latin America
- Fintech and the Future of Money: Reinventing Banking in Latin America
- Backing the Future: Venture Capital Shaping Latin America's Next Growth Cycle
- Inside Global Affairs: Perspectives from Latin American Diplomats
- Entrepreneurship and Entertainment: Lessons from Latin America's Entertainment Global Rise
- Leading with Impact: Women Redefining Business in Latin America
- Workshop: How to Build When Rules Keep Changing

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Please head to the following website for more detailed information:
https://www.mitrecsports.com/fitness/winter-triathlon-2026/

This event is great for beginner triathletes looking to try a triathlon without having all of the gear (i.e. wetsuit, bike) and triathletes looking for a hard workout or event to train for. The event is put on by MIT Recreation and the MIT Triathlon Club Team in Cambridge, MA and takes place entirely indoors at the Alumni Pool and Wang Fitness Center (Building 57, 6 Vassar St). This event is open for spectating for free!

Format: The triathlon will be a timed event; scores will be based on how much distance each participant covers in a specific amount of time. Transitions will be included for each heat making each heat a total of 75 minutes. See breakdown below:

-Swim: 15 minutes in a 25 yard lap pool
-Transition 1: 10 minutes to change in locker room
-Bike: 25 minute bike on Schwinn Z bike (2nd floor spin studio)
-Transition 2: 5 minutes to transition
-Run: 20 minute run or walk on Matrix or Precor treadmills (1st floor fitness area)

An official Athlete Guide will be sent out closer to the event date.

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Join Science Club for Girls to bring a little summer into March and explore the science of making BUBBLES! Science educator Sarah Weiner will lead participants through making a bubble mixture, testing and refining the mixture, and then creating bubbles with straws and wands. Finally, we will all build our own bubble frames to make a square bubble!

🥼 Scientists of all ages will enjoy this activity but it is most suited for K-3rd graders. 🫧

Please note that capacity is limited; space is available on a first come, first served basis regardless of registration.

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Location: Cambridge, MA

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Location: Hartford, CT

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Location: Waltham, MA / Bentley

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Location: Schenectady, NY

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Location: Troy, NY

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Location: Medford, MA

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Location: Cambridge, MA

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Location: Hartford, CT

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Location: Waltham, MA / Bentley

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Saturday, March 7, 2026/8:00pm

Thomas Tull Concert Hall, MIT

MIT Festival Jazz Ensemble

Frederick Harris, Jr. Music Director

Dan Tepfer, guest pianist/composer/technologist

On the heel of his Carnegie Hall premiere of Natural Machines 2.0 featuring piano improvisations in real time with symphony orchestra, Dan Tepfer—one of the most creative and innovative musicians of his generation—presents a new work with the MIT Festival Jazz Ensemble using his concept of algorithmic improvisation. This unique concert will also feature Tepfer’s own compositions along with music from the traditional and modern jazz cannon.

One of his generation’s extraordinary talents, Dan Tepfer has earned an international reputation as a pianist-composer of wide-ranging innovation, individuality, and drive—one “who refuses to set himself limits” (France’s Télérama). The New York City-based Tepfer, born in 1982 in Paris to American parents, has recorded and performed around the world with some of the leading lights in jazz and classical music, from Lee Konitz to Renée Fleming, and released eleven albums of his own in solo, duo and trio formats.

Tepfer earned global acclaim for his 2011 release Goldberg Variations / Variations, a disc that sees him performing J.S. Bach’s masterpiece as well as improvising upon it—to “elegant, thoughtful and thrilling” effect (New York magazine). Tepfer’s 2019 video album Natural Machines stands as one of his most ingeniously forward-minded yet, finding him exploring in real time the intersection between science and art, coding and improvisation, digital algorithms and the rhythms of the heart. The New York Times has called him “a deeply rational improviser drawn to the unknown.” His 2023 return to Bach, Inventions / Reinventions, an exploration of the narrative processes behind Bach’s beloved Inventions, became a best-seller, spending two weeks in the #1 spot on the Billboard Classical Charts.

Learn more about Dan Tepfer

Learn more about the MIT Festival Jazz Ensemble

Seating Policy

Your registration through Eventbrite guarantees you a seat until 15 minutes before the event start time. 15 minutes before the concert start time, we will release open seats to the standby list. If you were not able to register through Eventbrite, you may join the physical standby line in the Thomas Tull Concert Hall Lobby up to one hour before the concert start time.

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Location: Poughkeepsie, NY / Vassar College

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Location: Poughkeepsie, NY / Vassar College

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The Voxel Lab is excited to host Live from the Lab, a performance series featuring studio-style sets by MIT and Berklee student artists. This series brings together musicians and makers from across both campuses for three Sunday showcases inside the Voxel Lab. Each session includes 20-minute live sets recorded in front of a small audience, highlighting creative collaboration in an experiemental lab environment.

Doors open at 1:30 PM and close promptly at 2:00 PM for recording. Please arrive on time to ensure entry. A door team will be stationed on the first floor of iHQ for attendee check-in. Student ID is required for entry.

Sunday, February 22nd — Session III (Shoegaze/Pop-Rock): Featuring Manu Xavier (Berklee), Muzzle (Berklee), alongside a live student band from MIT LIVE.

Sunday, March 8th — Session IV (R&B/Hip-Hop/Jazz/Contemporary Pop): Featuring SB Khi, Paloma, alongside live student performers from MIT LIVE.

Sunday, April 19th — Session V (TBA)

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This exhibition draws on archival materials from the Aga Khan Documentation Center at MIT (AKDC) to explore a century of cultural heritage preservation in Aleppo, Syria. It takes as its point of departure the work of Kamil al-Ghazzi (1853–1933), the pioneering Aleppine historian whose influential three-volume chronicle, Nahr al-Dhahab fī Tārīkh Ḥalab (The River of Gold in the History of Aleppo), was published between 1924 and 1926.

Ink, Stone, and Silver Light presents three modes of documentation—manuscript, built form, and photography—through which Aleppo’s urban memory has been recorded and preserved. Featuring figures such as Michel Écochard and Yasser Tabbaa alongside al-Ghazzi, the exhibition traces overlapping efforts to capture the spirit of a city shaped by commerce, craft, and coexistence. At a time when Syria again confronts upheaval and displacement, these archival fragments offer models for preserving the past while envisioning futures rooted in dignity, knowledge, and place.

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Contents is an exhibition featuring artwork from Max Cheever (SMACT ‘27).

Through the work, the importance of framing is examined through structured methods of communication.

Contents: 8 wooden posts, 4 cardboard boxes, 4 wooden shelves, 2 glass mirrors. Metaphorically: What the work rests upon, within, and around.

Literally: A thing regarded as representative or symbolic of something else. Paradoxically: How to wander on a path already constructed?

Drawing inspiration from both literary and artistic works, the exhibition seeks to investigate a transformative process: An artwork that initially engages with specific procedural and aesthetic paradigms, when examined, foregrounds fundamentally divergent conceptual, formal, or emotional concerns. In other words, the difference between contents and content: that which can only be engaged with through a reading.

Join us for the opening reception on Thursday, March 12th, 5:30PM-7:30PM. The reception will be accompanied with a looped screening of the 3 minute film Look in Bartos Theater that viewers can experience as they please for the duration of the opening. Refreshments will be served.

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Title: A human electrophysiological signature of Fragile X pathophysiology is shared in V1 of Fmr1-/y mice

Abstract: Predicting clinical therapeutic outcomes from animal studies using conserved electrophysiological phenotypes could facilitate developing treatments for neuropsychiatric disorders. Alpha oscillations in human resting-state electroencephalogram recordings are altered in many disorders, but whether these disruptions exist in mouse models is unknown. We employ a uniform analytical method to show in males with fragile X syndrome (FXS) that alpha oscillations in humans and alpha-like oscillations in visual cortex of Fmr1-/y mice are slowed, with a stronger phenotype in adults than juveniles and a juvenile-specific power phenotype in both species. We also find that alpha-like oscillations are more sensitive to activation of GABAB receptors by Arbaclofen in wild-type than Fmr1-/y mice. Our framework reveals evolutionary conservation of alpha oscillation disruptions, enables deeper understanding of FXS pathophysiology, and narrows the gap between treatment promise and practice.

Speaker: Matias Andina (Choi/Hrvatin Lab)

Title: Wiring the Torpor Switch: AgRP Circuit Control of Energy Saving

Abstract:Torpor is a survival strategy used during energy shortage. It is marked by reduced body temperature, inactivity, and lower metabolic rate. In mice, fasting-induced torpor depends on a hypothalamic circuit linking AgRP neurons in the arcuate nucleus to preoptic neurons in the MnPO. This pathway helps convey energy-state information to thermoregulatory centers.Disrupting the circuit prevents torpor during fasting, indicating a central role in energy conservation. NPY and GABA signaling from AgRP neurons also contribute to starvation-induced hypothermic responses.

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The event will consist of lightning-fast research talks and poster presentations by CEE faculty, students, and postdocs. It will also include light food during the poster presentation reception hours.

Join us for an exciting event! Please RSVP here by Tuesday, March 3.

Please note that this event was initially going to happen on February 23, but it was rescheduled due to the winter storm.

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Title: Turán Problems For Tight Cycles

Abstract:

I will discuss two recent results regarding hypergraphs avoiding tight cycles of a fixed length. The main tool, which I hope to prove in full, is a hypergraph analogue of the statement that a graph has no odd closed walks if and only if it is bipartite. More precisely, for various classes C of "cycle-like" r-uniform hypergraphs — including, for any k, the family of tight cycles of length k modulo r — we show that C-hom-free hypergraphs are exactly those admitting a certain type of coloring of (r-1)-tuples of vertices.

This characterization allows us to reframe Turán-type problems as coloring problems. I will describe two applications of this approach: we compute the Turán density of sufficiently long 4-uniform tight cycles and provide upper bounds on the codegree Turán density of long tight cycles in all uniformities.

Some results are joint with Jozsef Balogh and Haoran Luo.

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Spring forward with a celebratory cookie (on us, while supplies last!) in honor of Daylight Savings Time starting on Sunday.

Presented in collaboration with the MIT Museum’s latest exhibition, Lighten Up, which explores circadian rhythms and the connection between biology and time.

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Professor Klartag will present a sequence of three lectures from March 9–11 on the theme:

Geometry in High Dimensions: Convexity and Lattices

Lecture 1: Lattice Packing of Spheres in High Dimensions via a Stochastically Evolving Ellipsoid

Lecture 2: The Resolution of Bourgain’s Slicing Problem

Lecture 3: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of the Convexity Assumption in High Dimensions

Each day, a reception will be held at 4:00 PM in Room 2-290, followed by the lecture at 4:30 PM in Room 2-190.

The Simons Lecture Series features presentations by leading mathematicians and is made possible through the generous support of the late Jim Simons and Marilyn Simons.

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Date: Monday (except holidays)

Time: 4:15pm – 5:45pm

Location: Building 14, Room 14N-417

Come by for snacks & tea with Literature Section friends, instructors, & students!

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Location: Hartford, CT

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Mr. Chen has performed with many prominent orchestras, including the Fort Worth, Indianapolis, Kansas City, San Diego, Knoxville, Hartford, Louisiana Philharmonic, Milwaukee, North Carolina, Pasadena, Phoenix, Santa Fe, and New West Symphony Orchestras, as well as the Chamber Orchestras of Philadelphia, Indianapolis, and South Bay. He has collaborated with such esteemed conductors as Leonard Slatkin, Michael Stern, Gerard Schwarz, Nicholas McGegan, Miguel Harth-Bedoya, Marcelo Lehninger, and James Judd. Solo recitals have brought him to major venues worldwide, including Jordan Hall in Boston, Subculture in New York City, the American Art Museum at the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., the National Concert Hall in Taipei, Het Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, and the Salle Cortot in Paris.

Mr. Chen has served on the juries of notable piano competitions, including PianoArts, American Piano Awards, Cliburn Junior, Thailand International Piano Competition, West Virginia International Piano Competition, Cleveland International Piano Competition for Young Artists, and Steinway competitions around the country. Given his natural inclination for teaching and approachable personality, Mr. Chen is particularly in demand for residencies that combine performances with master classes, school concerts, and artist conversations, which have brought him to such institutions as the Cleveland Institute of Music, Indiana University, University of British Columbia, University of Houston Moores School, Spotlight Awards at the Los Angeles Music Center, Young Artist World Piano Festival, and several Music Teachers’ Associations throughout the country.

Mr. Chen has been featured in both live and recorded performances on WQXR (New York), WFMT (Chicago), WGBH (Boston), WFYI (Indianapolis), KCUR (Kansas City), KPR (Kansas), NPR’s From the Top, and American Public Media’s Performance Today. Additional media coverage includes a profile featured on the cover of Clavier Companion in May 2015, recognition as “One to Watch” by International Piano Magazine in March 2014, and inclusion in WFMT’s “30 Under 30.” He is the host of the innovative new show Sounds Like with Sean Chen on Classical KC.

His CD releases include the 2021 all-Ravel digital album on the Steinway & Sons label, featuring Sonatine and Le Tombeau de Couperin; La Valse, another solo recording on the Steinway label, featuring Mr. Chen's own arrangement of La Valse and hailed for “penetrating artistic intellect” (Audiophile Audition); a live recording from the Cliburn Competition released by harmonia mundi, praised for his “ravishing tone and cogently contoured lines” (Gramophone); an album of Michael Williams’s solo piano works on the Parma label; and an album of Flute, Oboe, and Piano repertoire titled KaleidosCoping with colleagues Michael Gordon and Celeste Johnson. Mr. Chen has also contributed to the catalog of Steinway’s new Spirio system.

A multifaceted musician, Mr. Chen also transcribes, composes, and improvises. He has completed a transcription of Ysaÿe's Violin Sonata No. 3 for two pianos, commissioned by 88Squared duo. His composition, Daydream No. 1 - Steps (2021), was commissioned as a gift for the retirement of American Piano Award's former President/CEO. His transcriptions of such orchestral works as Ravel’s La Valse, Mozart’s Overture to The Marriage of Figaro, and the Adagio from Rachmaninoff’s Symphony No. 2, have been received with glowing acclaim and enthusiasm, and his encore improvisations are lauded as “genuinely brilliant” (Dallas Morning News). An advocate of new music, Mr. Chen has also collaborated with several composers and performed their works, including Lisa Bielawa, Jennifer Higdon, Michael Williams, Nicco Athens, Michael Gilbertson, and Reinaldo Moya.

Born in Florida, Mr. Chen grew up in the Los Angeles area of Oak Park, California. His impressive achievements before college include the NFAA ARTSweek, Los Angeles Music Center’s Spotlight, and 2006 Presidential Scholars awards. These honors combined with diligent schoolwork facilitated offers of acceptance by MIT, Harvard, and The Juilliard School. Choosing to study music, Mr. Chen earned his Bachelor and Master of Music from Juilliard, meanwhile garnering several awards, most notably the Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans. He received his Artist Diploma in 2014 at the Yale School of Music as a George W. Miles Fellow. His teachers include Hung-Kuan Chen, Edward Francis, Jerome Lowenthal, and Matti Raekallio.

Mr. Chen resides in the suburbs of Kansas City with his wife, Betty, a violinist in the Kansas City Symphony, and their daughters Ella and Maeve. When not at the piano, Mr. Chen enjoys tinkering with computers, and exploring math, science, and programming. Mr. Chen is a Steinway Artist and is managed by Jonathan Wentworth Associates, Ltd.

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Marek Poliks and Roberto Alonso Trillo’s Exocapitalism: Economics with Absolutely No Limits (2025, Becoming Press) has been lauded as among both the most controversial and the most accurate assessments of this economic moment — from “unbelievably inspiring” (Hito Steyerl) to “the Das Kapital of the 21st Century” (New Models) to “an info-hazard” (Metalabel) by “Hegel’s grandchildren” (Nick Land, derogatory). Marek and Roberto won Google’s 2024 Art and Machine Intelligence Award for their work in AI interface design.

This event is part of ACT’s Spring 2026 Lecture Series and is in collaboration with MIT Radius. It is free and open to the public, though registration is required. Register here.

Special thanks to ACT Graduate Student Hugh Scott-Douglas (SMACT ’27) for spearheading this event.

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Abstract: How do distributed neural circuits compute to support perception, memory, and decision-making? For decades, systems neuroscience has primarily focused on discrete spikes as the unit of computation. Yet spikes are sparse readouts of a richer dynamical process that unfolds continuously in membrane voltage across cell types, space, and time. A mechanistic understanding of how brains compute requires direct access to cross-scale voltage dynamics of defined circuit elements and their real-time interaction.

In this talk, I will describe three high-speed voltage imaging techniques that enable optical measurement of membrane voltage in genetically identified and projection-targeted neurons of awake, behaving mice. Together, these approaches bridge scales: from single-cell subthreshold fluctuations and action potentials to large-scale, cell-type-specific network dynamics. First, I will present a microscopy technique that visualizes both spikes and subthreshold activity from ~100 individual neurons, comprising up to four neuron-classes simultaneously. Second, I will describe an ultrasensitive fiber photometry device that tracks high-frequency membrane oscillations within a specific neuron type population in freely moving animals. Lastly, to study the spatiotemporal properties of these oscillations, I will introduce a wide-field mesoscopic imaging approach that resolves fast, high-frequency waves propagating across millimeter-scale neural circuits. Using these tools, I have uncovered previously undocumented forms of distributed voltage dynamics that differ across cell types, frequency bands, and brain states. These findings suggest that neural computation may rely not only on discrete spikes but also on spatially structured voltage dynamics that coordinate distributed circuits.

Overall, voltage imaging directly visualizes the rich repertoire of cross-scale neural dynamics that shape circuit function, providing a tractable path toward decoding how computation unfolds in healthy and dysfunctional brains.

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This exhibition draws on archival materials from the Aga Khan Documentation Center at MIT (AKDC) to explore a century of cultural heritage preservation in Aleppo, Syria. It takes as its point of departure the work of Kamil al-Ghazzi (1853–1933), the pioneering Aleppine historian whose influential three-volume chronicle, Nahr al-Dhahab fī Tārīkh Ḥalab (The River of Gold in the History of Aleppo), was published between 1924 and 1926.

Ink, Stone, and Silver Light presents three modes of documentation—manuscript, built form, and photography—through which Aleppo’s urban memory has been recorded and preserved. Featuring figures such as Michel Écochard and Yasser Tabbaa alongside al-Ghazzi, the exhibition traces overlapping efforts to capture the spirit of a city shaped by commerce, craft, and coexistence. At a time when Syria again confronts upheaval and displacement, these archival fragments offer models for preserving the past while envisioning futures rooted in dignity, knowledge, and place.

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In this interactive session, we’ll hear from the case author and CO_’s organizational leader as they unpack the strategic decisions that guided CO_’s evolution and the lessons learned in driving systemic impact.

The session will explore the frontier of impact and systemic investing and highlight how CO_ navigates trade-offs and uses capital to reshape markets and institutions.

Food Provided.

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Contents is an exhibition featuring artwork from Max Cheever (SMACT ‘27).

Through the work, the importance of framing is examined through structured methods of communication.

Contents: 8 wooden posts, 4 cardboard boxes, 4 wooden shelves, 2 glass mirrors. Metaphorically: What the work rests upon, within, and around.

Literally: A thing regarded as representative or symbolic of something else. Paradoxically: How to wander on a path already constructed?

Drawing inspiration from both literary and artistic works, the exhibition seeks to investigate a transformative process: An artwork that initially engages with specific procedural and aesthetic paradigms, when examined, foregrounds fundamentally divergent conceptual, formal, or emotional concerns. In other words, the difference between contents and content: that which can only be engaged with through a reading.

Join us for the opening reception on Thursday, March 12th, 5:30PM-7:30PM. The reception will be accompanied with a looped screening of the 3 minute film Look in Bartos Theater that viewers can experience as they please for the duration of the opening. Refreshments will be served.

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Title: Lessons from Flipped Classrooms: ImplementingPartially and Fully Flipped Learning Across the Mathematics Curriculum

Abstract: Flipped learning is often presented as an all-or-nothing instructional choice, which can make it feel inaccessible or risky—especially in content-heavy mathematics courses. In this talk, I share my lessons from 10+ years of experience implementing both fully flipped and partially flipped models across a range of mathematics courses at the Colorado School of Mines, including Calculus II, Linear Algebra, Foundations of Advanced Mathematics, and Topology. I discuss how different flipping choices supported student learning, how the model scales to multi-section courses, and how I addressed some of the challenges that emerged. Rather than advocating for a single model, this talk emphasizes intentional, flexible flipping strategies that can be adapted to instructors’ own goals and constraints.

Zoom link: https://cornell.zoom.us/j/92415199317

Zoom Link Password: olsume

For more information on OLSUME: https://olsume.org/

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Each session will include:

An overview of the MIT HEALS intiative and the HEALS Seed Grant programBest practices and lessons learned from last year's Seed Grant proposals (how can we help you maximize the success of your proposal)Networking with fellow junior facultyOpportunities for feedback on your proposal or ideas; support for identifying additional collaborative opportunities. Open discussion and Q&A

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Title: Rupture, instability, and phase transitions via constrained expansion

Abstract:

Consider an elastic material that increases in size due to growth or swelling. If the material is unable to expand freely, stresses develop. In this talk, I will present two systems in which stresses due to constrained expansion can generate complex and dramatic responses. First, I will discuss the mechanics of thin sheets that have been locally dilated at a periodic array of sites. When the dilations are sufficiently large, the affected sites buckle either above or below their surroundings. These bistable dilations form a programmable metamaterial, and their behavior can be understood through an analogy to the Ising model. Second, I will describe how hydrogels, polymer networks that imbibe large amounts of water, behave when forced to swell around rigid obstacles. We identify a regime in which stresses due to obstacles cause swelling hydrogels to rupture, tearing themselves apart as they expand.

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Title: Number of generators: an algebraic-geometry approach

Abstract:

The Primitive Element Theorem says that a separable field extension is generated by one element, and a well-known folklore result says that a central simple algebra (CSA) is generated by two elements over its center. The globalization of separable field extensions and CSAs are finite etale algebras and Azumaya algebras, respectively, and so one could ask if something could be said about their number of generators if the base scheme has dimension at most d. The same question can be asked for vector bundles and other types of algebra bundles. I will discuss some recent works with Reichstein, Williams and others where we study this question by turning it into a geometric question, thus finding both upper bounds and examples requiring arbitrarily many generators. For example, if X is a d-dimensional affine algebraic scheme over an infinite field, then any finite etale algebra over X can be generated by d+1 elements, and this cannot be improved in general.

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Title: How the Fisher information rules out blow ups in kinetic equations

Abstract:

In recent work with Luis Silvestre we rule out blow ups for the space homogeneous Landau equation. This result follows from the monotonicity along the flow of an important functional in statistics — the Fisher information. This realization was made possible by a new lifting procedure which (somewhat surprisingly) relates kinetic equations to linear elliptic equations. These linear equations are in fact quite simple -- they are given by the heat equation on families of two-dimensional spheres foliating six dimensional Euclidean space. The convexity of the Fisher information functional as well as the symmetries of the equation play an important role in the proof. Time permitting, I will also discuss parts of follow up work of Imbert, Silvestre, and Villani, in their work they improve on the Landau result by obtaining new nonlocal functional inequalities and ultimately ruling out blow ups for the space homogeneous Boltzmann equation.

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The American Revolution at 250

A series of talks to mark the semiquincentennial of the independence of the United States, open to members of the MIT community. All talks at 3:30pm in 4-265.

March 10, 2026: “Unruly Americans and the Origins of the U.S. Constitution”

Woody Holton, McCausland Professor of History, University of South Carolina

March 31, 2026: “The American Revolution as Origin Myth”

Michael Hattem, Associate Director of the Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute and author of The Memory of ’76: The Revolution in American History

April 14, 2026: "The Civil War as the Second American Revolution"

Manisha Sinha, James L. and Shirley A. Draper Chair in American History, University of Connecticut

May 5, 2026: “American Independence: Decision and Declaration”

Jack Rakove, Coe Professor of History and American Studies and Professor of Political Science, Emeritus, Stanford University

For further information, please contact Kathleen Lopes at kalopes@mit.edu.

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Professor Klartag will present a sequence of three lectures from March 9–11 on the theme:

Geometry in High Dimensions: Convexity and Lattices

Lecture 1: Lattice Packing of Spheres in High Dimensions via a Stochastically Evolving Ellipsoid

Lecture 2: The Resolution of Bourgain’s Slicing Problem

Lecture 3: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of the Convexity Assumption in High Dimensions

Each day, a reception will be held at 4:00 PM in Room 2-290, followed by the lecture at 4:30 PM in Room 2-190.

The Simons Lecture Series features presentations by leading mathematicians and is made possible through the generous support of the late Jim Simons and Marilyn Simons.

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Host: The Postdoctoral Committee

Title: "How to make microtubules and build the cytoskeleton"

The Biology Colloquium is a weekly seminar held throughout the academic year — featuring distinguished speakers in many areas of the biological sciences from universities and institutions worldwide. More information on speakers, their affiliations, and titles of their talks will be added as available. Unless otherwise stated, the Colloquium will be held live in Stata 32-123 (Kirsch auditorium) Contact Margaret Cabral with questions.

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Location: Troy, NY

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Pre-registration is required to participate and snacks will be served.

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Moving beyond standard chain-of-thought prompting, we introduce a hierarchical multi-agent framework that solves the "tool-use bottleneck" through dynamic planning and modular memory. I will discuss how we engineer agents capable of Guided Deep Research—a novel runtime retrieval mechanism that enables systems to parse complex technical documentation and synthesize code for heterogeneous simulation environments on which they were not explicitly trained. Furthermore, we address the grand challenge of spatial reasoning by grounding vision-language models in precise 3D Euclidean tools, bridging the gap between generative intent and physical constraints. This architecture represents a blueprint for the next generation of AI: systems that not only assist but also collaborate, reason, and discover.

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It is tempting to blame recent funding cuts for science’s current woes, but focusing only on money rather misses the point. Many of science’s biggest problems have been around for years, sometimes centuries. Scientists have long been criticised, sidelined or attacked for having ideas that were too new, too inconvenient or simply too correct for the people in power at the time. Even truly unscientific behaviours, like character assassination and fraud, are not modern inventions… though they do seem to have enjoyed a recent renaissance.

The good news is that longstanding problems are not the same as unsolvable ones. Join Matt Kaplan, science correspondent at The Economist and author of I Told You So! Scientists Who Were Ridiculed, Exiled and Imprisoned… For Being Right, for a spirited and insightful talk on the history of these endemic issues and what we can do to finally consign them to the scientific scrap heap.

Matt Kaplan has been working for The Economist as a science correspondent for nearly two decades and contributed over half a million words to the newspaper during that time. Fascinated by the weird and often less well respected members of the animal kingdom, he has made a habit of writing about how these species make life better for humanity.

Copies of his new book will be available for purchase at the talk.

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Location: Schenectady, NY

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Abstract: At the end of the 8th century, the Franks under their new Carolingian kings built an empire that spanned Europe and inspired the respect of both emperor(s) in Byzantium and caliphs in Baghdad. But by the middle of the next century, the empire was in tatters. In June 841, a field outside Auxerre (in modern France) lay drenched in blood, as old friends killed one another, as brother fought brother. This talk will focus on the fateful battle of Fontenoy in June 841 and particularly the account of 1 participant – a warrior named Angelbert and the poem he wrote about the battle, detailing how an empire that seemed so secure, so tightly bound in its political and cultural consensus, could be destroyed so quickly by greed and vengeance over a disputed succession to power. Bio: Matthew Gabriele is a professor of medieval studies at Virginia Tech. His research and teaching cover the European Middle Ages, ideas of religion and violence, as well as nostalgia and apocalypse. He has written for The Washington Post, CNN, Smithsonian Magazine, and MSNBC, among others, and interviews with him have appeared on outlets such as The History Channel, in The New York Times, and on NPR. He’s the author and editor of several academic books and nearly two dozen articles. In addition, he’s the author, with David M. Perry, of The Bright Ages: A New History of Medieval Europe (Harper Books, 2021), and most recently Oathbreakers: The War of Brothers that Shattered an Empire and Made Medieval Europe (Harper Books, 2024). Ancient & Medieval Studies Colloquium, co-sponsored by Lit@MIT and History at MITMore Info: https://ams.mit.edu/

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Check out our Instagram at mit.acro for day-of updates on our classes.

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WARNING: This series most definitely goes to 11! Earplugs optional.

We'll look at metal cultures, explore the fringes of the most extreme forms of metal, and, of course, listen to some SCREAMING HEAVY METAL! This is guaranteed to be the most BRUTAL class ever offered at MIT! Anyone is welcome to join, and since we're remote again this year, seating isn't limited. Learn more about this series' past in the class archive!

This year's flyer design was created by artist, Kai Gabriela of Nekroninfa Tattoo & Designs! Check out more of her work at www.instagram.com/_nekroninfa.art!

All classes start at 6:30pm ET and Zoom Registration links are posted below each class! Learn more at metal.mit.edu!

Tuesday March 10, 2026

This will be the final class for this year, examining even more genres of Heavy Metal. Topics will include more about subgenres we haven’t listened to yet, a discussion on AI and metal, and a look to the future of the genre. As always, it’s going to get weird.

Zoom Registration

Facebook Event

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Please RSVP so we know how much coffee to brew!

This event is open the MIT Community only.

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This exhibition draws on archival materials from the Aga Khan Documentation Center at MIT (AKDC) to explore a century of cultural heritage preservation in Aleppo, Syria. It takes as its point of departure the work of Kamil al-Ghazzi (1853–1933), the pioneering Aleppine historian whose influential three-volume chronicle, Nahr al-Dhahab fī Tārīkh Ḥalab (The River of Gold in the History of Aleppo), was published between 1924 and 1926.

Ink, Stone, and Silver Light presents three modes of documentation—manuscript, built form, and photography—through which Aleppo’s urban memory has been recorded and preserved. Featuring figures such as Michel Écochard and Yasser Tabbaa alongside al-Ghazzi, the exhibition traces overlapping efforts to capture the spirit of a city shaped by commerce, craft, and coexistence. At a time when Syria again confronts upheaval and displacement, these archival fragments offer models for preserving the past while envisioning futures rooted in dignity, knowledge, and place.

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Summary: For this seminar, Ms. Bingen will give a broad tour across the landscape of space security and competition, covering big picture tech trends (particularly commercial trends), the status of Chinese space efforts, warfighting developments, and policy challenges and implications.

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We’re thrilled to partner with The Loop Lab, an award-winning Cambridge media arts nonprofit known for its exceptional photography and AV production work. Their team trains the next generation of creative talent and delivers media for leading institutions across Greater Boston. This is your chance to experience their craft firsthand.Reserve a one-hour window through Eventbrite using the link below, then follow your confirmation email for details on arrival and workflow.

Join us for a polished, professional experience brought to you by MIT Open Space Programming and The Loop Lab.

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Contents is an exhibition featuring artwork from Max Cheever (SMACT ‘27).

Through the work, the importance of framing is examined through structured methods of communication.

Contents: 8 wooden posts, 4 cardboard boxes, 4 wooden shelves, 2 glass mirrors. Metaphorically: What the work rests upon, within, and around.

Literally: A thing regarded as representative or symbolic of something else. Paradoxically: How to wander on a path already constructed?

Drawing inspiration from both literary and artistic works, the exhibition seeks to investigate a transformative process: An artwork that initially engages with specific procedural and aesthetic paradigms, when examined, foregrounds fundamentally divergent conceptual, formal, or emotional concerns. In other words, the difference between contents and content: that which can only be engaged with through a reading.

Join us for the opening reception on Thursday, March 12th, 5:30PM-7:30PM. The reception will be accompanied with a looped screening of the 3 minute film Look in Bartos Theater that viewers can experience as they please for the duration of the opening. Refreshments will be served.

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This program is open to all MIT students, postdocs, faculty, and staff who are actively writing papers, proposals, manuscripts, or thesis chapters.

NOTE: These sessions are co-sponsored by the Writing and Communication Center (WCC) and the Office of Graduate Education (OGE).

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Speaker: Justin Campbell (Brandeis University)

Title: A proof of the FFKM tilting conjecture

Abstract: In their 1997 paper on semi-infinite flags, Feigin, Finkelberg, Kuznetsov, and Mirković constructed a remarkable action of the Langlands dual Lie algebra on the intersection cohomology of the space of quasimaps into a flag variety. They conjectured that this representation is tilting and explained how this is equivalent to a conjectural spectral description of the representation. I'll sketch a proof of this conjecture, which is joint work in progress with Andreas Hayash. Our strategy is to construct a purely local version of the FFKM action and then use chiral homology to pass from local to global.

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Location: Waltham, MA / Bentley

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Professor Klartag will present a sequence of three lectures from March 9–11 on the theme:

Geometry in High Dimensions: Convexity and Lattices

Lecture 1: Lattice Packing of Spheres in High Dimensions via a Stochastically Evolving Ellipsoid

Lecture 2: The Resolution of Bourgain’s Slicing Problem

Lecture 3: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of the Convexity Assumption in High Dimensions

Each day, a reception will be held at 4:00 PM in Room 2-290, followed by the lecture at 4:30 PM in Room 2-190.

The Simons Lecture Series features presentations by leading mathematicians and is made possible through the generous support of the late Jim Simons and Marilyn Simons.

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Tim Wu is a Silicon Valley veteran and Columbia Law School professor who served as Special Assistant to the President for technology and competition policy from 2021 to 2023. A leading voice on AI and tech regulation and the author of influential books on modern communication, the attention economy, and corporate concentration, Wu is also known for coining the term "net neutrality" before it became a federal law.

This event is open to the MIT Community - please register here.

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Abstract Title: Sink or Swim: Modeling and Control of Floating Offshore Wind Turbines

Abstract:

Wind energy is among the fastest-growing sources of electrical energy worldwide. Compared to land-based wind energy, offshore wind energy has the advantages of increased wind resource availability and consistency, proximity to major population centers, and enabling larger-scale turbines. As such, over the last decade, installed offshore wind power capacity has grown at a phenomenal average rate of 27% per year. Currently, more than 99% of installed offshore wind capacity consists of fixed-bottom wind turbines in shallow waters (<60m deep). Globally, however, the majority of offshore wind resources are over water depths greater than 60m. Floating wind turbines are better suited in such deep waters. Though, compared to fixed-bottom wind turbines, floating wind turbines are more dynamic and exhibit potential instabilities, which require advanced modeling and control methods to ensure a safe and efficient operation. Beyond their existing objectives of maximizing power production while minimizing structural loads, floating wind turbine controllers must also avoid large platform oscillations and accommodate ocean wave and current disturbances. In this talk, I will provide an overview of the challenges and opportunities in the control of floating offshore wind energy systems. I will also summarize some of our recent work in developing models and multi-input multi-output controllers for floating wind turbines aimed at improving power quality, regulating the generator speed, mitigating structural loading, and/or other goals.

Bio:

Lucy Pao is a Palmer Endowed Chair Professor in the Electrical, Computer, and Energy Engineering Department and a Professor (by courtesy) in the Aerospace Engineering Sciences Department at the University of Colorado Boulder (CU Boulder). She is also a Fellow of the Renewable and Sustainable Energy Institute, a joint institute between CU Boulder and the National Laboratory of the Rockies (formerly the National Renewable Energy Laboratory). She earned B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University. Her research has focused on engineering control systems, with applications ranging from atomic force microscopes to multi-megawatt wind energy systems. She is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and the International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC) and is a foreign corresponding member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. Selected recent recognitions include the 2017 American Automatic Control Council (AACC) Control Engineering Practice Award, 2017 European Academy of Wind Energy (EAWE) Scientific Award, 2019 American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) Nyquist Lecturer Award, 2022 CU Boulder campus-wide Outstanding Postdoc Mentor of the Year Award, 2024 CU Boulder campus-wide Outstanding Mentor Award for Faculty Mentoring, 2024 IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology Outstanding Paper Award, and 2020–2026 IFAC Pavel J. Nowacki Distinguished Lecturer. Lucy will be the Chair of the International Program Committee for the 2032 IFAC World Congress.

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Title:

Abstract:

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Can literature teach empathy?
And how much empathy is too much?

Join award-winning author Ling Ling Huang for a live conversation on Immaculate Conception.

Moderated by Prof. Sandy Alexandre (Literature), with insights from Prof. Rebecca Saxe (Cognitive Neuroscience).

Together, they’ll explore empathy in fiction: its power, its limits, and what science can tell us about it.

Music will be part of the experience.

See you there. Looking forward to your questions for the Q&A period after the conversation.

Ling Ling Huang is a writer and violinist. She plays with several ensembles, including the Oregon Symphony, Grand Teton Music Festival Orchestra, ProMusica Chamber Orchestra, and the Experiential Orchestra, with whom she won a Grammy Award in 2021. Her debut novel, Natural Beauty, was a Good Morning America Buzz Pick, a New York Times Editors’ Choice, and a winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Fiction. Her second novel, Immaculate Conception, was published in May 2025.

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We worship with beautiful songs, open conversation about the Scriptures, prayers and a simple sharing of communion around the altar. Then we enjoy dinner together and good company together. Whether you come every week or just drop by once in a while, there is a caring community for you at the Table.

You are truly welcome to come as you are: undergrad, grad, or post-doc; sure of your faith or wondering what it is all about; gay, straight, bi, trans, questioning. Please join us for no-pressure worship and fellowship.

Hosted by the Lutheran Epsicopal Ministry @ MIT. For more information, or to verify gathering times during holiday and vacation periods, please contact chaplains Andrew Heisen (heisen@mit.edu) and Kevin Vetiac (kvet246@mit.edu).

Please note that we will not meet during the week of Thanksgiving nor between Christmas and New Year's Day. Please see our website (le-ministry.mit.edu) for updates on meeting times and locations as well as additional details.

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Location: Waltham, MA / Bentley

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Led by WCC Lecturer Chris Featherman, PhD, the program spans the following sessions:

Session 1: Find Your Audience — Thursday, February 19th, 4:00-5:30 p.m.Session 2: Choose Your Tools — Thursday, February 26th, 4:00-5:30 p.m.Session 3: Create Flow — Thursday, March 5th, 4:00-5:30 p.m.Session 4: Explain Like a Pro — Thursday, March 12th, 4:00-5:30 p.m.

All participants who successfully complete the program requirements will receive a signed certificate, and three participants' final writing projects will be recognized at an end-of-program celebration.

Join the WCC in this new program to develop your professional communication skills while reinvigorating your scholarly practice through new connections between your research and public concerns.

Applications are due by 11:59 p.m. on Sunday, February 15th. Click here to apply.

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This exhibition draws on archival materials from the Aga Khan Documentation Center at MIT (AKDC) to explore a century of cultural heritage preservation in Aleppo, Syria. It takes as its point of departure the work of Kamil al-Ghazzi (1853–1933), the pioneering Aleppine historian whose influential three-volume chronicle, Nahr al-Dhahab fī Tārīkh Ḥalab (The River of Gold in the History of Aleppo), was published between 1924 and 1926.

Ink, Stone, and Silver Light presents three modes of documentation—manuscript, built form, and photography—through which Aleppo’s urban memory has been recorded and preserved. Featuring figures such as Michel Écochard and Yasser Tabbaa alongside al-Ghazzi, the exhibition traces overlapping efforts to capture the spirit of a city shaped by commerce, craft, and coexistence. At a time when Syria again confronts upheaval and displacement, these archival fragments offer models for preserving the past while envisioning futures rooted in dignity, knowledge, and place.

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March 12, 2026, 12-1PM

45-432 in Building 45 and Zoom Webinar

Talk Title: Model-consistent data-driven computational strategies for PDE joint inversion problems

Kui Ren

Professor of Applied Physics and Applied Mathematics, Columbia University

Abstract:

The task of simultaneously reconstructing multiple physical coefficients in PDEs from observed data is ubiquitous in applications. We propose an integrated data-driven and model-based iterative reconstruction framework for such joint inversion problems where additional data on the unknown coefficients are supplemented for better reconstructions. Our method couples the supplementary data with the PDE model to make the data-driven modeling process consistent with the model-based reconstruction procedure. This coupling strategy allows us to characterize the impact of learning uncertainty on the joint inversion results for two typical inverse problems. Numerical evidence is provided to demonstrate the feasibility of using data-driven models to improve the joint inversion of multiple coefficients in PDEs

Bio:

Kui Ren is a professor of applied mathematics at Columbia University. His research interest centers around computational and mathematical analysis of inverse and imaging problems related to partial differential equations. Ren received his Ph.D. from Columbia University. Following his Ph.D., he moved to the University of Chicago in 2007 where he worked as an L. E. Dickson instructor in mathematics and computer science. In Fall 2008, Ren joined the University of Texas at Austin as an assistant professor in the Department of Mathematics and the Oden Institute for Computational Sciences, Engineering and Mathematics, and was promoted to Associate Professor in 2014, and Full Professor in 2018 when he moved back to Columbia.

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Contents is an exhibition featuring artwork from Max Cheever (SMACT ‘27).

Through the work, the importance of framing is examined through structured methods of communication.

Contents: 8 wooden posts, 4 cardboard boxes, 4 wooden shelves, 2 glass mirrors. Metaphorically: What the work rests upon, within, and around.

Literally: A thing regarded as representative or symbolic of something else. Paradoxically: How to wander on a path already constructed?

Drawing inspiration from both literary and artistic works, the exhibition seeks to investigate a transformative process: An artwork that initially engages with specific procedural and aesthetic paradigms, when examined, foregrounds fundamentally divergent conceptual, formal, or emotional concerns. In other words, the difference between contents and content: that which can only be engaged with through a reading.

Join us for the opening reception on Thursday, March 12th, 5:30PM-7:30PM. The reception will be accompanied with a looped screening of the 3 minute film Look in Bartos Theater that viewers can experience as they please for the duration of the opening. Refreshments will be served.

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Title: Categorical weave calculus

Abstract: Weaves have been used to address questions in different contexts, including the study of Lagrangian fillings in symplectic topology, the construction of cluster algebras, and the formalization of spectral networks for irregular connections on curves. After a quick primer on weave calculus, I will present a new categorical enhancement of weaves, using perverse schobers, and some of its applications. The focus will be on symplectic topology and the study of Lagrangian submanifolds. In particular, we will discuss a relationship between Lagrangian fillings of braided Legendrian knots and the Picard-Lefschetz theory of certain symplectic 6-folds.

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Join us for a conversation with Skydio co-founder and CEO Adam Bry SM ’12 as he shares his path from graduate studies at MIT to leading advances at the frontier of modern robotics.

Skydio, the largest drone manufacturer in the U.S., has delivered more than 60,000 autonomous drones to 3,800 organizations worldwide. These systems conduct thousands of daily flights in mission-critical—often life-or-death—operations across public safety, critical infrastructure inspection, and national security.

Bry will discuss the technical, entrepreneurial, and personal journey behind Skydio’s rise: from early research at MIT to building a vertically integrated company spanning hardware, software, autonomy, and manufacturing. He will reflect on the challenges of developing robotics solutions for high-stakes environments and serving complex, demanding customers at scale.

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About the Speaker

Composer Molly Herron “thinks deeply about motion, energy, and the physics of sound” (NPR). Whether writing for baroque strings, flowerpots, or newly designed instruments, her work achieves “a wonderful consideration of counterpoint and sound in time” (Seen and Heard International).

Released on New Amsterdam Records, the album “Through Lines: New Music for Viola da Gamba” is a collaboration with the viol consort Science Ficta. Of the album, I Care If You Listen says: “"The casual listener might get pleasantly lost within the sounds of these pieces, while deep listening reveals smartly crafted layers of historical and contemporary ideas ... In negotiating the space between the conventional and the unconventional, [Herron] creates a connection between composers of the past and herself, a thoughtful and skilled composer of the 21st century."

Herron’s work has been featured on the Bang on a Can Marathon, MATA festival, American Composers Orchestra’s SONiC Festival, Fast Forward Austin, Berlin Film Festival, and Sundance Film Festival.

She has written for The Orchestra of St. Luke’s, Argus Quartet, Sō Percussion, Contemporaneous, and the String Orchestra of Brooklyn among many others. Her work has been supported by the DeGaetano Composers Institute, MATA, The New York Foundation for the Arts, The Brooklyn Arts Council, the Copland Fund, Avaloch Farm New Music, and Exploring the Metropolis.

Herron received a Masters of Music degree from The Steinhardt School at New York University and a Ph.D from Princeton University. She is an Assistant Professor of Composition and Theory at Vanderbilt University.

Molly lives in Boston with her husband, composer Pascal Le Boeuf, and their two kids.

About the Music Forum Series

The MIT Music & Theater Arts Music Forum is a series of public presentations by music scholars from inside and outside of MIT. Hosted in the Lewis Music Library and presented in partnership with MIT Libraries, the MTA Music Forum Series gives the MIT Community an opportunity to engage with leading voices in every field of music scholarship. Past presenters include John Harbison, Julia Wolfe, Terry Riley, Don Byron, and others.

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Title: The descent obstruction

Abstract:

Reference: Poonen, Rational points on varieties, Section 8.4.

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Feb 12

Feb 26 (beginning at 6:pm)

March 12

April 23

May (tbd)

Sponsored by MIT Prajnopaya, the Buddhist community ar MIT.

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Location: Cambridge, MA

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Location: Schenectady, NY

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Location: Cambridge, MA

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Location: Boston, MA / Reggie Lewis Center

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Location: Cambridge, MA

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Location: Cambridge, MA

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Location: Boston, MA / Reggie Lewis Center

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Abstract: Mean-field variational inference (MFVI) approximates a target
distribution with a product distribution in the standard
coordinate system, offering a scalable approach to Bayesian
inference but often severely underestimating uncertainty due
to neglected dependence. We show that MFVI can be greatly
improved when performed along carefully chosen principal
component axes rather than the standard coordinates. The
principal components are obtained from a cross-covariance
matrix of the target’s score function and identify orthogonal
directions that capture the dominant discrepancies between
the target distribution and a Gaussian reference.

Performing MFVI in a rotated system defines a rotation
followed by a coordinatewise transformation that moves the
target closer to Gaussian. Iterating this procedure yields a
sequence of transformations that progressively Gaussianize
the target. The resulting algorithm provides a computationally
efficient construction of normalizing flows, requiring only
MFVI sub-problems and avoiding large-scale optimization. In
posterior sampling tasks, we demonstrate that the proposed
method greatly outperforms standard MFVI while achieving
accuracy comparable to normalizing flows at a much lower
computational cost.

Biography: Sifan Liu is an Assistant Professor in the Department of
Statistical Science at Duke University. She was previously a
research scientist at the Flatiron Institute and received her
Ph.D. in Statistics from Stanford University. Her research
interests include sampling, generative modeling, and
selective inference.

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Join CMS/W for an afternoon of networking and discussion about career pathways in writing and media studies.

Alyssa Smith (21E – CMS, ’17)

Alyssa majored in 21E with CMS & 6-3. She wrote the first-ever CMS/W undergraduate thesis and is currently finishing up a Ph.D. in network science at Northeastern, studying the networks people create on social media platforms. “I am grateful for the grounding in ~The Internet~ that my CMS background provided.”

Deborah Levinson (21W, ’91)

Debby is a user experience strategist and designer who helps nonprofit, corporate, and higher education clients (including MIT!) develop well-organized and intuitive websites and applications. A graduate of MIT’s 21W (Creative Writing) program, Debby is the co-author of three books: Build Your First Web App (Sterling, 2017), Visual Usability: Principles and Practices for Designing Digital Applications (Morgan Kaufmann, 2013), and The MIT Guide to Teaching Web Site Design (MIT Press, 2001).

Bruno Tambasco (CMS, ’15)

Bruno graduated from MIT with a CMS degree in 2015, focusing on film and video games to understand how media, storytelling, and interactivity shape perception and drive behavior. He now brings that interdisciplinary foundation, alongside his Management Science (Course 15) foundation, to his work in marketing, merchandising, and pricing consulting at Simon-Kucher. By applying principles from media theory and customer behavioral science, he helps organizations deliver the right value message to the right customer, at the right time, through the right channel to drive sales and create memorable experiences.

Laura Rosado (21W & 2A-6, '22)

Laura majored in 21W & 2A-6 and also holds a master’s degree in mechanical engineering. She is a technical writer at MathWorks, where she blends engineering and communication skills to write product documentation. She also freelances as a sports journalist.

Holly Haney (CMS, '18)

While at MIT, Holly focused on film studies, videography, and theater. Once leaving, she went on to join the world of commercial advertising, finding her way to commercial film production in Austin, Texas. Holly has worked in advertising, post-production, brand creative, and now, her favorite, on-set production. Her studies in CMS at MIT taught her the fundamentals of creating still and motion images, and her concentration in theater taught her what it is to be a part of a production team, all skills that she has continued to hone.

The panel will be moderated by CMS/W's director of undergraduate programs Professor Paloma Duong. Duong researches and teaches modern and contemporary Latin American culture. She works with social texts and emergent media cultures that speak to the exercise of cultural agencies and the formation of political subjectivity. Her most recent book is Portable Postsocialisms: Cuban Mediascapes after the End of History, a book-length study of Cuba’s changing mediascape and an inquiry on the postsocialist condition and its contexts.

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The series explores how collaboration, data, and design are shaping decisions about energy systems, buildings, and food. These choices affect emissions, health and well-being, and everyday life on campus.

Each session features MIT staff and collaborators working at the intersection of operations, planning, and climate action, with time for discussion and Q&A. Additional webinar sessions may be added in the future as the series evolves. Register once to attend one, two, or all three sessions.

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Contents is an exhibition featuring artwork from Max Cheever (SMACT ‘27).

Through the work, the importance of framing is examined through structured methods of communication.

Contents: 8 wooden posts, 4 cardboard boxes, 4 wooden shelves, 2 glass mirrors. Metaphorically: What the work rests upon, within, and around.

Literally: A thing regarded as representative or symbolic of something else. Paradoxically: How to wander on a path already constructed?

Drawing inspiration from both literary and artistic works, the exhibition seeks to investigate a transformative process: An artwork that initially engages with specific procedural and aesthetic paradigms, when examined, foregrounds fundamentally divergent conceptual, formal, or emotional concerns. In other words, the difference between contents and content: that which can only be engaged with through a reading.

Join us for the opening reception on Thursday, March 12th, 5:30PM-7:30PM. The reception will be accompanied with a looped screening of the 3 minute film Look in Bartos Theater that viewers can experience as they please for the duration of the opening. Refreshments will be served.

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Title:

Abstract:

Zoom: https://mit.zoom.us/j/91800438944. For the Passcode, please contact Pavel Etingof at etingof@math.mit.edu.

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Location: Hartford, CT

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Lorna McGhee has been appointed principal flute of the Boston Symphony Orchestra beginning with the 2024-2025 season. She was previously appointed by Manfred Honeck as principal flute of the Pittsburgh Symphony, with which she recorded symphonies of Beethoven, Bruckner, Brahms, Dvořák, and Tchaikovsky, as well as the PSO’s Grammy award-winning Shostakovich Symphony No. 5. She has performed as guest principal with Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Minnesota Orchestra, San Francisco Symphony, London Symphony Orchestra, London Philharmonic, Philharmonia, Academy of St-Martin-in-the-Fields, and Chamber Orchestra of Europe, among others. Before emigrating to North America, McGhee was co-principal flute of the London’s BBC Symphony Orchestra.

As a concerto soloist, Lorna McGhee has appeared with orchestras in Japan, Taiwan, Canada, the UK, and the U.S. with such groups as the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, Victoria Symphony, Manitoba Chamber Orchestra, Oregon Bach Festival Orchestra, Minnesota Orchestra, and Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra. As winner of the Shell/LSO Scholarship, she performed the Ibert Concerto with London Symphony Orchestra at the Barbican Center in London and in a gala concert in Glasgow’s Royal Concert Hall. Other career highlights include performances of Penderecki’s Flute Concerto under the baton of the composer, Bach’s Orchestral Suite No. 2 with both Yannick Nézet-Séguin and Nicholas McGegan, Saariaho’s concerto Aile du songe with Osmo Vänskä, and Mozart’s G major concerto with Manfred Honeck. During the 2024-25 season she returns to the Pittsburgh Symphony as soloist in Rautavaara’s Flute Concerto Dances with the Winds with conductor Donald Runnicles.

Lorna McGhee’s love of chamber music has led to performances in Europe, North America, Japan, Taiwan, Singapore, India, Sri Lanka, and Australia, in such venues as the Wigmore Hall, Edinburgh International Festival, the Louvre, the Schubertsaal of Vienna's Konzerthaus, and the Library of Congress. She has participated in festivals including the Australian Festival of Chamber Music, Ottawa Chamberfest, Cleveland Chamberfest, Sitka Festival, and Seattle Chamber Music Society. As a member of Trio Verlaine with her husband, violist David Harding, and harpist Heidi Krutzen, she recorded the album Fin de Siècle, the Music of Debussy and Ravel plus Six Departures featuring new commissions by Jeffery Cotton and R. Murray Schafer. Along with duo partner Heidi Krutzen, she has commissioned several new works for flute and harp. Her Naxos recording of Bax’s chamber music with the group mobius was selected as Editor’s Choice in Gramophone magazine. She has two recital discs: The Hour of Dreaming with pianist Piers Lane and Songs without Words with pianist Naoko Ishibashi. Following in the footsteps of her mentor, William Bennett, who sought to expand the expressive range of the flute, these recital recordings include several of Lorna’s own transcriptions.

Dedicated to nurturing the upcoming generation of musicians, McGhee has taught flute performance at the University of Michigan, the University of British Columbia, and Carnegie Mellon University, and has given masterclasses for educational institutions and flute festivals around the world, including the Juilliard School, Royal Academy of Music, New World Symphony, and the online platform Tonebase. She is a regular guest teacher at summer schools including the Galway International Flute Festival, Orford Music Academy, and National Youth Orchestra of Canada. Lorna McGhee grew up in Largs, Scotland. She studied with David Nicholson at the Junior Department of the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama (now the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland) and later with Michie and William Bennett at the Royal Academy of Music in London. She is an honorary Fellow of the Royal Academy of Music and an Altus Artist for Altus Flutes. In addition to her love of music, she is a lifelong student of English literature and the Alexander Technique.

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Location: Waltham, MA

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Refreshments at 5:30pm | Screening at 6pm | Registration is required.

Synopsis: Kiah has just finished all the high school she’s going to do and is getting ready for her first day on the job. She’s an artist and she’s actually got a gig as an illustrator. This kid named Daniel is going to show her the ropes. Her mother, Ellie, trying hard not to helicopter-parent, spends her days prepping to get ready for an empty nest.

It’s the future, and everything is beautiful. We’ve mitigated climate change. We’ve eradicated world poverty. We have true trans species democracy. All just by rolling back technology a little bit, and all humans agreeing to end life by 50. It’s not so bad. You have a great life, and you get to choose how you’d like to go… before you consume too much. For questions about the event and accessibility, please contact wgs@mit.edu.

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This event is made possible by the Consortium for Graduate Studies in Gender, culture, Women, and sexuality, MIT Program in Media, Arts, and Sciences, and MIT Women’s and Gender Studies.

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the World Premiere of CLOSE UP

by Stefanie Batten Bland and Daniel Bernard Roumain

March 13-14, 2026

CLOSE UP brings together three-time Bessie nominated artist Stefanie Batten Bland and Emmy Award-winning composer and violinist Daniel Bernard Roumain in an intimate new concert of music and dance, where sound and movement entwine to reveal the stories our bodies carry. Conceived as a musical and physical lullaby, the work recreates the immediacy of a speakeasy—where the danger and thrill of proximity and truth can cut like a dagger or cradle us with love and acceptance. Blending classical, jazz, créole and postmodern influences into one expression, CLOSE UP explores deeply rooted cultural narratives shaped by ancestry and memory. Together, Batten Bland and Roumain celebrate the resilience of the human spirit, holding the beauty, humor, horror, and care within each body, and emphasizing the necessity of tenderness in turbulent times. Through this dialogue of bow and body, rhythm, and resistance, they build a world both familiar and newly imagined: a sanctuary of sound, sweat, and grace.

CLOSE UP features dramaturgy by Daniel Safer, costumes by Shane Ballard, and lighting design by Jessica Drayton.

CLOSE UP has been developed in part with support from MIT’s 2025-26 Gus Solomons, Jr. Visiting Artist program which is supported by the generous donors to the 2022 McDermott Award Gala, hosted by the Council for the Arts at MIT. Additional support has been provided by New Music USA 2025, MIT Theater Arts, Arizona State University, and Montclair State University.

Trailer:

https://vimeo.com/1056478317?fl=pl&fe=sh

Link to download photos

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/pl5kphtyq19788ed78inh/ALxdIslLSHffEUTorq8bf_E?rlkey=6exx90pyz2hp22d944qiar91u&st=0bimup5o&dl=0

About the Artists

Stefanie Batten Bland (SBB) global maker, 2025 NYSCA artist, 2023 Dance Magazine Cover Artist, 2022 BAM Next Wave Commissioned artist, straddles the artistic scenes of New York City and France. Born to a jazz composer father and a writer mother, she was raised in SoHo when it was led by artists. Batten Bland’s work profoundly explores contemporary and historical cultural symbolism, the body as a political statement, cultural identifiers, and their influence on our global relationships. SBB creates proscenium, cinematic, and immersive worlds that answer the quest for belonging. As the Artistic Director of The Atelier SBB, and Creative Casting and Movement Director for Life & Trust, she pioneered the methods which became the performance-Identity liaison for Sleep No More. She is artistic director of the first immersive theatre summer intensive in the US CONCRETE, and is constantly pushing the boundaries of mixed reality art. SBB creates for fashion and lifestyle partners Louis Vuitton, Van Cleef & Arpels, Hermès, and Guerlain. She has produced 14 dance cinema films shown in international festivals in South Africa, Argentina, Greece, and Germany, and was nominated for three Bessie Awards. She has been featured in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Dance Magazine, Marie Claire, and Dance Europe. SBB’s work has been recently presented at Danse Lille (France), Spoleto Festival (Italy), Lincoln Center (NYC), and Bates Dance Festival (Maine). SBB is the recipient of grants from Creative Capital, Harkness Foundation, the Dance Advancement Fund, and NEFA. She is an associate professor at Montclair State University. IG: @sbb_land

Daniel Bernard Roumain (DBR) is a Black, Haitian-American composer who sees composing as collaboration with artists, organizations, and communities within the farming and framing of ideas. He is a prolific and endlessly collaborative composer, performer, educator, and social entrepreneur. “About as omnivorous as a contemporary artist gets” (New York Times), DBR has worked with artists from Philip Glass to Bill T. Jones to Lady Gaga, as well as institutions including Brooklyn Academy of Music, Kennedy Center, Lyric Opera of Chicago, and Sydney Opera House. Acclaimed as a violinist and activist, DBR’s career spans more than two decades, earning commissions by venerable artists and institutions worldwide.

Known for his signature violin sounds infused with myriad electronic, urban, and African-American music influences, DBR is a composer of solo, chamber, orchestral, and operatic works, and has composed an array of film, theater, and dance scores. He has composed music for the acclaimed film Ailey (Sundance official selection); won Emmy awards for The New Look of Classical Music and Art is Essential; released and appeared on 30 album recordings; and has published over 300 works.

An avid arts industry leader, DBR was the first Artistic Ambassador with Firstworks; the first Artist Activist-in-Residence at Longy School of Music; and the first Resident Artistic Catalyst with the New Jersey Symphony. He serves as a board member for the League of American Orchestras and is a voting member for the Recording Academy GRAMMY awards.

DBR earned his doctorate in Music Composition from the University of Michigan and is currently a tenured Institute Professor at Arizona State University Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts. IG? ​​@danielroumain

About MIT Theater Arts

MIT Theater students engage in rigorous, interdisciplinary study across disciplines in performance, directing, design, movement, dramaturgy, and dramatic writing. Discovery drives our process—from exploring foundational craft to inventing new forms, or coaxing emerging technologies into play. Theater faculty, creative leaders in their fields, collaborate with students on campus and around the world, to create transformative works in the studio, on stage, and on screen that investigate self, society, and the ways in which we connect with one another.

The Gus Solomons Jr. Visiting Artist Series is a new initiative that brings a contemporary dance artist to the MIT Theater Arts program in order to share and create their work with students and MIT’s broader community. Selected artists will, in the spirit of both Gus and MIT Theater, exemplify openness, embody empathy, expand the contemporary performance world on a national and/or international scale, and bring their unique individuality to their work—inspiring others to do the same.

The Gus Solomons Jr. Visiting Artist Series is supported by the generous donors to the 2022 McDermott Award Gala, hosted by the Council for the Arts at MIT.

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What does it take to kill someone? What does it mean to live in the absence of those you love? A classic tragedy through and through, Hamlet is a story about betrayal, death, and grief, and shows its audience what it means to die. This version of Hamlet, set in Denmark, Kansas, seeks to explore themes of crippling indecision, struggling against masculinity and the patriarchy, and existentialism, all while in the chaos of a rodeo.

Performances will be on:
March 13th - 8PM
March 14th - 2PM, 8PM
March 15th - 2PM
March 19th - 8PM
March 20th - 8PM
All performances will be in La Sala de Puerto Rico, inside the Stratton Student Center (W20-202).

Tickets link: https://engage.mit.edu/events?group_ids=52987

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A nine-year journey begins as the MIT Symphony Orchestra starts a complete cycle of Beethoven symphonies. Along with the symphony, the orchestra will examine both the artists that influenced Beethoven, and how composers after him found their way in his mighty shadow.

Repertoire

Händel’s “The Arrival of theQueen of Sheba” from Solomon

Mahler’s Adagietto from Symphony No. 5

Rossini’s William Tell Overture

Beethoven: Symphony No. 1Adam Boyles, Conductor

About the MIT Symphony Orchestra
The central mission of the MIT Symphony Orchestra is the cultural enhancement of education at MIT by promoting music performance at the highest level of artistic excellence among MIT students, by nurturing new works and young artists, by developing and sustaining the widest possible audience. The orchestra’s repertoire consists of works from the entire symphonic canon, spanning works of the early Baroque era to contemporary compositions, and including music for film and theatre.

Compositions by MIT faculty are also part of MITSO’s repertoire. The orchestra recently recorded Berlioz’ Symphonie fantastique, and has participated in masterclasses with Gustavo Dudamel, Sir Roger Norrington, and Nicholas McGegan. Frequent collaborations with other ensembles such as the MIT Concert Choir, the theater program, with members of the faculty and performances by MITSOlite, a chamber orchestra comprised of MITSO members, are also part of MITSO’s activities.

The students in the MIT Symphony Orchestra come from a variety of fields including: Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Mechanical Engineering, Biology, Mathematics, Brain & Cognitive Sciences, Nuclear Science and Engineering, Civil Engineering, Chemistry, Physics, Aeronautics and Astronautics, Management, Architecture, and Materials Science & Engineering.

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Location: Cambridge, MA

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Location: Boston, MA / Reggie Lewis Center

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Location: Cambridge, MA

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Location: Cambridge, MA

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Location: Boston, MA / Reggie Lewis Center

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Location: Cambridge, MA

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Contents is an exhibition featuring artwork from Max Cheever (SMACT ‘27).

Through the work, the importance of framing is examined through structured methods of communication.

Contents: 8 wooden posts, 4 cardboard boxes, 4 wooden shelves, 2 glass mirrors. Metaphorically: What the work rests upon, within, and around.

Literally: A thing regarded as representative or symbolic of something else. Paradoxically: How to wander on a path already constructed?

Drawing inspiration from both literary and artistic works, the exhibition seeks to investigate a transformative process: An artwork that initially engages with specific procedural and aesthetic paradigms, when examined, foregrounds fundamentally divergent conceptual, formal, or emotional concerns. In other words, the difference between contents and content: that which can only be engaged with through a reading.

Join us for the opening reception on Thursday, March 12th, 5:30PM-7:30PM. The reception will be accompanied with a looped screening of the 3 minute film Look in Bartos Theater that viewers can experience as they please for the duration of the opening. Refreshments will be served.

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Location: Waltham, MA

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Location: Waltham, MA / Bentley

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Location: Schenectady, NY

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What does it take to kill someone? What does it mean to live in the absence of those you love? A classic tragedy through and through, Hamlet is a story about betrayal, death, and grief, and shows its audience what it means to die. This version of Hamlet, set in Denmark, Kansas, seeks to explore themes of crippling indecision, struggling against masculinity and the patriarchy, and existentialism, all while in the chaos of a rodeo.

Performances will be on:
March 13th - 8PM
March 14th - 2PM, 8PM
March 15th - 2PM
March 19th - 8PM
March 20th - 8PM
All performances will be in La Sala de Puerto Rico, inside the Stratton Student Center (W20-202).

Tickets link: https://engage.mit.edu/events?group_ids=52987

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Location: Medford, MA

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Location: Cambridge, MA

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Location: Waltham, MA / Bentley

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Location: Hartford, CT

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Location: Troy, NY

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Location: Medford, MA

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the World Premiere of CLOSE UP

by Stefanie Batten Bland and Daniel Bernard Roumain

March 13-14, 2026

CLOSE UP brings together three-time Bessie nominated artist Stefanie Batten Bland and Emmy Award-winning composer and violinist Daniel Bernard Roumain in an intimate new concert of music and dance, where sound and movement entwine to reveal the stories our bodies carry. Conceived as a musical and physical lullaby, the work recreates the immediacy of a speakeasy—where the danger and thrill of proximity and truth can cut like a dagger or cradle us with love and acceptance. Blending classical, jazz, créole and postmodern influences into one expression, CLOSE UP explores deeply rooted cultural narratives shaped by ancestry and memory. Together, Batten Bland and Roumain celebrate the resilience of the human spirit, holding the beauty, humor, horror, and care within each body, and emphasizing the necessity of tenderness in turbulent times. Through this dialogue of bow and body, rhythm, and resistance, they build a world both familiar and newly imagined: a sanctuary of sound, sweat, and grace.

CLOSE UP features dramaturgy by Daniel Safer, costumes by Shane Ballard, and lighting design by Jessica Drayton.

CLOSE UP has been developed in part with support from MIT’s 2025-26 Gus Solomons, Jr. Visiting Artist program which is supported by the generous donors to the 2022 McDermott Award Gala, hosted by the Council for the Arts at MIT. Additional support has been provided by New Music USA 2025, MIT Theater Arts, Arizona State University, and Montclair State University.

Trailer:

https://vimeo.com/1056478317?fl=pl&fe=sh

Link to download photos

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/pl5kphtyq19788ed78inh/ALxdIslLSHffEUTorq8bf_E?rlkey=6exx90pyz2hp22d944qiar91u&st=0bimup5o&dl=0

About the Artists

Stefanie Batten Bland (SBB) global maker, 2025 NYSCA artist, 2023 Dance Magazine Cover Artist, 2022 BAM Next Wave Commissioned artist, straddles the artistic scenes of New York City and France. Born to a jazz composer father and a writer mother, she was raised in SoHo when it was led by artists. Batten Bland’s work profoundly explores contemporary and historical cultural symbolism, the body as a political statement, cultural identifiers, and their influence on our global relationships. SBB creates proscenium, cinematic, and immersive worlds that answer the quest for belonging. As the Artistic Director of The Atelier SBB, and Creative Casting and Movement Director for Life & Trust, she pioneered the methods which became the performance-Identity liaison for Sleep No More. She is artistic director of the first immersive theatre summer intensive in the US CONCRETE, and is constantly pushing the boundaries of mixed reality art. SBB creates for fashion and lifestyle partners Louis Vuitton, Van Cleef & Arpels, Hermès, and Guerlain. She has produced 14 dance cinema films shown in international festivals in South Africa, Argentina, Greece, and Germany, and was nominated for three Bessie Awards. She has been featured in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Dance Magazine, Marie Claire, and Dance Europe. SBB’s work has been recently presented at Danse Lille (France), Spoleto Festival (Italy), Lincoln Center (NYC), and Bates Dance Festival (Maine). SBB is the recipient of grants from Creative Capital, Harkness Foundation, the Dance Advancement Fund, and NEFA. She is an associate professor at Montclair State University. IG: @sbb_land

Daniel Bernard Roumain (DBR) is a Black, Haitian-American composer who sees composing as collaboration with artists, organizations, and communities within the farming and framing of ideas. He is a prolific and endlessly collaborative composer, performer, educator, and social entrepreneur. “About as omnivorous as a contemporary artist gets” (New York Times), DBR has worked with artists from Philip Glass to Bill T. Jones to Lady Gaga, as well as institutions including Brooklyn Academy of Music, Kennedy Center, Lyric Opera of Chicago, and Sydney Opera House. Acclaimed as a violinist and activist, DBR’s career spans more than two decades, earning commissions by venerable artists and institutions worldwide.

Known for his signature violin sounds infused with myriad electronic, urban, and African-American music influences, DBR is a composer of solo, chamber, orchestral, and operatic works, and has composed an array of film, theater, and dance scores. He has composed music for the acclaimed film Ailey (Sundance official selection); won Emmy awards for The New Look of Classical Music and Art is Essential; released and appeared on 30 album recordings; and has published over 300 works.

An avid arts industry leader, DBR was the first Artistic Ambassador with Firstworks; the first Artist Activist-in-Residence at Longy School of Music; and the first Resident Artistic Catalyst with the New Jersey Symphony. He serves as a board member for the League of American Orchestras and is a voting member for the Recording Academy GRAMMY awards.

DBR earned his doctorate in Music Composition from the University of Michigan and is currently a tenured Institute Professor at Arizona State University Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts. IG? ​​@danielroumain

About MIT Theater Arts

MIT Theater students engage in rigorous, interdisciplinary study across disciplines in performance, directing, design, movement, dramaturgy, and dramatic writing. Discovery drives our process—from exploring foundational craft to inventing new forms, or coaxing emerging technologies into play. Theater faculty, creative leaders in their fields, collaborate with students on campus and around the world, to create transformative works in the studio, on stage, and on screen that investigate self, society, and the ways in which we connect with one another.

The Gus Solomons Jr. Visiting Artist Series is a new initiative that brings a contemporary dance artist to the MIT Theater Arts program in order to share and create their work with students and MIT’s broader community. Selected artists will, in the spirit of both Gus and MIT Theater, exemplify openness, embody empathy, expand the contemporary performance world on a national and/or international scale, and bring their unique individuality to their work—inspiring others to do the same.

The Gus Solomons Jr. Visiting Artist Series is supported by the generous donors to the 2022 McDermott Award Gala, hosted by the Council for the Arts at MIT.

View on site | Email this event

What does it take to kill someone? What does it mean to live in the absence of those you love? A classic tragedy through and through, Hamlet is a story about betrayal, death, and grief, and shows its audience what it means to die. This version of Hamlet, set in Denmark, Kansas, seeks to explore themes of crippling indecision, struggling against masculinity and the patriarchy, and existentialism, all while in the chaos of a rodeo.

Performances will be on:
March 13th - 8PM
March 14th - 2PM, 8PM
March 15th - 2PM
March 19th - 8PM
March 20th - 8PM
All performances will be in La Sala de Puerto Rico, inside the Stratton Student Center (W20-202).

Tickets link: https://engage.mit.edu/events?group_ids=52987

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MIT Wind Ensemble

Frederick Harris, Jr., Music Director

Kenneth Amis, Assistant Conductor

Evan Ziporyn, composer-clarinetist

Danny Kim, violist

Saturday, March 14, 2026

8:00 P.M. Thomas Tull Concert Hall

Inspired by his experiences travels in Eastern Europe in tumultuous times’ (or ‘uncertain times’ maybe is more apt), this unique program features the world premiere of Evan Ziporyn’s 1991 for solo viola and wind ensemble. Composed for the gifted violist of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Danny Kim, 1991 is Ziporyn's response to the global transformation he experienced 35 years ago and to the uncertainty and change in our current political environment. Bernstein’s Overture to Candide, Ives’ Variations on America, Copland’s Down a Country Lane and Variations on a Shaker Melody from Appalachian Spring, Schuman’s When Jesus Wept, and chamber works round out this special concert of exciting and probing music.

Composer/conductor/clarinetist Evan Ziporyn's music has taken him from Balinesetemples to concert halls around the world. He has composed for and collaborated with Yo-Yo Ma, Brooklyn Rider, Maya Beiser, Ethel, Anna Sofie Von Otter, the American Composers Orchestra, Boston Modern Orchestra Project, Iva Bittova, Terry Riley, Don Byron, Wu Man, and Bang on a Can. In 2017, his arrangements were featured on Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s The Vietnam War, and on Silkroad’s Grammy-winning album Sing Me Home.

Most recently, his orchestral reimagining of David Bowie's final album, Blackstar, was recently released on Islandia Music, featuring Ziporyn conducting his own Ambient Orchestra with Maya Beiser, cello soloist. Since its 2017 premiere, Ziporyn has conducted the work in Boston, Barcelona, New York Central Park Summerstage, Australia's Adelaide Fringe Festival, Strathmore Hall, and numerous other national and international venues.

Learn more about Evan Ziporyn

Violist Danny Kim joined the Boston Symphony Orchestra at the start of the 2016-2017 season and was appointed third chair of the viola section during the 2017-18 season. A native of St. Paul, Minnesota, Kim completed his undergraduate degree at University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he studied with Sally Chisholm and graduated with a B.A. in viola performance and a certificate in East Asian Studies. He earned his Master of Music in viola performance from the Juilliard School under the tutelage of Samuel Rhodes. Prior to winning a position with the Boston Symphony, Kim was a member of Carnegie Hall’s Ensemble Connect. An alumnus of the Tanglewood Music Center, where he won the Maurice Schwartz Prize, he has participated in such festivals as theMarlboro Music Festival, Pacific Music Festival, Lucerne, Aspen, and has toured with Musicians from Marlboro. As an avid chamber musician, he has performed with theBoston Symphony Chamber Players, Ensemble Connect, Chamber Music Society of Minnesota, Concordia Chamber Players, and has collaborated with artists including Joseph Silverstein, Peter Wiley, Arnold Steinhardt, Michael Tree, Marcy Rosen, Richard O’Neill among others.

Learn more about Danny Kim

Seating Policy

Your registration through Eventbrite guarantees you a seat until 15 minutes before the event start time. 15 minutes before the concert start time, we will release open seats to the standby list. If you were not able to register through Eventbrite, you may join the physical standby line in the Thomas Tull Concert Hall Lobby up to one hour before the concert start time.

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If you cannot attend this performance, we encourage you to watch the livestream.

View on site | Email this event

Contents is an exhibition featuring artwork from Max Cheever (SMACT ‘27).

Through the work, the importance of framing is examined through structured methods of communication.

Contents: 8 wooden posts, 4 cardboard boxes, 4 wooden shelves, 2 glass mirrors. Metaphorically: What the work rests upon, within, and around.

Literally: A thing regarded as representative or symbolic of something else. Paradoxically: How to wander on a path already constructed?

Drawing inspiration from both literary and artistic works, the exhibition seeks to investigate a transformative process: An artwork that initially engages with specific procedural and aesthetic paradigms, when examined, foregrounds fundamentally divergent conceptual, formal, or emotional concerns. In other words, the difference between contents and content: that which can only be engaged with through a reading.

Join us for the opening reception on Thursday, March 12th, 5:30PM-7:30PM. The reception will be accompanied with a looped screening of the 3 minute film Look in Bartos Theater that viewers can experience as they please for the duration of the opening. Refreshments will be served.

View on site | Email this event

What does it take to kill someone? What does it mean to live in the absence of those you love? A classic tragedy through and through, Hamlet is a story about betrayal, death, and grief, and shows its audience what it means to die. This version of Hamlet, set in Denmark, Kansas, seeks to explore themes of crippling indecision, struggling against masculinity and the patriarchy, and existentialism, all while in the chaos of a rodeo.

Performances will be on:
March 13th - 8PM
March 14th - 2PM, 8PM
March 15th - 2PM
March 19th - 8PM
March 20th - 8PM
All performances will be in La Sala de Puerto Rico, inside the Stratton Student Center (W20-202).

Tickets link: https://engage.mit.edu/events?group_ids=52987

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Location: Hartford, CT

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Through inspiring conversations, real-world examples of breakthrough research, and new approaches to education and training, the symposium will highlight the innovative work happening across MIT and beyond. The program will also feature a showcase of student and trainee projects and opportunities to connect with the broader HEALS community.

In-persion seating is limited, but live streaming will be available to ensure broad participation. All sessions will be streamed in real time and recorded for on-demand viewing after the event.

Register today to be part of this exciting community-wide event and help us imagine and build the next era of health and life sciences.

https://web.cvent.com/event/917ce106-9720-4f9d-9d02-262def7b30cf/summary?environment=P2

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Drop by to contribute to a collaborative mural in the south lobby. Available 9:30-4pm.

Stay tuned for more details.

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This exhibition draws on archival materials from the Aga Khan Documentation Center at MIT (AKDC) to explore a century of cultural heritage preservation in Aleppo, Syria. It takes as its point of departure the work of Kamil al-Ghazzi (1853–1933), the pioneering Aleppine historian whose influential three-volume chronicle, Nahr al-Dhahab fī Tārīkh Ḥalab (The River of Gold in the History of Aleppo), was published between 1924 and 1926.

Ink, Stone, and Silver Light presents three modes of documentation—manuscript, built form, and photography—through which Aleppo’s urban memory has been recorded and preserved. Featuring figures such as Michel Écochard and Yasser Tabbaa alongside al-Ghazzi, the exhibition traces overlapping efforts to capture the spirit of a city shaped by commerce, craft, and coexistence. At a time when Syria again confronts upheaval and displacement, these archival fragments offer models for preserving the past while envisioning futures rooted in dignity, knowledge, and place.

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Miho Mazereeuw is an Associate Professor at the MIT School of Architecture and Planning, an architect, and a landscape architect. She is the author of Design Before Disaster: Japan's Culture of Preparedness (University of Virginia Press, 2025). She also serves as MIT Climate Mission Director for Empowering Frontline Communities and leads the Urban Risk Lab, which develops strategies for cities to withstand flooding, cyclones, and heat stress. The Lab’s multidisciplinary team conducts fieldwork and community workshops in the U.S. and abroad to develop context-specific resilience solutions.

Eiichi “Eddie” Kato worked in Japan for a diesel engine company and later served as president of a hotel for twenty years. In the immediate aftermath of the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake, he opened the hotel to evacuees; it operated as an emergency shelter, and he personally managed relief efforts there for 70 days. He is a disaster storyteller (kataribe), sharing firsthand experiences of the earthquake to educate and inspire others.

This seminar will be held in E40-496 (Pye Room) and is co-sponsored with MIT-Japan. Lunch will be available. Please RSVP here.

Contact Kate Danahy at kdanahy@mit.edu with any questions.

This event is part of the CIS Global Research & Policy Seminar Series and is co-sponsored by MIT-Japan. Join our mailing list here to learn about upcoming seminars in the series.

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Title:

Abstract:

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HumaniTea is a program partnering with other units in SHASS to gather, share some food and thought, and enrich our shared MIT experience in the process. Once a month, SHASS community members, instructors, and students from diverse fields of studies, backgrounds, and interests can stop in and enjoy a cup of tea or snack.

Monday, March 16 @ 4:15 - 5:45PM

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Title: Hochschild Cohomology and Higher Centers

Abstract: In Higher Algebra, J. Lurie developed a theory of derived centers for algebras over ∞-operads. Similar to how the classical center of an associative 𝕜-algebra is a commutative kalgebra, the derived center of an 𝒪-algebra is an 𝔼1-algebra object in the category of 𝒪-algebras. In the case of 𝔼1-algebras, the Dunn Additivity Theorem thus promotes the derived center to an 𝔼2-algebra. By defining the Hochschild complex of an 𝔼1-algebra object as its derived center, we hence obtain a built-in solution of Deligne’s conjecture on Hochschild cochains. We show that for an associative 𝕜-algebra, this definition recovers the classical Hochschild complex, including the correct Gerstenhaber algebra structure in cohomology. Globalizing to schemes, we show that the derived 𝔼1-center of the structure sheaf is indeed glued from the local centers, and that for a smooth scheme we recover the sheaf of polydifferential operators. The motivation for this work has its origin in Kontsevich’s description of the action of the Grothendieck-Teichmüller group on the Hochschild cohomology of a smooth algebraic variety

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Speaker:

Ambassador John J. Sullivan is the former US deputy secretary of state and former US ambassador to the Russian Federation. His career spans four decades in public service in prominent diplomatic and legal positions under five US presidents. He is a non-resident distinguished senior fellow with the National Security Law Program as well as a partner in Mayer Brown’s Washington DC and New York offices. He co-leads the firm’s National Security practice.

Co-chairs:

Carol Saivetz is a senior fellow in the MIT Security Studies Program at the Center for International Studies (CIS). She is the author and contributing co-editor of books and articles on Soviet and now Russian foreign policy issues.

Elizabeth Wood is Ford International Professor of History at MIT. She is the author most recently of Roots of Russia’s War in Ukraine as well as articles on Vladimir Putin, the political cult of WWII, right-wing populism in Russia and Turkey, and US-Russian Partnerships in Science. She is the faculty director of the Center’s MIT-Ukraine Program and co-faculty director of the MIT-Eurasia Program.

This event is co-sponsored by the Center for International Studies, the MIT-Eurasia Program, and the MIT Security Studies Program (SSP).

This is a hybrid event.

This event is part of our Focus on Eurasia speaker series. Each semester, the series brings together the MIT community and the general public to investigate ongoing issues in Eurasian domestic and foreign policy. Join our mailing list here to learn about upcoming seminars in the series.

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Despite facing immense challenges—including tsunami risk mitigation, recovery from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant accident, and ongoing population decline—Tohoku has continued to move forward. This event brings together inspiring individuals and organizations who remain deeply committed to the region’s revitalization. Through a panel discussion, speakers will share initiatives ranging from reimagining tourism and strengthening STEM education to advancing environmental monitoring and creating new business opportunities.

Join us for a meaningful conversation that highlights hard-won progress and explores practical lessons for building resilience and achieving long-term recovery from both natural and human-made disasters.

5:00 – 6:30PM: Panel Discussion

Moderator: Christine Pilcavage (MIT, MISTI, MIT-Japan Program)

Eiichi Kato (Representative of Tourism Rias, storyteller and former CEO of Hotel BOYO, Kesen-numa): Rebuilding tourism industry and engaging after 3.11

Miho Mazereeuw (MIT, DUSP): Building a framework to design/prepare for next disasters

Marwa AlAlawi (MIT, MechE ,PhD candidate): Reimagining STEM education in rural regions

Haruko Wainwright (MIT, NSE/CEE): Informing environmental recovery from a nuclear disaster through data science

Sho Hayashi (Fukushima Bu): Creating new opportunities in Fukushima

6:30 – 7:15PM: Light reception and further discussion

Please RSVP HERE

This is event is co-sponsored by Department of Nuclear Science and MIT-Japan Program

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Bio

Ahmed Abdelazim is the current Aga Khan Postdoctoral Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His research focuses on Egypt’s material, visual, and architectural culture in the second half of the twentieth century, with particular attention to the intersections of architecture, politics, religion, and everyday life.

Trained initially as an architect, Ahmed’s work is deeply interdisciplinary. He holds an MA in Islamic Art and Architecture and an MA in Cultural Anthropology from the American University in Cairo, in addition to formal training in Islamic studies. In December 2024, he completed his Ph.D. in Art History at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His dissertation, From Nation to Sensation: Discourses on the “Islamic” in Egypt’s Contemporary Architecture (1967–2011), examines how architecture became a key site for negotiating religion, nationalism, and state power in modern Egypt.

Alongside his academic research, Ahmed has been actively involved in curatorial and archival work. He served as project coordinator for The Mashrabiya Project at the Museum for Art in Wood in Philadelphia, collaborated with the Arab Center for Architecture on the exhibition A Journey in Architectural Archives at the Sharjah Architecture Triennial, and worked with UNESCO on archiving the Hassan Fathy collection at the American University in Cairo.

Ahmed is also the author of Kanīs al-Kharāb (Architecture of Doom), an Arabic-language book that critically examines the role of architecture in the realization of the Zionist colonial project on the ground. His forthcoming book, Contemporary Architecture in Egypt, 1970–2010, to be published by AUC Press, offers the first comprehensive scholarly account of Egypt’s contemporary architectural production within its broader social and political contexts.

Today’s talk, “In the Name of God and the People: The Mosque and the State in Socialist Egypt,” draws directly from this long-term research agenda, exploring how mosque architecture became a charged site where religion, ideology, and state power converged during the Nasser era.

Abstract

Recent scholarship has underscored the centrality of architecture in materializing Egypt’s revolutionary political project, with infrastructural and mass-housing schemes operating as visual and spatial instruments of modernization. This process was accompanied by a deliberate and systematic marginalization of Islamic symbols and institutions from the public sphere. As this paper argues, this configuration, shifted decisively in the aftermath of the 1967 defeat in the Six-Day War. In response to the crisis of political legitimacy, the state recalibrated its ideological project through the selective reactivation of Islamic visual and material culture. Drawing on archival research and primary sources, this paper examines state-commissioned mosques and the mediated circulation of Islamic imagery in print culture as technologies through which national politics were rearticulated and authority was reconstituted.

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Drop by to contribute to a collaborative mural in the south lobby. Available 9:30-4pm.

Stay tuned for more details.

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This exhibition draws on archival materials from the Aga Khan Documentation Center at MIT (AKDC) to explore a century of cultural heritage preservation in Aleppo, Syria. It takes as its point of departure the work of Kamil al-Ghazzi (1853–1933), the pioneering Aleppine historian whose influential three-volume chronicle, Nahr al-Dhahab fī Tārīkh Ḥalab (The River of Gold in the History of Aleppo), was published between 1924 and 1926.

Ink, Stone, and Silver Light presents three modes of documentation—manuscript, built form, and photography—through which Aleppo’s urban memory has been recorded and preserved. Featuring figures such as Michel Écochard and Yasser Tabbaa alongside al-Ghazzi, the exhibition traces overlapping efforts to capture the spirit of a city shaped by commerce, craft, and coexistence. At a time when Syria again confronts upheaval and displacement, these archival fragments offer models for preserving the past while envisioning futures rooted in dignity, knowledge, and place.

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Join us for a lecture and discussion with internationally renowned scholar, educator, and author Vanessa de Oliveira Andreotti, a leading voice on decolonial futures, global justice, and the profound transformations required in times of social and ecological breakdown.

Vanessa de Oliveira Andreotti is the former Dean of the Faculty of Education at the University of Victoria. She is the author of Hospicing Modernity: Facing humanity's wrongs and the implications for social activism and Outgrowing Modernity: Navigating complexity, complicity and collapse (August 2025), and one of the founders of the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures Arts/Research Collective. Her latest work, Burnout From Humans: A Little Book About AI That is Not Really About AI, explores AI as a mirror and metaphor for human systems and invites readers to rethink relationality amidst planetary crises.

Co-sponsored by MIT Systems Awareness Lab, Indigenous Spirit at MIT, MIT Radius, and MIT Sloan Sustainability Initiative.

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Join us for a lecture and discussion with internationally renowned scholar, educator, and author Vanessa de Oliveira Andreotti, a leading voice on decolonial futures, global justice, and the profound transformations required in times of social and ecological breakdown.

4th GHI Master Class

Title: Hospicing and Outgrowing Modernity:Tuesday, March 17, 12:00 - 1:30 pmLocation: The Nexus at Hayden Library, 14S-130, 160 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MALearn more and register: https://bit.ly/4rSX7RR

Vanessa de Oliveira Andreotti is the former Dean of the Faculty of Education at the University of Victoria. She is the author of Hospicing Modernity: Facing humanity's wrongs and the implications for social activism and Outgrowing Modernity: Navigating complexity, complicity and collapse (August 2025), and one of the founders of the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures Arts/Research Collective. Her latest work, Burnout From Humans: A Little Book About AI That is Not Really About AI, explores AI as a mirror and metaphor for human systems and invites readers to rethink relationality amidst planetary crises.

Co-sponsored by MIT Global Humanities Initiative, MITHIC, MIT Systems Awareness Lab, Indigenous Spirit at MIT, MIT Radius, MIT Sloan Sustainability Initiative, and the Presencing Institute.

Looking forward to seeing you at our events!

The GHI Team

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Contents is an exhibition featuring artwork from Max Cheever (SMACT ‘27).

Through the work, the importance of framing is examined through structured methods of communication.

Contents: 8 wooden posts, 4 cardboard boxes, 4 wooden shelves, 2 glass mirrors. Metaphorically: What the work rests upon, within, and around.

Literally: A thing regarded as representative or symbolic of something else. Paradoxically: How to wander on a path already constructed?

Drawing inspiration from both literary and artistic works, the exhibition seeks to investigate a transformative process: An artwork that initially engages with specific procedural and aesthetic paradigms, when examined, foregrounds fundamentally divergent conceptual, formal, or emotional concerns. In other words, the difference between contents and content: that which can only be engaged with through a reading.

Join us for the opening reception on Thursday, March 12th, 5:30PM-7:30PM. The reception will be accompanied with a looped screening of the 3 minute film Look in Bartos Theater that viewers can experience as they please for the duration of the opening. Refreshments will be served.

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This series was organized by Rania Ghosn, Associate Professor in the Department of Architecture and Director of the SMArchS Urbanism Program.

GEO–MATTERS asks how designers might respond to the earth’s matter, forces and signals. The lecture series attends to matter and material ecologies, including the unruly disturbances intensified by the climate crisis. Here, design works with earth systems, tracking material flows—greenhouse gases, heat, sediment, water, biomass, waste—across the extended territories, from quarries and farms to Arctic coastlines. Media also matters for geo-design because the globe is already an image, produced through systems that sense, record, and visualize the Earth— satellite tiles, climate-model outputs, air-quality dashboards, LiDAR point clouds, GIS layers, and more. GEO-MATTERS attends thus to geographic situatedness, material ecologies, and imaging systems through which Earth is assembled and geo–design is practiced.

For Tuesday March 17th:

Speaker: Mason White, University of Toronto Daniels / Lateral Office
Respondent: Rania Ghosn

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Title: Spontaneous Flow and Non-singular Topological Defects in Confined Active Nematics

Abstract:

Emergence of chirality is a significant characteristic of biological systems across scales, but it is perhaps surprising that even completely achiral active constituents can spontaneously break the chiral symmetry. We study the fundamental instability in 3D confined active nematics with normal anchoring, which gives rise to degenerate left- and right-handed flow states. This spontaneous symmetry breaking yields key signatures of umbilic defects and domain walls separating chiral domains of opposite handedness. Topologically, these belong to a class of non-singular topological defects. We show that domains in this system can be characterised by an effective anisotropic Model A field theory, where anisotropy affects not only the shape but also drastically modifies the coarsening timescales. Umbilics, on the other hand, are unstable in open systems, but become preferred once the active system is entirely closed, resulting in flows similar to convective rolls. Our predictions can be useful across several experimental systems, including gravitactic bacteria, mixtures of molecular motors and microtubules, and tissues. Furthermore, anisotropy shapes dynamics even at the scale of individual active swimmers in complex environments. The same broken symmetries that were narrating emergent collective phenomena can convert even reciprocal swimming strokes into net motion, circumventing the classical constraints of Purcell’s Scallop Theorem.

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Host: Phil Sharp

Title: "Modern coexistence with the persistent RNA world"

This lecture will be in honor of Dr. Alexander Rich.

The Biology Colloquium is a weekly seminar held throughout the academic year — featuring distinguished speakers in many areas of the biological sciences from universities and institutions worldwide. More information on speakers, their affiliations, and titles of their talks will be added as available. Unless otherwise stated, the Colloquium will be held live in Stata 32-123 (Kirsch auditorium) Contact Margaret Cabral with questions.

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Pre-registration is required to participate and snacks will be served.

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During his CAST residency at MIT, Rudess has been exploring the next frontier: real-time collaboration between human performer and artificial intelligence. He is collaborating with Professor Joe Paradiso’s MIT Media Lab Responsive Environments Group to create Jam_Bot, a new technology exploring the boundaries of AI-driven musical control and expression. The machine-learning model—trained on Rudess’s own playing style—improvises and performs live in duet with its human counterpart. This talk will trace the path that led him from classical training to pioneering work in musical innovation, unpack the development of his live AI collaboration project, and offer an honest look at where the technology stands today—and where it might take us next.

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Check out our Instagram at mit.acro for day-of updates on our classes.

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Location: Schenectady, NY

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Hosted by New Engineering Education Transformation (NEET) and MIT Office of Sustainability

Open to all MIT undergraduates. RSVP by 10:00 AM, Monday, March 16.

1st Place Prize: $300 TechCASH2nd Place Prize: $150 TechCASH$20 TechCASH for each participant

Tackle a challenge related to the MIT campus food system and present your ideas using a systems thinking approach to win TechCASH in this competition hosted by the New Engineering Education Transformation (NEET) program in collaboration with the MIT Office of Sustainability.

Participants must attend ONE of the information sessions below AND the team presentations to participate in the competition and receive any TechCASH.

Information Sessions (Choose One):

Tuesday, March 17, 6:30 PM–7:30 PM (Virtual or 3-001)Wednesday, March 18, 6:30 PM–7:30 PM (Virtual)Team Presentations:

Tuesday, March 31, 6:30 PM–7:30 PM (Virtual)Announcement of Winners:

Monday, April 6, EOD (Email)

Learn more and RSVP now!

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Location: Troy, NY

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Emily Falcon lives in Massachusetts. At seven weeks old, she had a heart attack and was diagnosed with anomalous origin of the left coronary artery from the pulmonary artery (ALCAPA). This led to two open-heart surgeries, one at age six and another at age thirty-five. She loves travel and animals, both of which have helped her get through difficult times. While living a constrained life, Emily has sought out adventures whenever she can, such as trekking up volcanoes to observe mountain gorillas in Uganda, volunteering with cheetahs and baboons in Namibia, playing with wolves at the Arctic Circle, and eating with orangutans in Singapore. She is now an athlete who participates in a weekly run club and runs in 5K races throughout the year. She hopes to inspire others who have health limitations to never waste a moment and not let life pass them by. She can be emailed at dont.waste.a.second.press@gmail.com.

Space is limited. Please email kbennett@mit.edu to RSVP, and let us know if you have any dietary restrictions.

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This event is free and open to the public with priority to the MIT community. Registration is required.

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Drop by to contribute to a collaborative mural in the south lobby. Available 9:30-4pm.

Stay tuned for more details.

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This exhibition draws on archival materials from the Aga Khan Documentation Center at MIT (AKDC) to explore a century of cultural heritage preservation in Aleppo, Syria. It takes as its point of departure the work of Kamil al-Ghazzi (1853–1933), the pioneering Aleppine historian whose influential three-volume chronicle, Nahr al-Dhahab fī Tārīkh Ḥalab (The River of Gold in the History of Aleppo), was published between 1924 and 1926.

Ink, Stone, and Silver Light presents three modes of documentation—manuscript, built form, and photography—through which Aleppo’s urban memory has been recorded and preserved. Featuring figures such as Michel Écochard and Yasser Tabbaa alongside al-Ghazzi, the exhibition traces overlapping efforts to capture the spirit of a city shaped by commerce, craft, and coexistence. At a time when Syria again confronts upheaval and displacement, these archival fragments offer models for preserving the past while envisioning futures rooted in dignity, knowledge, and place.

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Location: Indianapolis, IN

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Location: Indianapolis, IN

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Summary: For this seminar, Alexandra Bell will discuss recent developments in nuclear proliferation, arms control, and strategy. Many in the nuclear policy community now say we are at the start of a third nuclear age. What this age will look like is a matter of debate. What is clear is that academics, experts, and policy makers thinking about the future of nonproliferation, arms control, deterrence, and disarmament policy will face new and unprecedented challenges. They will need to understand how other existential risks—climate change and emerging disruptive technologies that include synthetic biology and artificial intelligence, among others—will affect their work, for good and for bad. Further, given that a common long-term consensus about the future of nuclear weapons will take time and effort to forge, the short-term common goal should be the prevention of nuclear war. The question that then follows is whether the system of controls we have created to prevent nuclear war is fit for purpose or whether our luck will finally run out.

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Contents is an exhibition featuring artwork from Max Cheever (SMACT ‘27).

Through the work, the importance of framing is examined through structured methods of communication.

Contents: 8 wooden posts, 4 cardboard boxes, 4 wooden shelves, 2 glass mirrors. Metaphorically: What the work rests upon, within, and around.

Literally: A thing regarded as representative or symbolic of something else. Paradoxically: How to wander on a path already constructed?

Drawing inspiration from both literary and artistic works, the exhibition seeks to investigate a transformative process: An artwork that initially engages with specific procedural and aesthetic paradigms, when examined, foregrounds fundamentally divergent conceptual, formal, or emotional concerns. In other words, the difference between contents and content: that which can only be engaged with through a reading.

Join us for the opening reception on Thursday, March 12th, 5:30PM-7:30PM. The reception will be accompanied with a looped screening of the 3 minute film Look in Bartos Theater that viewers can experience as they please for the duration of the opening. Refreshments will be served.

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Title: Almgren-Pitts and Allen-Cahn approaches to anisotropic min-max construction.

Abstract:

We present our recent results on the min-max construction of closed anisotropic minimal hypersurfaces in closed Riemannian manifolds.

The first approach follows the Almgren-Pitts scheme: we construct closed hypersurfaces of optimal regularity with constant anisotropic mean curvature, thereby confirming a conjecture of Allard [Invent. Math., 1983].

The second approach uses the anisotropic Allen-Cahn energy to produce a (possibly singular) anisotropic minimal hypersurface, yielding an anisotropic analogue of the Hutchinson-Tonegawa theorem.

The talk is based on joint work with De Philippis-Li and with Pigati.

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Title: New supercuspidal representations from the Weil representation in characteristic two

Abstract: Supercuspidal representations are the mysterious "elementary particles" from which all other representations of a reductive p-adic group are built. Residue characteristic two presents additional difficulties in the construction of these representations, and even for classical groups, our knowledge is incomplete. In this talk, based on joint work with Jessica Fintzen, I'll explain how to overcome one of these difficulties: the exceptional behavior of the Heisenberg group and Weil representation in characteristic two. Time permitting, I'll also explain how to overcome a second difficulty: disconnected Lie-algebra centralizers.

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Speaker: Jed Elison, Ph.D.
Affiliation: Irving B Harris Professor of Child Development and Distinguished McKnight University Professor, Institute of Child Development & Department of Pediatrics, University of Minnesota

Host: Dr. Charles Nelson

Talk title: Toward a New Era of Early Autism Identification

Abstract: Early intervention and support augment outcomes for autistic children. And yet, early identification remains challenging. I will discuss a conceptual challenge and a methodological challenge that if addressed, could potentially improve early identification efforts. I will share work from my team on early identification in three contexts: 1) familial risk, 2) neurological risk, and 3) normative epidemiological risk. I will close with some future directions that emphasize the value of “big” and “small” science.

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Title: A positive combinatorial formula for the double Edelman-Greene coefficients

Abstract: Lam, Lee, and Shimozono introduced the double Stanley symmetric functions in their study of the equivariant geometry of the affine Grassmannian. They proved that the associated double Edelman--Greene coefficients, the double Schur expansion coefficients of these functions, are positive, a result later refined by Anderson. They further asked for a combinatorial proof of this positivity. In this paper, we provide the first such proof, together with a combinatorial formula that manifests the finer positivity established by Anderson. Our formula is built from two combinatorial models: bumpless pipedreams and increasing chains in the Bruhat order. The proof relies on three key ingredients: a correspondence between these two models, a natural subdivision of bumpless pipedreams, and a symmetry property of increasing chains. This is based on joint work with Tianyi Yu.

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Location: Hartford, CT

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We worship with beautiful songs, open conversation about the Scriptures, prayers and a simple sharing of communion around the altar. Then we enjoy dinner together and good company together. Whether you come every week or just drop by once in a while, there is a caring community for you at the Table.

You are truly welcome to come as you are: undergrad, grad, or post-doc; sure of your faith or wondering what it is all about; gay, straight, bi, trans, questioning. Please join us for no-pressure worship and fellowship.

Hosted by the Lutheran Epsicopal Ministry @ MIT. For more information, or to verify gathering times during holiday and vacation periods, please contact chaplains Andrew Heisen (heisen@mit.edu) and Kevin Vetiac (kvet246@mit.edu).

Please note that we will not meet during the week of Thanksgiving nor between Christmas and New Year's Day. Please see our website (le-ministry.mit.edu) for updates on meeting times and locations as well as additional details.

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Hosted by New Engineering Education Transformation (NEET) and MIT Office of Sustainability

Open to all MIT undergraduates. RSVP by 10:00 AM, Monday, March 16.

1st Place Prize: $300 TechCASH2nd Place Prize: $150 TechCASH$20 TechCASH for each participant

Tackle a challenge related to the MIT campus food system and present your ideas using a systems thinking approach to win TechCASH in this competition hosted by the New Engineering Education Transformation (NEET) program in collaboration with the MIT Office of Sustainability.

Participants must attend ONE of the information sessions below AND the team presentations to participate in the competition and receive any TechCASH.

Information Sessions (Choose One):

Tuesday, March 17, 6:30 PM–7:30 PM (Virtual or 3-001)Wednesday, March 18, 6:30 PM–7:30 PM (Virtual)Team Presentations:

Tuesday, March 31, 6:30 PM–7:30 PM (Virtual)Announcement of Winners:

Monday, April 6, EOD (Email)

Learn more and RSVP now!

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Location: Cambridge, MA

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Location: Cambridge, MA

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Location: Poughkeepsie, NY / Vassar College

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Drop by to contribute to a collaborative mural in the south lobby. Available 9:30-4pm.

Stay tuned for more details.

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This exhibition draws on archival materials from the Aga Khan Documentation Center at MIT (AKDC) to explore a century of cultural heritage preservation in Aleppo, Syria. It takes as its point of departure the work of Kamil al-Ghazzi (1853–1933), the pioneering Aleppine historian whose influential three-volume chronicle, Nahr al-Dhahab fī Tārīkh Ḥalab (The River of Gold in the History of Aleppo), was published between 1924 and 1926.

Ink, Stone, and Silver Light presents three modes of documentation—manuscript, built form, and photography—through which Aleppo’s urban memory has been recorded and preserved. Featuring figures such as Michel Écochard and Yasser Tabbaa alongside al-Ghazzi, the exhibition traces overlapping efforts to capture the spirit of a city shaped by commerce, craft, and coexistence. At a time when Syria again confronts upheaval and displacement, these archival fragments offer models for preserving the past while envisioning futures rooted in dignity, knowledge, and place.

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Location: Indianapolis, IN

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Location: Indianapolis, IN

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Contents is an exhibition featuring artwork from Max Cheever (SMACT ‘27).

Through the work, the importance of framing is examined through structured methods of communication.

Contents: 8 wooden posts, 4 cardboard boxes, 4 wooden shelves, 2 glass mirrors. Metaphorically: What the work rests upon, within, and around.

Literally: A thing regarded as representative or symbolic of something else. Paradoxically: How to wander on a path already constructed?

Drawing inspiration from both literary and artistic works, the exhibition seeks to investigate a transformative process: An artwork that initially engages with specific procedural and aesthetic paradigms, when examined, foregrounds fundamentally divergent conceptual, formal, or emotional concerns. In other words, the difference between contents and content: that which can only be engaged with through a reading.

Join us for the opening reception on Thursday, March 12th, 5:30PM-7:30PM. The reception will be accompanied with a looped screening of the 3 minute film Look in Bartos Theater that viewers can experience as they please for the duration of the opening. Refreshments will be served.

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Exhibit curator Simon Wolfe is a Boston area archivist and freelance archival researcher. Simon has a MLIS from Simmons University, a BA in Religion from the University of Vermont, and has worked at The MIT Press, The MIT Museum, as well as at MIT's Department of Distinctive Collections. Simon loves old paper and reading dead people's mail, and currently spends most of his time working as a project archivist at Mount Auburn Cemetery.

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2026 James R. Killian, Jr. Award and Lecture Series by:
Professor Dimitris Bertsimas SM ’87 PhD ’88
Vice Provost for Open Learning
Associate Dean, Online Education & Artificial Intelligence

Algorithms for Life: AI and Operations Research Transforming Healthcare, Education, and Agriculture
For over four decades, I have pursued the vision of using mathematics and algorithms to address problems that improve the human condition—saving lives, improving learning, and feeding the world. This talk traces the convergence from operations research and optimization under uncertainty, through machine learning and AI, to their impact in healthcare, education, and agriculture. I share how breakthrough research becomes real-world impact, with concrete examples from medical diagnosis and precision medicine to precision agriculture and personalized education. And I explore what is next: how emerging AI developments will fundamentally reshape these fields in ways we are only beginning to imagine.

Lecture will begin at 4 pm in 10-250

The Killian Lecture is open to all members of the MIT community. No registration is required, but we do suggest arriving a few minutes early to ensure a seat. Live Streamtext captioning will be available via mobile devices.

This lecture will not be webcast, but it will be recorded and posted on the Killian Lecture website in the days following.

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Dimitris Bertsimas SM ’87, PhD ’88, a leading figure in operations research, has been named the recipient of the 2025-26 James R. Killian Jr. Faculty Achievement Award. It is the highest honor the MIT faculty grants to its own professors.

Bertsimas is the Boeing Professor of Operations Research at the MIT Sloan School of Management, where he has made substantial contributions to business practices in many fields. He has also been a prolific advisor of graduate students and an enterprising leader of academic programs, serving as the inaugural faculty director of the Master of Business Analytics (MBAn) program since 2016, associate dean of business analytics since 2019, and vice provost for open learning since 2024.

MIT News announcement: https://news.mit.edu/2025/dimitris-bertsimas-receives-killian-award-0514

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About the James R. Killian Faculty Achievement Award and Lecture Series: The purpose of the Killian Award is to recognize extraordinary professional achievement by MIT faculty members and to communicate their accomplishments to members of the Institute community. The recipient of the Killian Award holds the title of Killian Award Lecturer for the following academic year and presents, during that time, one or more lectures to the MIT community on his or her own professional activities. The Killian Award selection is made by faculty members elected by vote of the Faculty from a slate prepared by the Faculty Nominations Committee. Visit the Killian Award and Lecture site.

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Questions? Contact

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Walji will explore the practical constraints countries face in implementing large-scale ecosystem restoration, with particular attention to the role of productive landscapes in sustaining food systems and water security. Drawing on work under the Global Biodiversity Framework’s Target 2 and Integrated Landscape Management initiatives, the seminar will examine how restoration is not a binary shift from “degraded” to “restored,” but a continuum of recovery, where agricultural lands, rangelands, forests, and agroforestry systems can progressively rebuild ecosystem services.

Date: Thursday, March 19, 2026
Time: 4:30 - 5:30 p.m. ET
Location: MIT Campus -- Room will be emailed to registrants. This is an in-person event. You MUST use an MIT email address to register, or an email address from a university or organization in the greater Cambridge / Boston area.

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Can Machines Be Creative?

A conversation inspired by the work of MIT Professor Markus Buehler.

Date: March 19, 2026
Time: 5:00 PM — 7:00 PM ET
Location: 12-0168; MIT.nano East Lobby

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Event Description

Prof. Buehler’s lab is pioneering the use of AI agents to design nanoscale materials — systems that reason, self-organize, and generate structures atom by atom. His research opens a profound question: When machines help design matter itself, are they participating in creativity? Join STUDIO.nano for an interdisciplinary discussion exploring AI, scientific discovery, art, and the evolving relationship between human and machine imagination.

Featuring
:

Markus Buehler, McAfee Professor of Engineering, Departments of Civil & Environmental Engineering and Mechanical Engineering
Aude Oliva, Director of Strategic Industry Engagement, Schwarzman College of Computing

Tobias Putrih, Lecturer, MIT Program in Art, Culture and Technology
W. Craig Carter, Professor, Department of Materials Science and Engineering (moderator)

Followed by a reception and the opening of
Sparks
: An exhibition in the MIT.nano digital gallery highlighting Professor Buehler’s research at the intersection of artificial intelligence, materials science, and creative design.

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Feb 12

Feb 26 (beginning at 6:pm)

March 12

April 23

May (tbd)

Sponsored by MIT Prajnopaya, the Buddhist community ar MIT.

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7:00 PM, Thursday, 19 March 2026

MIT Room 32-G449 (Kiva) and online via Zoom

Takeaways from Davos on AI Trends: world models, physical AI and autonomous warfare

Paul Baier

Please register in advance for this seminar even if you plan to attend in person at

https://acm-org.zoom.us/webinar/register/9517697066024/WN_asJFGtuGSUG_x7fw8jL30Q

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the webinar.

Indicate on the registration form if you plan to attend in person. This will help us determine whether the room is close to reaching capacity. We plan to serve light refreshments (probably pizza) before the talk starting at around 6:30 pm. Letting us know you will come in person will help us determine how much pizza to order.

We may make some auxiliary material such as slides and access to the recording available after the seminar to people who have registered.

Abstract:

Paul Baier publishes an online (daily/weekly) newsletter about what's going on in the AI universe.

https://www.gaiinsights.com

He was also a moderator for several panels in the Dome at Davos during the Imagination in Action event in January.

I had asked him to give a talk about his impressions from Davos, but I think he'll also include some more general comments about other things happening in the AI world.

He will also tell us about some of his recent work on the OpenClaw project and personal agents.

Bio:

Paul Baier is the CEO and principal analyst at GAI Insights. He is a seasoned software entrepreneur with two decades of experience and multiple exits. Related to AI, he was VP of Product at First Fuel Software, an enterprise AI company for 5 years. Mr Baier co-authored 3 articles about enterprise GenAI that were featured in Harvard Business Review. He was appointed an Executive Fellow at Harvard Business School and is a Forbes contributor. He holds an MBA from Harvard and a BA from Kenyon College.

He was part of the Imagination in Action group that organized presentations in the Dome at Davos on AI and the future of Technology and also led some panels there. We are anxious to hear his impressions from the conference and what it all means.

Directions to 32-G449 - MIT Stata Center, 32 Vassar Street, Cambridge, MA: Please use the main entrance to the Stata Center at 32 Vassar Street (the entrance closest to Main street) as those doors will be unlocked. Upon entering, proceed to the elevators which will be on the right after passing a large set of stairs and a MITAC kiosk. Take the elevator to the 4th floor and turn right, following the hall to an open area; 32-G449 will be on the left. Location of Stata on campus map

This joint meeting of the Boston Chapter of the IEEE Computer Society and GBC/ACM will be hybrid (in person and online).

Up-to-date information about this and other talks is available online at https://ewh.ieee.org/r1/boston/computer/. You can sign up to receive updated status information about this talk and informational emails about future talks at https://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/ieee-cs, our self-administered mailing list.

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What does it take to kill someone? What does it mean to live in the absence of those you love? A classic tragedy through and through, Hamlet is a story about betrayal, death, and grief, and shows its audience what it means to die. This version of Hamlet, set in Denmark, Kansas, seeks to explore themes of crippling indecision, struggling against masculinity and the patriarchy, and existentialism, all while in the chaos of a rodeo.

Performances will be on:
March 13th - 8PM
March 14th - 2PM, 8PM
March 15th - 2PM
March 19th - 8PM
March 20th - 8PM
All performances will be in La Sala de Puerto Rico, inside the Stratton Student Center (W20-202).

Tickets link: https://engage.mit.edu/events?group_ids=52987

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Location: Cambridge, MA

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Location: Cambridge, MA

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Location: Poughkeepsie, NY / Vassar College

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Drop by to contribute to a collaborative mural in the south lobby. Available 9:30-4pm.

Stay tuned for more details.

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Location: Indianapolis, IN

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Contents is an exhibition featuring artwork from Max Cheever (SMACT ‘27).

Through the work, the importance of framing is examined through structured methods of communication.

Contents: 8 wooden posts, 4 cardboard boxes, 4 wooden shelves, 2 glass mirrors. Metaphorically: What the work rests upon, within, and around.

Literally: A thing regarded as representative or symbolic of something else. Paradoxically: How to wander on a path already constructed?

Drawing inspiration from both literary and artistic works, the exhibition seeks to investigate a transformative process: An artwork that initially engages with specific procedural and aesthetic paradigms, when examined, foregrounds fundamentally divergent conceptual, formal, or emotional concerns. In other words, the difference between contents and content: that which can only be engaged with through a reading.

Join us for the opening reception on Thursday, March 12th, 5:30PM-7:30PM. The reception will be accompanied with a looped screening of the 3 minute film Look in Bartos Theater that viewers can experience as they please for the duration of the opening. Refreshments will be served.

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Speaker: Lukas Vogelsang, Ph.D.
Affiliation: Simons Postdoctoral Fellow, Sinha Lab, Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, MIT

Talk title: Studies of temporal processing and prediction in autism

Abstract: The processing of temporal structure in our sensory environment critically subserves perceptual organization. In this talk, I will present findings from our recently completed SPARK study examining temporal processing in autistic and non-autistic adults. Across two experiments probing visual temporal correlation detection and sensorimotor entrainment to visual and auditory metronomic sequences, autistic individuals showed fully typical performance. These findings suggest preserved mechanisms for key aspects of temporal processing that may provide a stable foundation for perceptual organization, even amid reported challenges in other timing-related domains, such as temporal prediction. I will then present an ongoing SPARK study explicitly assessing such temporal prediction across paradigms spanning binary cue-outcome learning, continuous time-series prediction, and the prediction of plausible continuations of video sequences. Together, these studies help reveal which aspects of temporal processing and prediction are impaired, preserved, or enhanced in autism, and help test theoretical frameworks of perceptual organization and predictive processing in autism.

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Location: Waltham, MA / Bentley

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Location: Medford, MA

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Location: Waltham, MA / Bentley

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Livestream: https://mta.mit.edu/viewlisten/live-killian-hall

About the Performers

Charlotte Wickert is a PhD student at MIT in the Nuclear Science and Engineering Department, where she conducts research in the Computational Reactor Physics Group (CPRG). She currently studies flute with Sue-Ellen Hershman-Tcherepnin through the MIT Emerson Scholars program. Music has been a large part of Charlotte's life, first through piano and later flute. She has performed in school and extracurricular ensembles throughout middle and high school, including the Las Vegas Regional Honor Band, Nevada All-State Band, Las Vegas Youth Orchestra, and John Philip Sousa National Honor Band. While at MIT, she played flute in the MIT Symphony Orchestra, MIT Wind Ensemble, and MIT Afro-Latin Ensemble and sang in the Vocal Jazz Ensemble.

About the Emerson/Harris Program for Private Study

Support for private musical study is available for students through the Emerson/Harris Program (E/HP), which offers merit-based financial awards for outstanding achievement on instruments or voice in classical, jazz, or world music. Each academic year, the program awards Scholarships and Fellowships to nearly seventy students who commit to a full year’s study and participate in the musical life of MIT.

Auditions for the program are held at the beginning of each academic year. Private teacher selections, made in consultation with the E/HP jury heads, may include instructors from MIT staff and throughout Greater Boston. The Emerson/Harris Program is funded by the late Mr. Cherry L. Emerson, Jr. (SM, 1941), in response to an appeal from AssociateProvost Ellen T. Harris (Class of 1949 Professor Emeritus of Music). The Emerson/Harris Masterclass Series is supported, in part, by the Robert L. Malster (1956) Fund.

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Title:

Abstract:

Zoom: https://mit.zoom.us/j/91800438944. For the Passcode, please contact Pavel Etingof at etingof@math.mit.edu.

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Location: Waltham, MA

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Starring Tony Torn

Written by Michael McClure

Original music by Christian Frederickson and Jared Michael Nickerson

Spider Rabbit is a play by poet and Obie award winning playwright Michael McClure. Written in 1971, it is an “absurdist anti war gargoyle cartoon” that feels increasingly relevant 50+ years later. It is a radical, expressionistic, surreal journey that feels like an episode of Pee Wee’s Playhouse turning into a poignant tragedy turning into a howl against brutality.

Dan Safer and Tony Torn co-created the wildly acclaimed Ubu Sings Ubu. Between the two of them, they have worked with Reza Abdoh, Richard Foreman, Mabou Mines, Pigface, Genesis P-Orridge, Anohni’s Blacklips Performance Kult, made choreography for the Queen of Thailand’s birthday party, gogo danced at Squeezebox and Jackie 60, performed on Broadway, at BAM, and Théâtre National de Chaillot in Paris, among all sorts of other people, places, and things. Torn was in the remake of Stepford Wives and Safer has over 50 tattoos.

Friday, March 20 at 7:30pm

Building W97-160 at MIT

345 Vassar Street

Cambridge, Massachusetts

Free and open to the public

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What does it take to kill someone? What does it mean to live in the absence of those you love? A classic tragedy through and through, Hamlet is a story about betrayal, death, and grief, and shows its audience what it means to die. This version of Hamlet, set in Denmark, Kansas, seeks to explore themes of crippling indecision, struggling against masculinity and the patriarchy, and existentialism, all while in the chaos of a rodeo.

Performances will be on:
March 13th - 8PM
March 14th - 2PM, 8PM
March 15th - 2PM
March 19th - 8PM
March 20th - 8PM
All performances will be in La Sala de Puerto Rico, inside the Stratton Student Center (W20-202).

Tickets link: https://engage.mit.edu/events?group_ids=52987

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Location: Poughkeepsie, NY / Vassar College

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Location: Cambridge, MA

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Location: Cambridge, MA

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Location: Cambridge, MA

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Location: Waltham, MA / Bentley

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Location: Indianapolis, IN

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Location: Cambridge, MA

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Location: Indianapolis, IN

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Contents is an exhibition featuring artwork from Max Cheever (SMACT ‘27).

Through the work, the importance of framing is examined through structured methods of communication.

Contents: 8 wooden posts, 4 cardboard boxes, 4 wooden shelves, 2 glass mirrors. Metaphorically: What the work rests upon, within, and around.

Literally: A thing regarded as representative or symbolic of something else. Paradoxically: How to wander on a path already constructed?

Drawing inspiration from both literary and artistic works, the exhibition seeks to investigate a transformative process: An artwork that initially engages with specific procedural and aesthetic paradigms, when examined, foregrounds fundamentally divergent conceptual, formal, or emotional concerns. In other words, the difference between contents and content: that which can only be engaged with through a reading.

Join us for the opening reception on Thursday, March 12th, 5:30PM-7:30PM. The reception will be accompanied with a looped screening of the 3 minute film Look in Bartos Theater that viewers can experience as they please for the duration of the opening. Refreshments will be served.

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Location: Waltham, MA / Bentley

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Location: Hartford, CT

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Location: Troy, NY

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Location: Schenectady, NY

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Location: Hartford, CT

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Location: Poughkeepsie, NY / Vassar College

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Location: Waltham, MA / Bentley

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Contents is an exhibition featuring artwork from Max Cheever (SMACT ‘27).

Through the work, the importance of framing is examined through structured methods of communication.

Contents: 8 wooden posts, 4 cardboard boxes, 4 wooden shelves, 2 glass mirrors. Metaphorically: What the work rests upon, within, and around.

Literally: A thing regarded as representative or symbolic of something else. Paradoxically: How to wander on a path already constructed?

Drawing inspiration from both literary and artistic works, the exhibition seeks to investigate a transformative process: An artwork that initially engages with specific procedural and aesthetic paradigms, when examined, foregrounds fundamentally divergent conceptual, formal, or emotional concerns. In other words, the difference between contents and content: that which can only be engaged with through a reading.

Join us for the opening reception on Thursday, March 12th, 5:30PM-7:30PM. The reception will be accompanied with a looped screening of the 3 minute film Look in Bartos Theater that viewers can experience as they please for the duration of the opening. Refreshments will be served.

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Location: Waltham, MA / Bentley

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This exhibition draws on archival materials from the Aga Khan Documentation Center at MIT (AKDC) to explore a century of cultural heritage preservation in Aleppo, Syria. It takes as its point of departure the work of Kamil al-Ghazzi (1853–1933), the pioneering Aleppine historian whose influential three-volume chronicle, Nahr al-Dhahab fī Tārīkh Ḥalab (The River of Gold in the History of Aleppo), was published between 1924 and 1926.

Ink, Stone, and Silver Light presents three modes of documentation—manuscript, built form, and photography—through which Aleppo’s urban memory has been recorded and preserved. Featuring figures such as Michel Écochard and Yasser Tabbaa alongside al-Ghazzi, the exhibition traces overlapping efforts to capture the spirit of a city shaped by commerce, craft, and coexistence. At a time when Syria again confronts upheaval and displacement, these archival fragments offer models for preserving the past while envisioning futures rooted in dignity, knowledge, and place.

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Location: Medford, MA

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Location: Waltham, MA

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This exhibition draws on archival materials from the Aga Khan Documentation Center at MIT (AKDC) to explore a century of cultural heritage preservation in Aleppo, Syria. It takes as its point of departure the work of Kamil al-Ghazzi (1853–1933), the pioneering Aleppine historian whose influential three-volume chronicle, Nahr al-Dhahab fī Tārīkh Ḥalab (The River of Gold in the History of Aleppo), was published between 1924 and 1926.

Ink, Stone, and Silver Light presents three modes of documentation—manuscript, built form, and photography—through which Aleppo’s urban memory has been recorded and preserved. Featuring figures such as Michel Écochard and Yasser Tabbaa alongside al-Ghazzi, the exhibition traces overlapping efforts to capture the spirit of a city shaped by commerce, craft, and coexistence. At a time when Syria again confronts upheaval and displacement, these archival fragments offer models for preserving the past while envisioning futures rooted in dignity, knowledge, and place.

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Location: Waltham, MA / Bentley

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Dr. Hu is an internationally recognized leader in nutrition, epidemiology, and public health. His research focuses on the prevention of obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and other chronic conditions through dietary and lifestyle interventions. He has authored more than 1,000 scientific publications and has played a pivotal role in shaping global understanding of how food systems, dietary patterns, and policy intersect with human and planetary health.

At Gastronomy & Beyond, Dr. Hu will explore the powerful connections between nutrition science, sustainable food systems, and the future of health — bridging rigorous research with real-world impact. His work offers critical insight into how culinary innovation, public policy, and scientific evidence can converge to build healthier communities worldwide.

Join us for a thought-provoking conversation at the intersection of science, gastronomy, and global well-being.

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Title: Fractions Are Hard!

Abstract: The school curriculum is shaped by a fundamental tension: while much of mathematics is motivated by real‐world intuition, the mathematics that emerges ultimately outgrows any single model that inspired it. Fractions sit squarely in this tension, and it is never fully resolved in the curriculum. Students first meet fractions as commands—circle a third of the kittens—and then as concrete parts of a whole—a third of a pie. Fractions are not numbers per se until we place them on the number line and suggest that they are. Questions about multiplication and division, then pull us back toward real‐world thinking—“of means multiply,” portions of portions, and the area model—further blurring what a fraction seems to be. Where do students land after all this on what a fraction is and why its arithmetic works? No wonder so many students reach high school and college mathematics disliking, or even hating fractions. Let’s see if we can turn that around!

Zoom link: https://cornell.zoom.us/j/92415199317

Zoom Link Password: olsume

For more information on OLSUME: https://olsume.org/

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Location: Waltham, MA / Bentley

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Location: Troy, NY

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Location: Hartford, CT

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Check out our Instagram at mit.acro for day-of updates on our classes.

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Location: Waltham, MA

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This exhibition draws on archival materials from the Aga Khan Documentation Center at MIT (AKDC) to explore a century of cultural heritage preservation in Aleppo, Syria. It takes as its point of departure the work of Kamil al-Ghazzi (1853–1933), the pioneering Aleppine historian whose influential three-volume chronicle, Nahr al-Dhahab fī Tārīkh Ḥalab (The River of Gold in the History of Aleppo), was published between 1924 and 1926.

Ink, Stone, and Silver Light presents three modes of documentation—manuscript, built form, and photography—through which Aleppo’s urban memory has been recorded and preserved. Featuring figures such as Michel Écochard and Yasser Tabbaa alongside al-Ghazzi, the exhibition traces overlapping efforts to capture the spirit of a city shaped by commerce, craft, and coexistence. At a time when Syria again confronts upheaval and displacement, these archival fragments offer models for preserving the past while envisioning futures rooted in dignity, knowledge, and place.

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Location: Waltham, MA / Bentley

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The Book Discussion group will host virtual meetings via Zoom. Please write to Maxine Jonas (jonas_m@mit.edu) to be added to their mailing list. They (almost always) meet on the fourth Wednesday of the month, at 11:30am – 1pm.

Our book line-up this year will be:

September 24: Kristin Hannah, The Women October 22: Asmaa Alghoul, A Rebel in Gaza December 10: Edwidge Danticat, Brother I'm Dying January 28: Caroline Criado Perez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men February 25: Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca March 25: Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence April 22: Percival Everett, James May 27: Amor Towles, Rules of Civility

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Location: Waltham, MA / Bentley

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Title:

Abstract:

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We worship with beautiful songs, open conversation about the Scriptures, prayers and a simple sharing of communion around the altar. Then we enjoy dinner together and good company together. Whether you come every week or just drop by once in a while, there is a caring community for you at the Table.

You are truly welcome to come as you are: undergrad, grad, or post-doc; sure of your faith or wondering what it is all about; gay, straight, bi, trans, questioning. Please join us for no-pressure worship and fellowship.

Hosted by the Lutheran Epsicopal Ministry @ MIT. For more information, or to verify gathering times during holiday and vacation periods, please contact chaplains Andrew Heisen (heisen@mit.edu) and Kevin Vetiac (kvet246@mit.edu).

Please note that we will not meet during the week of Thanksgiving nor between Christmas and New Year's Day. Please see our website (le-ministry.mit.edu) for updates on meeting times and locations as well as additional details.

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Location: Schenectady, NY

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Location: Boston, MA / Reggie Lewis Center

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Location: Boston, MA / Reggie Lewis Center

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Talk Abstract: How is the brain built? Even very early in life, developing neuronal circuits are active, responsive to sensory inputs, and drive behavior. Such early life circuit functions both guide circuit formation and also support early social and survival behaviors. This is akin to flying an airplane while still building it. How do developing circuits, despite rapidly changing structure, drive coherent and age-appropriate behaviors? To address this, I focused on the hypothalamic preoptic area. The preoptic area is critical for homeostatic control and social behavior, functions that change dramatically from infancy to adulthood. I established a developmental transcriptomic atlas of ~150 preoptic cell types, including dozens involved in distinct homeostatic and social functions, uncovering (1) surprisingly early cell type diversity; (2) a mosaic pattern in which, at any given age, some cell types are more mature than others, correlating with the maturation of distinct behaviors; and (3) a putative critical period in early infancy, when social experience affects social behavior circuit maturation. These findings lay the foundation for ongoing and future investigations of neuronal circuits underlying social behavior, sleep, and other functions in early life.

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This exhibition draws on archival materials from the Aga Khan Documentation Center at MIT (AKDC) to explore a century of cultural heritage preservation in Aleppo, Syria. It takes as its point of departure the work of Kamil al-Ghazzi (1853–1933), the pioneering Aleppine historian whose influential three-volume chronicle, Nahr al-Dhahab fī Tārīkh Ḥalab (The River of Gold in the History of Aleppo), was published between 1924 and 1926.

Ink, Stone, and Silver Light presents three modes of documentation—manuscript, built form, and photography—through which Aleppo’s urban memory has been recorded and preserved. Featuring figures such as Michel Écochard and Yasser Tabbaa alongside al-Ghazzi, the exhibition traces overlapping efforts to capture the spirit of a city shaped by commerce, craft, and coexistence. At a time when Syria again confronts upheaval and displacement, these archival fragments offer models for preserving the past while envisioning futures rooted in dignity, knowledge, and place.

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Location: Hartford, CT

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Feb 12

Feb 26 (beginning at 6:pm)

March 12

April 23

May (tbd)

Sponsored by MIT Prajnopaya, the Buddhist community ar MIT.

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Location: Medford, MA

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Location: Cambridge, MA

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Location: Waltham, MA

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Location: Boston, MA / Reggie Lewis Center

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Location: Boston, MA / Reggie Lewis Center

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Location: Medford, MA

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Location: Waltham, MA

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Location: Cambridge, MA

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Location: Cambridge, MA

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Location: Teaneck, NJ / Lake Carnegie

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Location: Boston, MA / Reggie Lewis Center

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Location: Cambridge, MA

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Location: Boston, MA / Reggie Lewis Center

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Location: Cambridge, MA

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Location: Hartford, CT

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Location: Schenectady, NY

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Location: Cambridge, MA

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Location: Waltham, MA / Bentley

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Location: Hartford, CT

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Location: Waltham, MA / Bentley

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Welcome to a mesmerizing evening of Tamil Classical Music, presented by MITHAS. Join us on the 28th of March, 2026 for a unique musical journey with the renowned Ganesh & Kumaresh. The Carnatic Violin duo, popularly known as the Violin Brothers, has a reputation for captivating audiences with their enchanting performances. Their music, deeply rooted in the South Indian tradition, is a harmonious blend of contemporary and classical elements that will leave you spellbound.

Meet the Maestros: Ganesh & Kumaresh

Step into the world of Ganesh & Kumaresh, the dynamic duo who have carved their own niche in the South Indian music industry. Hailing from Kanpur, these talented violinists discovered their musical prowess at a tender age. Since 1972, they have been sharing stage and screen, earning them the popular moniker - the Fiddling Monks. Their synchronization, a thing of beauty, holds the power to captivate and transport listeners to a world of musical ecstasy.

Discover Thomas Tull Concert Hall

Thomas Tull Concert Hall, located on the charming Amherst Street in Cambridge, MA, United States, serves as the perfect backdrop for this musical extravaganza. The venue is known for its safety, accessibility, and close proximity to a host of attractions. Ample parking is available for guests. For those looking to indulge in some authentic Indian cuisine before or after the performance, the location boasts several Indian restaurants in the vicinity, promising an evening of culture and cuisine.

Secure Your Seats Today!

Don't miss out on this musical feast. Grab your tickets now! We offer an Early Bird rate of $30.00 for those who love to plan ahead. For others, General tickets are available at $35.00. Book your place and make memories with the enchanting tunes of Ganesh & Kumaresh.

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Location: Troy, NY

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Location: Medford, MA

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Location: Schenectady, NY

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This exhibition draws on archival materials from the Aga Khan Documentation Center at MIT (AKDC) to explore a century of cultural heritage preservation in Aleppo, Syria. It takes as its point of departure the work of Kamil al-Ghazzi (1853–1933), the pioneering Aleppine historian whose influential three-volume chronicle, Nahr al-Dhahab fī Tārīkh Ḥalab (The River of Gold in the History of Aleppo), was published between 1924 and 1926.

Ink, Stone, and Silver Light presents three modes of documentation—manuscript, built form, and photography—through which Aleppo’s urban memory has been recorded and preserved. Featuring figures such as Michel Écochard and Yasser Tabbaa alongside al-Ghazzi, the exhibition traces overlapping efforts to capture the spirit of a city shaped by commerce, craft, and coexistence. At a time when Syria again confronts upheaval and displacement, these archival fragments offer models for preserving the past while envisioning futures rooted in dignity, knowledge, and place.

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Søren Elbech is the Chief Risk Officer at the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB). He previously served as Managing Director and Global Head of Supranational Institutions at J.P. Morgan in New York (2019–2023) and was the first Director General/Treasurer of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank in Beijing (2016–2019). Earlier, he was a Senior Vice President at a global wind-energy firm and served as IDB Treasurer and Chief of the Treasury Division in the Finance Department. He holds Executive MBAs from ESCP Business School (Paris) and BI Norwegian School of Management (Oslo).

This seminar will be held in E40-496 (Pye Room). Lunch will be available. Please RSVP here.

Contact Kate Danahy at kdanahy@mit.edu with any questions.

This event is part of the CIS Global Research & Policy Seminar Series. Join our mailing list here to learn about upcoming seminars in the series.

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Date: Monday (except holidays)

Time: 4:15pm – 5:45pm

Location: Building 14, Room 14N-417

Come by for snacks & tea with Literature Section friends, instructors, & students!

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Shen’s practice is concerned with the materiality of sound and its relationship to the human body through a lens of disruption and experimentation. She creates and manipulates custom-built sculptures and extensions specific to her body to challenge conventional methods of sound production and erode the boundaries between performer, tool, and audience.

Eschewing conventions in harmony and rhythm in favor of extreme textures and gestural tones, Shen uses what she calls “chaotic sound” to oppose signal and information, eluding traditionally embedded meaning. Her work resists passive consumption. Instead, the body as both subject and instrument, using movement and tactility to provoke visceral, often confrontational encounters with sound. Her performances are deliberately physical, unpredictable, and ephemeral—rejecting polish in favor of raw immediacy.

Through a discursive practice spanning sound, performance, installation, sculpture, and non-traditional means of distribution, themes of spectacle, violence, control, and gender are interrogated. The intention is not to comfort or entertain, but to destabilize: to push systems, tools, and traditions until they reveal something unexpected.

Part of ACT’s Spring 2026 Lecture Series, this program is in collaboration with the List Visual Arts Center and Non-Event.

The event is free and open to the public, though registration is required. Register here.

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This exhibition draws on archival materials from the Aga Khan Documentation Center at MIT (AKDC) to explore a century of cultural heritage preservation in Aleppo, Syria. It takes as its point of departure the work of Kamil al-Ghazzi (1853–1933), the pioneering Aleppine historian whose influential three-volume chronicle, Nahr al-Dhahab fī Tārīkh Ḥalab (The River of Gold in the History of Aleppo), was published between 1924 and 1926.

Ink, Stone, and Silver Light presents three modes of documentation—manuscript, built form, and photography—through which Aleppo’s urban memory has been recorded and preserved. Featuring figures such as Michel Écochard and Yasser Tabbaa alongside al-Ghazzi, the exhibition traces overlapping efforts to capture the spirit of a city shaped by commerce, craft, and coexistence. At a time when Syria again confronts upheaval and displacement, these archival fragments offer models for preserving the past while envisioning futures rooted in dignity, knowledge, and place.

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Speaker: Ryan Unger (UC Berkeley) 3:00 PM - 4:00 PM

Speaker: Jeff Schenker (Michigan State University) 4:15 PM - 5:15 PM

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The American Revolution at 250

A series of talks to mark the semiquincentennial of the independence of the United States, open to members of the MIT community. All talks at 3:30pm in 4-265.

March 10, 2026: “Unruly Americans and the Origins of the U.S. Constitution”

Woody Holton, McCausland Professor of History, University of South Carolina

March 31, 2026: “The American Revolution as Origin Myth”

Michael Hattem, Associate Director of the Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute and author of The Memory of ’76: The Revolution in American History

April 14, 2026: "The Civil War as the Second American Revolution"

Manisha Sinha, James L. and Shirley A. Draper Chair in American History, University of Connecticut

May 5, 2026: “American Independence: Decision and Declaration”

Jack Rakove, Coe Professor of History and American Studies and Professor of Political Science, Emeritus, Stanford University

For further information, please contact Kathleen Lopes at kalopes@mit.edu.

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Host: Hernandez Moura Silva

Title: "The Energetics of Integrating Brain and Body"

This lecture will be in honor of Dr. Francis O. Schmitt.

The Biology Colloquium is a weekly seminar held throughout the academic year — featuring distinguished speakers in many areas of the biological sciences from universities and institutions worldwide. More information on speakers, their affiliations, and titles of their talks will be added as available. Unless otherwise stated, the Colloquium will be held live in Stata 32-123 (Kirsch auditorium) Contact Margaret Cabral with questions.

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Pre-registration is required to participate and snacks will be served.

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The Embodied Intelligence Mission at SQI broadly addresses how we perceive the world around us and integrate this information to plan and complete tasks. Scientific goals include research into how perception, planning, and action interface, how we learn efficiently from small data sets and the creation of behavioral benchmark tasks. Engineering goals include task-based benchmarks derived from natural intelligence and methods for composing artificial systems to achieve those tasks.

PIs Nancy Kanwisher and Leslie Kaelbling will present an update on the latest research being done in the Embodied Intelligence Mission on Tuesday, March 31st at 4:00 PM in 45-792.

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Location: Hartford, CT

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Born in Mexico in 1937. He earned two degrees in Engineering and Economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), a Master’s degree in Metallurgical Engineering from the Centre d’Études Supérieures de Sidérurgie (CESSID) in France, and also pursued cello studies with Imre Hartman, Pierre Fournier, and Leonard Rose.

He worked at the major steel company Fundidora Monterrey, eventually becoming its Chief Executive Officer. In 1977, he resigned from his business career to devote himself entirely to music.

He has performed in many of the leading concert halls in the United States, Canada, Latin America, Europe, and Asia. He has enriched the cello repertoire and has premiered and recorded 114 new works dedicated to him by composers from a wide range of countries. He has performed with Yo-Yo Ma in Mexico, the United States, Spain, and other countries in concerts featuring works for two cellos dedicated to both artists.

He is the author of 14 books, some of which have been translated into several languages and presented in multiple countries.

Awards: Mexico’s National Award for Sciences and Arts; France’s Order of Arts and Letters; Spain’s Order of Civil Merit (Commander); Russia’s Pushkin Medal; awards from the Mexican Cultural Seminar; and honors from Yale University, MIT, Indiana University, TCU, Spain, and many others.

He is a member of the Mexican Academy of the Spanish Language, a corresponding member of the Royal Spanish Academy, of the Chilean Academy of the Spanish Language, of the Chilean Academy of Fine Arts , and an honorary member of the Ecuadorian Academy of the Spanish Language. He is a full lmember of the Seminary of Mexican Cultural Seminar.

About the Emerson/Harris Program for Private Study

Support for private musical study is available for students through the Emerson/Harris Program (E/HP), which offers merit-based financial awards for outstanding achievement on instruments or voice in classical, jazz, or world music. Each academic year, the program awards Scholarships and Fellowships to nearly seventy students who commit to a full year’s study and participate in the musical life of MIT.

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Location: Medford, MA

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Check out our Instagram at mit.acro for day-of updates on our classes.

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Hosted by New Engineering Education Transformation (NEET) and MIT Office of Sustainability

Open to all MIT undergraduates. RSVP by 10:00 AM, Monday, March 16.

1st Place Prize: $300 TechCASH2nd Place Prize: $150 TechCASH$20 TechCASH for each participant

Tackle a challenge related to the MIT campus food system and present your ideas using a systems thinking approach to win TechCASH in this competition hosted by the New Engineering Education Transformation (NEET) program in collaboration with the MIT Office of Sustainability.

Participants must attend ONE of the information sessions below AND the team presentations to participate in the competition and receive any TechCASH.

Information Sessions (Choose One):

Tuesday, March 17, 6:30 PM–7:30 PM (Virtual or 3-001)Wednesday, March 18, 6:30 PM–7:30 PM (Virtual)Team Presentations:

Tuesday, March 31, 6:30 PM–7:30 PM (Virtual)Announcement of Winners:

Monday, April 6, EOD (Email)

Learn more and RSVP now!

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This exhibition draws on archival materials from the Aga Khan Documentation Center at MIT (AKDC) to explore a century of cultural heritage preservation in Aleppo, Syria. It takes as its point of departure the work of Kamil al-Ghazzi (1853–1933), the pioneering Aleppine historian whose influential three-volume chronicle, Nahr al-Dhahab fī Tārīkh Ḥalab (The River of Gold in the History of Aleppo), was published between 1924 and 1926.

Ink, Stone, and Silver Light presents three modes of documentation—manuscript, built form, and photography—through which Aleppo’s urban memory has been recorded and preserved. Featuring figures such as Michel Écochard and Yasser Tabbaa alongside al-Ghazzi, the exhibition traces overlapping efforts to capture the spirit of a city shaped by commerce, craft, and coexistence. At a time when Syria again confronts upheaval and displacement, these archival fragments offer models for preserving the past while envisioning futures rooted in dignity, knowledge, and place.

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Summary: Polarization is a defining feature of politics in the United States and many other democracies. Yet although there is much research focusing on the effects of polarization on domestic politics, little is known about how polarization influences international cooperation and conflict. Myrick argues that polarization reshapes the nature of constraints on democratic leaders, which in turn erodes the advantages democracies have in foreign affairs. Drawing on a range of evidence, including cross-national analyses, observational and experimental public opinion research, descriptive data on the behavior of politicians, and interviews with policymakers, Myrick traces the pathways by which polarization undermines each of the democratic advantages. Turning to the case of contemporary US foreign policy, Myrick shows that as its political leaders become less responsive to the public and less accountable to political opposition, the United States loses both reliability as an ally and credibility as an adversary.

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UPCOMING:

March 4: Killian Glass Howey (G), Percussion

Percussionist Killian Glass Howey presents Roger Zare’s Bioluminescence and additional vibraphone works, creating a sonic space where listeners can sink into layered vibrations and allow their thoughts to wander.

April 1: Aurora Zhang (G), Piano

Pianist Aurora Zhang, part of ORSEL's Addir Fellows Interfaith Dialogue Program, presents an interfaith program of contemplative music from different traditions.

May 6: Skandaprasad Rao (G), Indian classical flute and voice

Indian classical flutist and vocalist Skandaprasad Rao presents songs and improvisations for reflection and contemplation.

PAST:

Christine Southworth ('02): Snowflake Sonifications (NEW DATE: February 4)

Christine Southworth’s Snowflake Sonifications transforms microscopic images of melting snowflakes into evolving sound and visual environments that respond in real time. Its organic structures—delicate, unpredictable, and constantly shifting—intertwine with improvisations by Southworth (electric guitar) and Evan Ziporyn (electronic wind instrument), creating a dialogue with the generative sounds and imagery that blurs the line between nature’s patterns and human expression.

Evan Ziporyn: More Sonic Holograms (October 1)

Evan Ziporyn, Kenan Sahin Distinguished Professor of Music at MIT & Faculty Director of MIT CAST, weaves live clarinet, bass clarinet, wind synth, effects boxes and loop pedals into a multidimensional, immersive and meditative auditory journey.

Valerie K Chen, cello: Midday Contemplation (Nov 5)

Join EECS PhD student Valerie K. Chen for a midday contemplation of resilience, reconciliation, and compassion through the voice of the solo cello.

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Title: On regularity theory for generalized surfaces

Abstract:

The natural question of how much smoother integral currents are with respect to their initial definition goes back to the late 1950s and to the origin of the theory with the seminal article of Federer and Fleming. In this seminar I will explain how closely one can approximate an integral current representing a given homology class by a smooth submanifold. Part of what will be discussed is derived from a joint study with William Browder and Camillo De Lellis, and builds on earlier preliminary work by the former author together with Frederick Almgren.

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☛ Tentative — speaker availability to be confirmed ☚

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Title:

Abstract:

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Location: Hartford, CT

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We worship with beautiful songs, open conversation about the Scriptures, prayers and a simple sharing of communion around the altar. Then we enjoy dinner together and good company together. Whether you come every week or just drop by once in a while, there is a caring community for you at the Table.

You are truly welcome to come as you are: undergrad, grad, or post-doc; sure of your faith or wondering what it is all about; gay, straight, bi, trans, questioning. Please join us for no-pressure worship and fellowship.

Hosted by the Lutheran Epsicopal Ministry @ MIT. For more information, or to verify gathering times during holiday and vacation periods, please contact chaplains Andrew Heisen (heisen@mit.edu) and Kevin Vetiac (kvet246@mit.edu).

Please note that we will not meet during the week of Thanksgiving nor between Christmas and New Year's Day. Please see our website (le-ministry.mit.edu) for updates on meeting times and locations as well as additional details.

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Arthur Sze is a poet, translator, and editor, and in 2025 he was named the 25th Poet Laureate of the United States.

He is the author of twelve books of poetry, including Into the Hush (2025) and The White Orchard: Selected Interviews, Essays, and Poems (2025); The Glass Constellation: New and Collected Poems (2021); Sight Lines (2019), for which he won the National Book Award; Compass Rose (2014); The Ginkgo Light (2009); Quipu (2005); The Redshifting Web: Poems 1970–1998 (1998); and Archipelago (1995). He also authored Transient Worlds: On Translating Poetry (forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press, 2026), The Silk Dragon II: Translations of Chinese Poetry (2024), and edited Chinese Writers on Writing (2010). His poetry has been translated into fifteen languages, including Chinese, Dutch, German, Portuguese, and Spanish.

Sze received the 2025 Bollingen Prize for lifetime achievement in American poetry, the 2024 Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry, 2024 National Book Foundation Science + Literature award, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Shelley Memorial Award, the Jackson Poetry Prize, a Lannan Literary Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship, among others.

A chancellor emeritus of the Academy of American Poets and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he was the 2023–2024 Mohr Visiting Poet at Stanford University. Professor emeritus at the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA), Sze was the first poet laureate of Santa Fe, where he lives with his wife, the poet Carol Moldaw.

Presented by Comparative Media Studies/Writing and the William Corbett Poetry Series, with Lit@MIT and the MIT Press Bookstore.

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Location: Schenectady, NY

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This exhibition draws on archival materials from the Aga Khan Documentation Center at MIT (AKDC) to explore a century of cultural heritage preservation in Aleppo, Syria. It takes as its point of departure the work of Kamil al-Ghazzi (1853–1933), the pioneering Aleppine historian whose influential three-volume chronicle, Nahr al-Dhahab fī Tārīkh Ḥalab (The River of Gold in the History of Aleppo), was published between 1924 and 1926.

Ink, Stone, and Silver Light presents three modes of documentation—manuscript, built form, and photography—through which Aleppo’s urban memory has been recorded and preserved. Featuring figures such as Michel Écochard and Yasser Tabbaa alongside al-Ghazzi, the exhibition traces overlapping efforts to capture the spirit of a city shaped by commerce, craft, and coexistence. At a time when Syria again confronts upheaval and displacement, these archival fragments offer models for preserving the past while envisioning futures rooted in dignity, knowledge, and place.

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This series was organized by Rania Ghosn, Associate Professor in the Department of Architecture and Director of the SMArchS Urbanism Program.

GEO–MATTERS asks how designers might respond to the earth’s matter, forces and signals. The lecture series attends to matter and material ecologies, including the unruly disturbances intensified by the climate crisis. Here, design works with earth systems, tracking material flows—greenhouse gases, heat, sediment, water, biomass, waste—across the extended territories, from quarries and farms to Arctic coastlines. Media also matters for geo-design because the globe is already an image, produced through systems that sense, record, and visualize the Earth— satellite tiles, climate-model outputs, air-quality dashboards, LiDAR point clouds, GIS layers, and more. GEO-MATTERS attends thus to geographic situatedness, material ecologies, and imaging systems through which Earth is assembled and geo–design is practiced.

For Thursday April 2nd:
Speaker: Roi Salgueiro Barrio. MIT SA+P)
Respondent: Sarah Williams

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Talk Title: Subjective Feelings to Brain Mechanisms: Advancing the Science of Mood through Epistemic Iteration

Abstract:

What happens in our brains to generate our moods? We don't yet know. Unlike functions such as memory, which can be measured objectively, mood is typically assessed with subjective ratings, such as “On a scale of 1 to 5, how excited (or upset) are you?” At the same time, our most precise neural measurements come from nonhuman animals, who cannot report how they feel. Mood is an extreme example of a central problem in neuroscience: we need measurements to create understanding, but we need understanding to design good measurements. Once we fully understand mood, we'll know exactly how to measure it (for instance, in an animal). But how do we get there?

In this talk, I will draw on the notion of “epistemic iteration,” proposed by the philosopher Hasok Chang, to describe how scientists tackled the conceptually analogous problem of understanding temperature in the 17th century. Building on this idea, we have developed a new approach to bridge the gap between behavioral and neural measures of mood. I will describe how we have used this strategy to identify a strong neural correlate of mood, reflected in the heterogeneous, persistent responses of individual neurons in monkey anterior insular cortex — a brain area implicated in human mood via lesions, fMRI, and microstimulation. Finally, I will describe how these insights are leading us to detailed accounts of how the brain converts experiences into mood and the mechanisms that keep mood within a healthy range, rather than spiraling out of control.

Bio:

Nicole Rust, PhD, is the Rose Family Endowed Term Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. She received her B.S. in molecular biology from the University of Idaho, her Ph.D. in Neural Science from New York University, and she completed her postdoctoral training at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dr. Rust's research focuses on understanding mood and memory in the brain. She is the author of the 2025 book Elusive Cures: Why Neuroscience Hasn't Solve Brain Disorders and How We Can Change That. She also serves as an editor for BrainFacts.org (a source that shares stories of scientific discovery from neuroscientists around the world) and as a contributing editor for The Transmitter (a leading brain research news magazine).​​​​​​​

Dr. Rust's research and teaching have been recognized by numerous awards, including the Troland Research Award from the National Academy of Sciences. She is an elected member of the Memory Disorders Research Society, the recipient of a McKnight Scholar Award, a CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation, an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, and the Charles Ludwig Distinguished Teaching Award. She is currently a Simons Foundation Pivot Fellow.

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The series explores how collaboration, data, and design are shaping decisions about energy systems, buildings, and food. These choices affect emissions, health and well-being, and everyday life on campus.

Each session features MIT staff and collaborators working at the intersection of operations, planning, and climate action, with time for discussion and Q&A. Additional webinar sessions may be added in the future as the series evolves. Register once to attend one, two, or all three sessions.

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Title:

Abstract:

Zoom: https://mit.zoom.us/j/91800438944. For the Passcode, please contact Pavel Etingof at etingof@math.mit.edu.

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Location: Medford, MA

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Location: Waltham, MA / Bentley

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Location: Waltham, MA

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MITHAS and LearnQuest present an enchanting evening of Tamil Classical Music with Lalgudi GJR Krishnan and Rupak Kulkarni's Violin and Flute Jugalbandhi. This musical extravaganza is set to take place on the 3rd of April, 2026, at the prestigious Thomas Tull Concert Hall in Cambridge, MA. Be prepared to be captivated by the harmonious blend of violin and flute, as these maestros take you on a magical journey through the realms of classical music.

Meet the Maestros: Lalgudi GJR Krishnan and Rupak Kulkarni

Experience the magic of music with Lalgudi GJR Krishnan and Rupak Kulkarni, two accomplished musicians who have devoted their lives to the pursuit of classical music. Krishnan, a violin virtuoso, and Kulkarni, a flute maestro, will captivate you with their skill and passion. Their rich musical backgrounds, combined with their dedication to their craft, make this Jugalbandhi a must-watch for any classical music enthusiast.

The Majestic Thomas Tull Concert Hall

Located on Amherst Street in the historic city of Cambridge, Thomas Tull Concert Hall is renowned for its stellar acoustics and comfortable seating. This venue in Massachusetts, United States, is easily accessible and assures all attendees a safe and enjoyable experience. In addition to the concert, patrons can take advantage of the nearby attractions, including a variety of Indian restaurants that offer authentic cuisine. Parking facilities are also available for your convenience.

Securing Your Seat at the Concert

General admission tickets for the concert are priced at $35.00. Don't miss out on this unique opportunity to witness a mesmerizing blend of violin and flute performed by two of the most respected artists in the classical music scene. Secure your seat and prepare for an unforgettable evening of music and melody.

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Location: Waltham, MA / Bentley

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Location: Cambridge, MA

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Location: Teaneck, NJ / Lake Carnegie

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Location: Boston, MA / Reggie Lewis Center

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Location: Cambridge, MA

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Location: Cambridge, MA

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Location: Boston, MA / Reggie Lewis Center

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Location: Medford, MA

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Location: Cambridge, MA

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Location: Hartford, CT

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Location: Waltham, MA / Bentley

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Location: Waltham, MA

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Location: Troy, NY

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Location: Medford, MA

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Location: Cambridge, MA

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Location: Schenectady, NY

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Location: Waltham, MA / Bentley

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Location: Hartford, CT

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Location: Cambridge, MA

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Location: Cambridge, MA

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Location: Cambridge, MA

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This exhibition draws on archival materials from the Aga Khan Documentation Center at MIT (AKDC) to explore a century of cultural heritage preservation in Aleppo, Syria. It takes as its point of departure the work of Kamil al-Ghazzi (1853–1933), the pioneering Aleppine historian whose influential three-volume chronicle, Nahr al-Dhahab fī Tārīkh Ḥalab (The River of Gold in the History of Aleppo), was published between 1924 and 1926.

Ink, Stone, and Silver Light presents three modes of documentation—manuscript, built form, and photography—through which Aleppo’s urban memory has been recorded and preserved. Featuring figures such as Michel Écochard and Yasser Tabbaa alongside al-Ghazzi, the exhibition traces overlapping efforts to capture the spirit of a city shaped by commerce, craft, and coexistence. At a time when Syria again confronts upheaval and displacement, these archival fragments offer models for preserving the past while envisioning futures rooted in dignity, knowledge, and place.

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Title:

Abstract:

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She Runs the World is the powerful story of Olympic champion Allyson Felix as she challenges her sponsor Nike after being financially penalized during her pregnancy. The documentary highlights the need for maternal rights in professional sports.

The screening will be followed by a panel moderated by Sandy Alexander (Associate Professor, Literature Section)

In conversation with:

Marzyeh Ghassemi (Associate Professor, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science & the Institute for Medical Engineering & Science) Angelica Castro-Salazar (Mechanical Engineering and student-athlete)

Cinema at the Nexus is an institute-wide film series showcasing films/documentaries that grapple with pressing issues of our day aiming to make some sense of what we are experiencing today.

Supported by the SHASS Dean’s grant, sponsored by the MIT Libraries and the Literature Section.

Pizza and light refreshments will be served. Registration is encouraged but not required.

Questions? Contact doylec@mit.edu, szarko@mit.edu, or turnator@mit.edu

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Date: Monday (except holidays)

Time: 4:15pm – 5:45pm

Location: Building 14, Room 14N-417

Come by for snacks & tea with Literature Section friends, instructors, & students!

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This exhibition draws on archival materials from the Aga Khan Documentation Center at MIT (AKDC) to explore a century of cultural heritage preservation in Aleppo, Syria. It takes as its point of departure the work of Kamil al-Ghazzi (1853–1933), the pioneering Aleppine historian whose influential three-volume chronicle, Nahr al-Dhahab fī Tārīkh Ḥalab (The River of Gold in the History of Aleppo), was published between 1924 and 1926.

Ink, Stone, and Silver Light presents three modes of documentation—manuscript, built form, and photography—through which Aleppo’s urban memory has been recorded and preserved. Featuring figures such as Michel Écochard and Yasser Tabbaa alongside al-Ghazzi, the exhibition traces overlapping efforts to capture the spirit of a city shaped by commerce, craft, and coexistence. At a time when Syria again confronts upheaval and displacement, these archival fragments offer models for preserving the past while envisioning futures rooted in dignity, knowledge, and place.

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Title: SCORE with Data

Abstract: SCORE with Data is an NSF-funded initiative that uses the popularity of sports and sports analytics to open low-barrier pathways into statistics, data science, and STEM. Responding to growing demand for data skills and limited access to resources, SCORE with Data equips educators with peer‑reviewed instructional modules, professional development, and a rich repository of sports data sets.

Learn more at: https://scorenetwork.org

Zoom link: https://cornell.zoom.us/j/92415199317

Zoom Link Password: olsume

For more information on OLSUME: https://olsume.org/

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Host: Yukiko Yamashita

Title: "Controlling Aedes aegypti populations and how they sense people."

The Biology Colloquium is a weekly seminar held throughout the academic year — featuring distinguished speakers in many areas of the biological sciences from universities and institutions worldwide. More information on speakers, their affiliations, and titles of their talks will be added as available. Unless otherwise stated, the Colloquium will be held live in Stata 32-123 (Kirsch auditorium) Contact Margaret Cabral with questions.

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Pre-registration is required to participate and snacks will be served.

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Location: Hartford, CT

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Check out our Instagram at mit.acro for day-of updates on our classes.

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Location: Schenectady, NY

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Since its launch in 2001, OCW has empowered millions worldwide with free access to MIT course materials. This anniversary offers a moment to recognize the vibrant ecosystem that sustains open knowledge as a public good—and to reaffirm MIT’s mission-driven leadership in ensuring that high-quality learning remains accessible to all.

Join us for an engaging, dynamic, and celebratory program featuring MIT leadership, pioneering faculty, global learners, open education innovators, and philanthropic partners. Together, we will explore OCW’s legacy, its role in the evolving open ecosystem, and the opportunities and challenges ahead.

Who Should Attend
This gathering welcomes:

Learners and educators worldwide who use OCW to teach, learn, and create new opportunitiesPhilanthropic supporters and donors who power open educationMIT faculty, students, and staff invested in sharing knowledge freely and openlyCollaborators across the global open education and open knowledge ecosystems

Thursday, April 8, 2026 online and on campus (MIT Welcome Center)

9:15-10:00AM Light breakfast and refreshments available.

Symposium Program

10:00–10:10 AM
From Bold Idea to Global Legacy: 25 Years of MIT OpenCourseWare
Welcome remarks from Dimitris Bertsimas and Curt Newton.

10:10–10:30 AM
Opening Remarks from MIT President Sally Kornbluth
President Kornbluth will reflect on OCW’s impact and the Institute’s leadership in open knowledge.

10:30–11:00 AM
OCW @ 25: A Story in Motion
Premiere of a new short documentary celebrating OCW’s origins, influence, and global reach, followed by a panel with key MIT contributors who have helped shape OCW’s worldwide influence.

11:15 AM–12:15 PM
Learning Without Limits: How OCW Opens Opportunity for Curious Minds Worldwide
A conversation with learners and educators whose stories reveal the transformative power of open knowledge—showing how OCW has sparked curiosity, expanded opportunity, and inspired people worldwide to imagine new possibilities for themselves and their communities.

12:15–1:00 PM Lunch Reception

1:00–1:45 PM
Knowledge Without Walls: MIT’s Ethos of Open
A cross-campus look at MIT’s leadership in all forms of open knowledge—expanding the open education legacy of OCW and championing knowledge as a public good. This session highlights how practices in open source technologies, open access, open science and data, and open publishing have evolved across MIT and influenced global movements for accessible and equitable learning.

2:00–3:00 PM
Catalysts of Open: Philanthropy’s Role in the Open Education Movement
A conversation with supporters and partners from the open education funding community about the essential role that philanthropy has played—and continues to play—in driving forward a global movement centered on access, equity, and the belief that knowledge should be a public good.

3:15–4:15 PM
The Future of MIT Open Education
A forward-looking dialogue on the commitments and evolution of OCW and MIT’s open learning initiatives, including mobile learning, language translation, AI-enabled personalization and learning supports, and sustaining open education’s place in future knowledge landscapes.

To attend the symposium in-person, please register here.

To attend the symposium online, please register at the following links:

10-11:00AM From Bold Idea to Global Legacy: 25 Years of MIT OpenCourseWare

11:15AM-12:15PM Learning Without Limits: How OCW Opens Opportunity for Curious Minds Worldwide

1:00-1:45PM Knowledge Without Walls: MIT’s Ethos of Open

2:00PM-3:00PM Catalysts of Open: Philanthropy’s Role in the Open Education Movement

3:15PM-4:15PM The Future of MIT Open Education

All sessions will be streamed live on the MIT OpenCourseWare YouTube Channel. They will be recorded and made available online after the event.

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This exhibition draws on archival materials from the Aga Khan Documentation Center at MIT (AKDC) to explore a century of cultural heritage preservation in Aleppo, Syria. It takes as its point of departure the work of Kamil al-Ghazzi (1853–1933), the pioneering Aleppine historian whose influential three-volume chronicle, Nahr al-Dhahab fī Tārīkh Ḥalab (The River of Gold in the History of Aleppo), was published between 1924 and 1926.

Ink, Stone, and Silver Light presents three modes of documentation—manuscript, built form, and photography—through which Aleppo’s urban memory has been recorded and preserved. Featuring figures such as Michel Écochard and Yasser Tabbaa alongside al-Ghazzi, the exhibition traces overlapping efforts to capture the spirit of a city shaped by commerce, craft, and coexistence. At a time when Syria again confronts upheaval and displacement, these archival fragments offer models for preserving the past while envisioning futures rooted in dignity, knowledge, and place.

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Each session will include:

An overview of the MIT HEALS intiative and the HEALS Seed Grant programBest practices and lessons learned from last year's Seed Grant proposals (how can we help you maximize the success of your proposal)Networking with fellow junior facultyOpportunities for feedback on your proposal or ideas; support for identifying additional collaborative opportunities. Open discussion and Q&A

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Title: The theta correspondence and functoriality

Abstract: In a letter to Howe in 1975, Langlands speculated that the theta correspondence could be an instance of functoriality. This later turned out to be false as the theta correspondence does not always preserve L-packets. In 1989, Adams proposed a remedy: instead of L-packets, the theta correspondence should preserve A-packets. Mœglin showed that Adams was mostly correct, but also that there are examples where Adams' conjecture fails: there exists a representation lying in an A-packet whose theta lift does not lie in any A-packet. The goal of this talk is to generalize Adams' conjecture to ABV-packets (also called micro packets). We will discuss how the generalization explains the failure of Adams' conjecture, along with providing some evidence for the generalization.

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Marko Lončar, Harvard University

Marko Lončar is Tiantsai Lin Professor of Electrical Engineering at Harvard's John A Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS). Lončar received his Diploma from University of Belgrade (R. Serbia) in 1997, and PhD from Caltech in 2003 (with Axel Scherer), both in Electrical Engineering. After completing his postdoctoral studies at Harvard (with Federico Capasso), he joined Harvard faculty in 2006. Lončar is expert in nanophotonics and nanofabrication, and his group has done pioneering work in the field of quantum and nonlinear nanophotonics. In particular, Lončar is recognized for his work on the development of diamond and thin film lithium niobate nanophotonic platforms. Lončar has co-authored more than 250 manuscripts in top scientific journals and has given more than 300 invited talks and seminars. He has received NSF CAREER Award in 2009, Sloan Fellowship in 2010, Marko Jarić Foundation Award in 2020, and Microoptics Conference Award in 2023. In recognition of his teaching activities, Lončar has been awarded Harvard University Levenson Prize for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching (2012), and has been named Harvard College Professor in 2017. Lončar is Fellow of Optical Society of America and IEEE, as well as Senior Member of SPIE. He is co-founder of HyperLight Corporation (Cambridge, MA), VC backed startup commercializing lithium-niobate technology developed in his lab.

Reception to follow: R&D Commons, Bldg 32 – 4th floor

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Speaker: Catherine Lord, Ph.D.
Affiliation: Distinguished Professor of Psychiatry and Education, David Geffen School of Medicine, University of California Los Angeles

Host: Dr. Mriganka Sur

Talk title: Trajectories in Autism from 2 to 34; What can we learn from them?

Abstract: For more than 30 years, our group has followed individuals first referred for possible autism under age 3 into adulthood in a longitudinal, observational study of developmental trajectories in autism. I will describe findings on stability and change in autism symptoms, language and cognitive development, and adaptive functioning, with particular attention to early language trajectories and the marked heterogeneity in adult outcomes. The goal is to highlight how these long-term trajectories can inform our understanding of neurobiological heterogeneity and clarify potential pathways to change across the lifespan.

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Location: Waltham, MA / Bentley

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Title:

Abstract:

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Location: Hartford, CT

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Location: Medford, MA

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We worship with beautiful songs, open conversation about the Scriptures, prayers and a simple sharing of communion around the altar. Then we enjoy dinner together and good company together. Whether you come every week or just drop by once in a while, there is a caring community for you at the Table.

You are truly welcome to come as you are: undergrad, grad, or post-doc; sure of your faith or wondering what it is all about; gay, straight, bi, trans, questioning. Please join us for no-pressure worship and fellowship.

Hosted by the Lutheran Epsicopal Ministry @ MIT. For more information, or to verify gathering times during holiday and vacation periods, please contact chaplains Andrew Heisen (heisen@mit.edu) and Kevin Vetiac (kvet246@mit.edu).

Please note that we will not meet during the week of Thanksgiving nor between Christmas and New Year's Day. Please see our website (le-ministry.mit.edu) for updates on meeting times and locations as well as additional details.

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Location: Waltham, MA / Bentley

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The 11th Annual MIT Sloan New Space Age Conference (NSAC) aims to bring together industry professionals, students, and academics to address the key opportunities and challenges in developing the commercial space industry.

This year's theme is: "Space as the Next Frontier - How Earth Industry is Preparing for Orbit and Beyond"

Join us as we give the spotlight to influential leaders and organizations at the frontier of innovation, strategy, and policy, who are pathfinding the way to the next generation of the global space economy.

Visit the Conference Website for the latest information!

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This exhibition draws on archival materials from the Aga Khan Documentation Center at MIT (AKDC) to explore a century of cultural heritage preservation in Aleppo, Syria. It takes as its point of departure the work of Kamil al-Ghazzi (1853–1933), the pioneering Aleppine historian whose influential three-volume chronicle, Nahr al-Dhahab fī Tārīkh Ḥalab (The River of Gold in the History of Aleppo), was published between 1924 and 1926.

Ink, Stone, and Silver Light presents three modes of documentation—manuscript, built form, and photography—through which Aleppo’s urban memory has been recorded and preserved. Featuring figures such as Michel Écochard and Yasser Tabbaa alongside al-Ghazzi, the exhibition traces overlapping efforts to capture the spirit of a city shaped by commerce, craft, and coexistence. At a time when Syria again confronts upheaval and displacement, these archival fragments offer models for preserving the past while envisioning futures rooted in dignity, knowledge, and place.

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This series was organized by Rania Ghosn, Associate Professor in the Department of Architecture and Director of the SMArchS Urbanism Program.

GEO–MATTERS asks how designers might respond to the earth’s matter, forces and signals. The lecture series attends to matter and material ecologies, including the unruly disturbances intensified by the climate crisis. Here, design works with earth systems, tracking material flows—greenhouse gases, heat, sediment, water, biomass, waste—across the extended territories, from quarries and farms to Arctic coastlines. Media also matters for geo-design because the globe is already an image, produced through systems that sense, record, and visualize the Earth— satellite tiles, climate-model outputs, air-quality dashboards, LiDAR point clouds, GIS layers, and more. GEO-MATTERS attends thus to geographic situatedness, material ecologies, and imaging systems through which Earth is assembled and geo–design is practiced.

For Thursday April 9th:
Speaker: Mae-ling Lokko, Yale Architecture
Respondent: Caitlin Mueller

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Abstract: English speech flexibly recombines 44 phonemes into more than 20,000 words and limitless phrases. Here we identify a novel neural code supporting combinatorial vocal control in budgerigar parrots. Deep learning–based acoustic analyses show that both English-imitated and natural warble songs are composed of subsyllabic acoustic elements that are flexibly reused across acoustic contexts, analogous to phoneme reuse in words. Such reuse poses a scaling problem for songbird-inspired timing-based codes, which require distinct neural sequences for distinct syllables even when syllables share acoustic components. We identified neurons in the parrot frontal cortical nucleus MO that exhibit sparse bursts locked to reused acoustic elements independent of syllable identity, timing, or surrounding acoustic context. These results provide the first evidence for a sparse, acoustically grounded vocal-motor code that can be flexibly reused to assemble a large and combinatorial vocal repertoire.

Bio: Jesse trained as an MD/PhD, developing an early interest in the neural circuits underlying movement disorders such as Parkinson’s disease and dystonia. Motivated by the limits of existing treatments, he left clinical medicine to pursue basic research on motor control and learning, completing postdoctoral training with Michael Fee at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he used songbirds to study basal ganglia–dependent trial-and-error learning. At Cornell University, Jesse leads a comparative systems neuroscience lab studying motor control across songbirds, parrots, and mice, integrating high-density electrophysiology, closed-loop optogenetics, and machine-learning–based behavioral analysis to understand how distributed brain circuits generate natural behavior.

Followed by a reception with food and drink in 3rd floor atrium

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