Mon 12 May 16:15: Normalisation, adaptation, and the balance of excitation and inhibition
Abstract not available
- Speaker: Yashar Ahmadian, Dept of Engineering, University of Cambridge
- Monday 12 May 2025, 16:15-18:00
- Venue: Hodgkin-Huxley Seminar Room.
- Series: Adrian Seminars in Neuroscience; organiser: Dr Máté Lengyel.
Fri 25 Apr 08:45: Stereo-photogrammetry of reef manta rays: insights into aggregation, maturity, and sexual dimorphism
Niv Froman is a marine biologist, PhD candidate at the University of Cambridge, Principal Researcher at the Manta Trust, and Director of Manta Expeditions. With over a decade of experience in the Maldives, Niv’s work focuses on the reproductive ecology, physiology, and behavior of mobulid rays. He uses cutting-edge techniques like ultrasonography and stereo-video photogrammetry to study wild populations and inform conservation strategies. His passion for manta rays began with firsthand encounters in the field and has since evolved into a career dedicated to their research and protection.
Chaired by Elizabeth Murchison and Sophia Belkhir
- Speaker: Niv Froman, Department of Veterinary Medicine
- Friday 25 April 2025, 08:45-10:00
- Venue: LT2.
- Series: Friday Morning Seminars, Dept of Veterinary Medicine; organiser: Fiona Roby.
Fri 02 May 08:45: A novel approach to the maxillary nerve: The Palatine Technique
Chaired by Muriel Dresen and Andrew Conlan
- Speaker: Iliana Antonopoulou , Department of Veterinary Medicine
- Friday 02 May 2025, 08:45-10:00
- Venue: LT2.
- Series: Friday Morning Seminars, Dept of Veterinary Medicine; organiser: Fiona Roby.
Tue 15 Apr 14:00: Quantum geometry effects in flat bands
By endowing the Hilbert space with a metric and a curvature, the modern theory of solids resorts to tools from differential geometry and topology to analyze the physical properties of electrons in a crystal. After introducing the concept of the quantum geometric tensor, I will explore the implications of the quantum geometry to flat bands, where the quasiparticles have zero group velocity. I will then address the possibility of using pumped light in flat Chern bands to create out-of-equilibrium excitons with finite vorticity in momentum space. Those excitons, called topological excitons, have their vorticity set by the difference between the Chern numbers in the conduction and valence bands. Topological excitons can be found optically through the non-linear Hall effect and can condense into a novel type of topological neutral superfluid with profile wavefunctions in momentum space that carry a finite vorticity.
- Speaker: Bruno Uchoa, University of Oklahoma
- Tuesday 15 April 2025, 14:00-15:30
- Venue: Seminar Room 3, RDC.
- Series: Theory of Condensed Matter; organiser: Gaurav.
Thu 29 May 15:30: Mobilizing medicine
For more than 60 years, the United States has trained fewer physicians than it needs, relying instead on the economically expedient option of soliciting immigrant physicians trained at the expense of other countries. In this talk, I will examine the first large scale migration initiated during the Cold War with the passage of the Hart-Celler Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. This bill expedited the entry of Foreign Medical Graduates (FMGs) from postcolonial Asian nations and directed them to provide care in shortage areas throughout the country in exchange for legal status. Although this arrangement was conceived as a temporary measure, it has become a permanent feature of the US medical system with foreign physicians comprising a quarter of the total physician labor force. This neocolonial dynamic has entrenched a stratified healthcare system; foreign physicians are directed to America’s marginalized communities, thereby disincentivizing organized medicine from addressing the structural conditions that perpetually produce labor shortages. The ubiquitous and integral presence of foreign physicians not only reveals the racialized operations of US medicine, but it also makes visible how the political economy of care writ large operates in our globalized present.
- Speaker: Eram Alam (Harvard University)
- Thursday 29 May 2025, 15:30-17:00
- Venue: Hopkinson Lecture Theatre, New Museums Site.
- Series: Departmental Seminars in History and Philosophy of Science; organiser: Dr. Rosanna Dent.
Thu 22 May 16:00: Pinosaur redux: whose lives count in histories of extinction?
Joint seminar with the World History Seminar; start time 4pm
In 1994, David Noble, a Field Officer for the Wollemi National Park, in New South Wales, came across a tree he did not recognize in a narrow canyon. Quickly dubbed the Wollemi pine, the tree proved to be an unknown species whose evolution stretched back to the lost worlds of the dinosaurs, before the formation of modern continents, and even flowering plants. Promoted as the Pinosaur and the botanical find of the century, the tree’s ensuing journey from wild endangerment to domesticated treasure is a rare tale of an endangered plant celebrity attracting global conservation efforts. This talk traces the story of the Wollemi pine from its origins and chance find, to the present day, to consider why it is so important for us to include plants within histories of extinction, especially when they are routinely neglected as species needing conservation or subjects worthy of historical narratives. In particular, the talk will explore how paying attention to plants challenges historians to radically rethink common divisions of time, place, and whose lives are historically interesting or significant, and helps us move beyond both anthropocentric and animal-centric policy-making and history writing.
- Speaker: Sadiah Qureshi (University of Manchester)
- Thursday 22 May 2025, 16:00-17:30
- Venue: Hopkinson Lecture Theatre, New Museums Site.
- Series: Departmental Seminars in History and Philosophy of Science; organiser: Dr. Rosanna Dent.
Thu 15 May 15:30: The emergence of metascience: risks and opportunities
The replication crisis in the 2010s shook the scientific community, causing widespread concern and scepticism. In response, a new wave of optimistic researchers has turned the scientific lens inward, aiming to improve science itself. These metascientists have made progress in diagnosing the crisis, pinpointing questionable research practices and bad statistics as key culprits, and proposing reforms to statistical methods and publication practices. While the term ‘metascience’ is not new, its institutionalization as a discipline is a recent development. A growing community of practitioners, societies, conferences, and research centres now shape this expanding field. This growth raises compelling philosophical questions: Where did metascience come from? How does metascience relate to established fields like philosophy of science and science studies? Is metascience merely about data collection, or does it offer deeper epistemic insights? This talk explores these questions by proposing a taxonomy of metascientific projects, examining models of how scientific disciplines form, and evaluating whether metascience holds a unique epistemic status.
- Speaker: Felipe Romero (University of Groningen)
- Thursday 15 May 2025, 15:30-17:00
- Venue: Hopkinson Lecture Theatre, New Museums Site.
- Series: Departmental Seminars in History and Philosophy of Science; organiser: Dr. Rosanna Dent.
Thu 08 May 15:30: Doing your own patient activist research
The slogan ‘Do Your Own Research’ (DYOR) is often invoked by people who are distrustful, even downright sceptical, of recognized expert authorities. While this slogan may serve various rhetorical purposes, it also expresses an ethic of inquiry that valorises independent thinking and rejects uncritical deference to recognized experts. This paper is a qualified defence of this ethic of inquiry in one of the central contexts in which it might seem attractive. I use several case studies of patient activist groups to argue that these groups often engage in valuable independent research that advances biomedical knowledge. In doing so they demonstrate the value of ‘lay expertise’ and the epistemic as well as political necessity of not simply deferring to recognized experts. I also give some reasons why patient activist groups often produce valuable biomedical knowledge: they are examples of what I call ‘research collectives’. Research collectives are research communities that differ from the traditional research communities we find in universities and research institutes in that their members typically lack formal relevant scientific credentials and training. But they are similar in that they have internal structures – training procedures, norms of discussion, venues for holding discussions – that facilitate the production of knowledge. I finish by suggesting that future research into the differences and similarities between research collectives and traditional research communities is required.
- Speaker: Robin McKenna (University of Liverpool)
- Thursday 08 May 2025, 15:30-17:00
- Venue: Hopkinson Lecture Theatre, New Museums Site.
- Series: Departmental Seminars in History and Philosophy of Science; organiser: Dr. Rosanna Dent.
Thu 01 May 15:30: Disinformation, denial, and the assault on truth
Disinformation is the scourge of the information age, causing both science denial (climate denial, anti-vaxx, etc.) as well as the more recent ‘reality’ denial (Trump’s claim that the 2020 election was stolen, Q-Anon conspiracies, etc.). People do not wake up one day wondering whether there are tracking microchips in the Covid vaccines or a Jewish space laser causing the California wildfires. They are led to those ridiculous, false beliefs through strategic lies, told by those who created them, in service of their own economic, ideological, or political interests. The problem, however, is that once disinformation is in the information stream, it does not just tempt someone to believe a falsehood, but also polarizes them around a factual issue, which undermines trust and poisons the path by which they might revise past beliefs and embrace future true ones.
How to address this? Engaging with deniers is one path. In a recent study in Nature Human Behavior Cornelia Betsch and Phillip Schmid provide the first empirical evidence that science deniers can sometimes be led to give up their false beliefs. Most intriguing, one of the methods for doing this has nothing to do with the content of the belief itself, but focuses instead on the path of reasoning that led them to it. ‘Technique rebuttal’ thus provides a ray of hope for philosophers and other non-scientists to address science (and reality) denial, even if they are not content experts on the topic of denial. But there is a hitch. This method doesn’t always work… and it is slow.
What might work better? In my talk I will explore a few ideas from my most recent book On Disinformation (MIT Press, 2023), in which I claim that the pinch point on the disinformation highway from creation to amplification to belief is to clamp down on the spread of disinformation.
- Speaker: Lee McIntyre (Boston University)
- Thursday 01 May 2025, 15:30-17:00
- Venue: Hopkinson Lecture Theatre, New Museums Site.
- Series: Departmental Seminars in History and Philosophy of Science; organiser: Dr. Rosanna Dent.
Tue 15 Apr 15:00: In-Context Learning
In-context learning is an emergent capability of large language models (LLMs) trained via next-token prediction. It refers to the LLMs’ ability to learn new tasks and associations (rules, patterns, functions, etc), without changes in their weights, based on (often few) examples provided in their active context window. We will mention some examples of in-context learning of both natural language and numerical tasks by LLMs, and quickly review work on their mechanistic interpretability. In particular, we will present a study linking ICL capabilities of transformer LLMs to the emergence of so-called induction heads during their (pre)training. We will then present a paper which reveals striking parallels between induction heads in LLMs and the Contextual Maintenance and Retrieval (CMR) model of human episodic memory. Both exhibit similar behavioural patterns (temporal contiguity and forward asymmetry), converge on nearly identical parameter values, and use functionally equivalent computational mechanisms. This convergence between artificial and biological systems offers valuable insights into both LLM interpretability and the computational principles underlying sequential memory processing in humans.
Papers: https://transformer-circuits.pub/2021/framework/index.html https://transformer-circuits.pub/2022/in-context-learning-and-induction-heads/index.html https://proceedings.neurips.cc/paper_files/paper/2024/file/0ba385c3ea3bb417ac6d6a33e24411bc-Paper-Conference.pdf
- Speaker: Yashar Ahmadian; Nandini Shiralkar
- Tuesday 15 April 2025, 15:00-16:30
- Venue: CBL Seminar Room, Engineering Department, 4th floor Baker building.
- Series: Computational Neuroscience; organiser: .
Fri 27 Jun 13:00: TBA
Abstract not available
- Speaker: Vicky Metzis
- Friday 27 June 2025, 13:00-14:00
- Venue: Biffen Theater- Please subscribe to mailing list for link.
- Series: Developmental Biology Seminar Series; organiser: Theresa Gross-Thebing.
Fri 20 Jun 13:00: Chromatin remodelling and cell fate plasticity during neuronal maturation
Abstract not available
- Speaker: Tony Southall
- Friday 20 June 2025, 13:00-14:00
- Venue: Biffen Theater- Please subscribe to mailing list for link.
- Series: Developmental Biology Seminar Series; organiser: Theresa Gross-Thebing.
Fri 16 May 13:00: Motility and matrix remodelling coupling drive early avian morphogenesis
Abstract not available
- Speaker: Lakshmi Balasubramaniam
- Friday 16 May 2025, 13:00-14:00
- Venue: Biffen Theater- Please subscribe to mailing list for link.
- Series: Developmental Biology Seminar Series; organiser: Theresa Gross-Thebing.
Fri 02 May 13:00: Coordination of Protrusions in Migrating Immune Cells
Abstract not available
- Speaker: Michael Sixt
- Friday 02 May 2025, 13:00-14:00
- Venue: Biffen Theater- Please subscribe to mailing list for link.
- Series: Developmental Biology Seminar Series; organiser: Theresa Gross-Thebing.
Fri 25 Apr 13:00: Echoes of the Embryo: A stem cell model of human gastrulation and post-gastrulation lineage emergence
Abstract not available
- Speaker: Jitesh Neupane
- Friday 25 April 2025, 13:00-14:00
- Venue: Biffen Theater- Please subscribe to mailing list for link.
- Series: Developmental Biology Seminar Series; organiser: Theresa Gross-Thebing.
Fri 23 May 13:00: Decoding the Notch Signal
Abstract not available
- Speaker: Sarah Bray
- Friday 23 May 2025, 13:00-14:00
- Venue: Biffen Theater- Please subscribe to mailing list for link.
- Series: Developmental Biology Seminar Series; organiser: Theresa Gross-Thebing.
Mon 13 Oct 11:00: LMB Seminar - Title TBC
Abstract not available
- Speaker: Bonnie Bassler, Princeton University
- Monday 13 October 2025, 11:00-12:00
- Venue: In person in the Max Perutz Lecture Theatre (CB2 0QH) and via Zoom link https://mrc-lmb-cam-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/99006584805?pwd=yFgF0P1zMvOJEKkOES4eNPpntaUodk.1.
- Series: MRC LMB Seminar Series; organiser: Scientific Meetings Co-ordinator.
Thu 01 May 16:00: Notions of entropy in ergodic theory and representation theory
Entropy has its origins in thermodynamics and statistical mechanics. It was explored with mathematical rigour in Shannon’s work on the foundations of information theory, and quickly found striking applications to ergodic theory in work of Kolmogorov and Sinai. Many variants and other applications have appeared in pure mathematics since, connecting probability, combinatorics, dynamics and other areas.
I will survey a few recent developments in this story, with an emphasis on some of the basic ideas that they have in common. I will focus mostly on (i) Lewis Bowen’s “sofic entropy”, which helps us to study the dynamics of “large” groups such as free groups, and (ii) a cousin of sofic entropy in the world of unitary representations, which leads to new large deviations principles for tuples of random matrices.
A wine reception in the Central Core will follow the lecture.
- Speaker: Tim Austin (Warwick)
- Thursday 01 May 2025, 16:00-17:00
- Venue: MR2, CMS.
- Series: Mordell Lectures; organiser: HoD Secretary, DPMMS.
Thu 17 Jul 16:00: Dr John James, Immunology, Warwick Medical School. Warwick Medical School
This Cambridge Immunology Network Seminar will take place on Thursday 17 July 2025, starting at 4:00pm, in the Ground Floor Lecture Theatre, Jeffrey Cheah Biomedical Centre (JCBC)
Speaker: Dr John James, Associate Professor, Immunology, Warwick Medical School, University of Warwick
Title: TBC
Host: Mathilde Colombe and Tim Halim, CRUK Cambridge
Refreshments will be available following the seminar.
- Speaker: Dr John James, Immunology, Warwick Medical School. Warwick Medical School
- Thursday 17 July 2025, 16:00-17:00
- Venue: Lecture Theatre, Jeffrey Cheah Biomedical Centre, Cambridge Biomedical Campus.
- Series: Cambridge Immunology Network Seminar Series; organiser: Ruth Paton.
Thu 15 May 17:00: Completeness Theorems for Variations of Higher-Order Logic
Mike Gordon’s Higher-Order Logic (HOL) is one of the most important logical foundations for interactive theorem proving. The standard semantics of HOL , due to Andrew Pitts, employs a downward closed universe of sets, and interprets HOL ’s Hilbert choice operator via a global choice function on the universe.
In this talk, I introduce a natural Henkin-style notion of general model corresponding to the standard models. By following the Henkin route of proving completeness, I discover an enrichment of HOL deduction that is sound and complete w.r.t. these general models. Variations of my proof also yield completeness results for weaker deduction systems located between standard and (fully) enriched HOL deduction, relative to less constrained models.
=== Hybrid talk ===
Join Zoom Meeting https://cam-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/87143365195?pwd=SELTNkOcfVrIE1IppYCsbooOVqenzI.1
Meeting ID: 871 4336 5195
Passcode: 541180
- Speaker: Andrei Popescu (University of Sheffield)
- Thursday 15 May 2025, 17:00-18:00
- Venue: MR14 Centre for Mathematical Sciences.
- Series: Formalisation of mathematics with interactive theorem provers ; organiser: Anand Rao Tadipatri.