Tue 08 Apr 13:30: Recent aspects of chaperone functions in health and disease - A BIOLOGICAL RIG SEMINAR
Abstract not available
- Speaker: Prof. Ulrich Hartl - Max-Planck-Institute of Biochemistry
- Tuesday 08 April 2025, 13:30-14:30
- Venue: Department of Chemistry, Cambridge, Pfizer LT.
- Series: Biological Chemistry Research Interest Group; organiser: Xani Thorman.
Fri 23 May 14:00: Joint ChemBio and Synthesis RIG Seminar - Chemical Biology Tools for Measuring Drug Delivery
Large-molecule therapeutics including peptides, oligonucleotides, and proteins make up a large and growing portion of the drug development pipeline. One of the greatest barriers to developing these drugs is cell penetration. Most enter the cell through a complex pathway involving endocytosis followed by endosomal escape. This process is so poorly understood and difficult to study that it is challenging simply to measure how much compound has actually accessed the cytosol at any given point. The Kritzer Lab has developed new tools for making these and related measurements. The Chloroalkane Penetration Assay (CAPA) is a versatile assay that measures cell penetration using cellularly expressed HaloTag protein and a small chloroalkane tag on the molecule-of-interest. CAPA has been used by the Kritzer group to measure cell penetration for many classes of peptide and oligonucleotide therapeutics, to measure penetration to different subcellular compartments, and to measure relative penetration in different cell types. CAPA has also been adopted by academic and industrial groups all over the world to investigate cell penetration. The Kritzer group has also used molecular evolution to produce new HaloTag variants which work optimally with a fluorogenic benzothiadiazole dye. The resulting “BenzoTag” system allows for turn-on, no-wash cell labeling in seconds. BenzoTag is currently being applied to produce a “turn-on” version of CAPA for continued investigation of drug delivery and mechanisms of endosomal escape
- Speaker: Joshua Kritzer (Tufts University)
- Friday 23 May 2025, 14:00-15:00
- Venue: Dept. of Chemistry, Wolfson Lecture Theatre.
- Series: Synthetic Chemistry Research Interest Group; organiser: Jasmine Mitchell.
Tue 01 Apr 14:30: The Druggable Transcriptome Project: From Chemical Probes to Precision Medicines
A scientific challenge is to understand biological pathways and to exploit the targets within them for therapeutic development. Coding and non-coding RNAs both directly cause disease, whether by mutation or aberrant expression. Akin to proteins, RNA structure often dictates its function in health or dysfunction in disease. RNA , however, is generally not considered a target for small molecule chemical probes and lead medicines, despite its immense potential. The focus of our research program is to uncover fundamental principles that govern the molecular recognition of RNA structures by small molecules to enable design of chemical probes that targeting disease relevant RNA structures to perturb and study their function.
I will describe using evolutionary principles to identify molecular recognition patterns between small molecules and RNA structures by studying the binding of RNA fold libraries to small molecule libraries. These interactions are computationally mined across the human transcriptome to define cellular RNAs with targetable structure. Such an approach has afforded bioactive interactions that have uncovered new biology, where the small molecules bind to functional structures within a target RNA . We have devised a strategy to imbue biologically silent RNA -small molecule interactions with cellular activity. Chimeras comprising an inactive small molecule and ribonuclease recruiter trigger targeted degradation of disease-causing RNAs. These degraders affect the biology of RNA in specific ways in cells and in mouse models of various diseases and can rationally reprogram protein-targeted medicines for RNA . Lastly, we have recently devised unbiased transcriptome wide approaches to define the RNA bound by small molecules is live cells. This allows us to study the RNA targets that are bound by small molecules, the selectivity of these interactions, and ways in which compounds of various types can modulate disease biology.
- Speaker: Matthew Disney - Scripps Research Institute
- Tuesday 01 April 2025, 14:30-15:30
- Venue: Department of Chemistry, Cambridge, Pfizer lecture theatre.
- Series: Biological Chemistry Research Interest Group; organiser: Xani Thorman.
Tue 06 May 14:30: Big Picture Talk: Bhopal 40 years on - What have we learned?
Our departmental seminar series, Bigger Picture Talks, runs throughout the academic year, inviting thought-leaders from across the world driving significant advances in our impact areas of energy, health and sustainability to share and discuss their work with us.
This talk will hear from alumni Professor Fiona Macleod, Professor of Process Safety at the University of Sheffield, who will talk about safety in the chemical engineering industry, using the worst disaster in history as a lens for why safety matters.
On the night of 2 and 3 December 1984 a toxic gas release from the Union Carbide pesticide factory in Bhopal, India caused thousands of deaths and hundreds of thousands of life-changing injuries. Forty years later, the rusting factory equipment still towers above buried hazardous waste in the abandoned factory. I visited the site of the former Union Carbide site in Bhopal India to try to understand what went so horribly wrong.
1. What caused the worst accident in the history of the chemical industry? 2. Why was the accident never properly investigated? 3. What can we learn about process safety from revisiting the accident? 4. Why has no clean-up been undertaken in 40 years?
- Speaker: Professor Fiona Macleod
- Tuesday 06 May 2025, 14:30-15:15
- Venue: Lecture Theatre 1, Department of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology, West Cambridge Site.
- Series: Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology; organiser: ejm94.
Wed 23 Apr 14:00: Ocean dynamics in the Ross Ice Shelf cavity from in situ observations
The future response of ice shelves to climate through ocean warming is a key unknown for climate projections, especially global sea level rise. The Ross Ice Shelf ocean cavity is one of the least observed regions in the ocean, with its broad circulation patterns primarily inferred from remotely sensed estimates of tides, bathymetry, and melt rates. I aim to advance our understanding of the ocean cavity under the Ross Ice Shelf – the southern-most and largest-by area of all Earth’s ice shelves. To achieve this, I analyzed a multi-year hydrographic moored timeseries from the central Ross Ice Shelf cavity (80◦39.497′S, 174◦27.678′E). These data help address three key processes: (i) the general circulation; (ii) the appearance and impact of baroclinic eddy events; and (iii) tidal modulation of the ice-ocean boundary layer structure and the implications for ice melting. In terms of circulation and the inter-annual changes, stronger melting/refreezing occurred between late September 2019 to late December 2019, which is linked to the inter-annual sea ice production in the Ross Ice Shelf Polynya. Notably, cold-water interleaving in the mid-water column exhibits distinct seasonality. An analysis of baroclinic eddies identifies coherent structures that are around 22 km in diameter with a velocity scale of between 0.8 and 1.8 cm/s. The thermohaline structure of the eddies suggests that they have the potential to entrain High Salinity Shelf Water from the benthic water column to the mid-water column. On the question of tidal modulation of the ice shelf-ocean interaction, the results suggest that tides modulate the melt rate by altering the boundary layer structure over a spring-neap cycle. These new findings demonstrate the rich variability within the Ross Ice Shelf ocean cavity, ranging from large interannual-seasonal scales, through to multi-week eddy scales and then down to tidal and mixing timescales.
- Speaker: Yingpu Xiahou, University of Auckland
- Wednesday 23 April 2025, 14:00-15:00
- Venue: BAS Seminar Room 330b.
- Series: British Antarctic Survey - Polar Oceans seminar series; organiser: Dr Birgit Rogalla.
Fri 28 Mar 14:00: Interventions and Counterfactuals for the Working Programmer
Correlation famously does not imply causation! But how then can we answer interventional questions such as “Does smoking cause cancer?” or even counterfactual ones as “If I had left one minute earlier, would I have managed to arrive on time?” This is the subject of Causal Inference, as pioneered and formalized by Judea Pearl. In my talk, I want to focus on how such problems can be modelled and solved using tools from programming languages theory.
I will aim to give a general introduction to causal inference from a programmer’s point of view. I will then present work-in-progress from an ongoing collaboration dedicated to the extension of a probabilistic programming language to a causal probabilistic programming language; this includes operational semantics, a type system and denotational semantics using graded monads.
- Speaker: Dario Stein (Radboud University)
- Friday 28 March 2025, 14:00-15:00
- Venue: SS03, Computer Laboratory.
- Series: Logic and Semantics Seminar (Computer Laboratory); organiser: Ioannis Markakis.
Tue 08 Apr 13:00: Recent aspects of chaperone functions in health and disease - A BIORIG SEMINAR
Abstract not available
- Speaker: Prof. Ulrich Hartl
- Tuesday 08 April 2025, 13:00-15:00
- Venue: Department of Chemistry, Cambridge, Unilever lecture theatre.
- Series: Biological Chemistry Research Interest Group; organiser: Xani Thorman.
Thu 27 Mar 11:45: Cambridge MedAI Seminar - March 2025
Sign up on Eventbrite: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/cambridge-medai-seminar-series-tickets-1301806461169?aff=oddtdtcreator
Join us for the Cambridge AI in Medicine Seminar Series, hosted by the Cancer Research UK Cambridge Centre and the Department of Radiology at Addenbrooke’s. This series brings together leading experts to explore cutting-edge AI applications in healthcare—from disease diagnosis to drug discovery. It’s a unique opportunity for researchers, practitioners, and students to stay at the forefront of AI innovations and engage in discussions shaping the future of AI in healthcare.
This month’s seminar will be held on Thursday 27 March 2025, 12-1pm at the Jeffrey Cheah Biomedical Centre (Main Lecture Theatre), University of Cambridge and streamed online via Zoom. A light lunch from Aromi will be served from 11:45. The event will feature the following talks:
Explainable and Interpretable AI: Building Trust and Uncovering Patterns in Healthcare and Neuroscience – Dr Michail Mamalakis, Research Associate, Department of Psychiatry, University of Cambridge
Dr Michail Mamalakis is a research scientist at the University of Cambridge, specializing in AI, Machine Learning, Explainable AI and Computer Vision for biomedical applications. His work focuses on explainable AI (XAI) for integrating imaging, genomics, and phenotyping data in neuroscience and clinical decision-making. He has collaborated with leading institutions, including Oxford, Sheffield, and Cambridge, on projects in brain tumors, Alzheimer’s, cardiac arrhythmias and pulmonary hypertension. His research spans AI-driven biomarker discovery, uncertainty estimation, attributional interpretability in funtional and structural imaging and mechanistic interpretability in protein language models and large language models. Currently, he develops multi-modal AI frameworks for Alzheimer’s prediction and glioblastoma analysis contributing to high-impact projects like EBRAINS 2 .0.
Abstract: Explainability is a critical factor in enhancing the trustworthiness and acceptance of artificial intelligence (AI) in healthcare, where decisions have a direct impact on patient outcomes. Despite significant advancements in AI interpretability, clear guidelines on when and to what extent explanations are required in medical applications remain insufficient. In this talk, I will provide guidance on the need for explanations in AI applications within healthcare. I will discuss possible explainable AI frameworks that can be used to identify new patterns and offer insights through explainable AI methods. These approaches have the potential to uncover new biomarkers and novel patterns relevant to the applications of interest. Finally, I will present some basic examples from neuroscience research to illustrate these concepts.
Retrospective evaluation and comparison of state-of-the-art deep learning breast cancer risk prediction algorithms – Joshua Rothwell, PhD Student, Department of Radiology, University of Cambridge School of Clinical Medicine
Josh is an MBBS /PhD student, researching and evaluating commercial mammography AI tools for the detection and prediction of breast cancer.
Abstract: Breast ‘interval’ cancers present between screening examinations and have poorer prognoses compared to screen detected cancers. Risk prediction tools can identify women that are at increased risk of developing cancer, and may therefore benefit from supplemental imaging or increased frequency screening, to detect cancers earlier and improve patient outcomes.This talk focuses on the retrospective evaluation of two state-of-the-art deep learning risk prediction algorithms, attempting to quantify potential cancer detection rates if implemented into the NHS Breast Screening Programme and discern the characteristics of misclassified cancers.
This is a hybrid event so you can also join via Zoom:
https://zoom.us/j/99050467573?pwd=UE5OdFdTSFdZeUtIcU1DbXpmdlNGZz09
Meeting ID: 990 5046 7573 and Passcode: 617729
We look forward to your participation! If you are interested in getting involved and presenting your work, please email Ines Machado at im549@cam.ac.uk
For more information about this seminar series, see: https://www.integratedcancermedicine.org/research/cambridge-medai-seminar-series/
- Speaker: Dr Michail Mamalakis and Joshua Rothwell
- Thursday 27 March 2025, 11:45-13:00
- Venue: Jeffrey Cheah Biomedical Centre (Main Lecture Theatre), University of Cambridge.
- Series: Cambridge MedAI Seminar Series; organiser: Hannah Clayton.
Mon 31 Mar 15:00: DNA-Encoded Chemical Libraries - A BIOLOGICAL RIG SEMINAR
The discovery of small organic ligands, capable of specific recognition of protein targets of interest, is a central problem in Chemistry, Pharmacy, Biology and Medicine. Traditionally, small organic ligands to proteins are discovered by screening, one by one, individual compounds from chemical libraries. However, the technology is cumbersome, very expensive and is typically limited to the testing of up to one million compounds. DNA -encoded chemical library (DEL) technology allows the construction and screening of much larger compound libraries, without the need for expensive instrumentations and logistics. DELs are collections of molecules, individually coupled to distinctive DNA fragments, serving as amplifiable identification barcodes. Binding compounds can be selected using affinity capture procedures, with the protein target of interest immobilised on magnetic beads. After this “fishing” experiment, the DNA barcodes can be PCR amplified and quantified using high-throughput DNA sequencing [1]. In this lecture, I will present theory and applications of DEL technology. I will also show examples of DEL -derived ligands, isolated in our laboratories, which have been tested in patients with cancer, with promising clinical results.
- Speaker: Professor Dario Neri - CEO and CSO of Philogen, Professor of ETH Zürich, Honorary Senior Visiting Fellow, Department of Radiology, University of Cambridge (UK)
- Monday 31 March 2025, 15:00-16:00
- Venue: Department of Chemistry, Cambridge, Wolfson Lecture Theatre.
- Series: Biological Chemistry Research Interest Group; organiser: Xani Thorman.
Tue 06 May 14:30: Bhopal 40 years on - What have we learned?
On the night of 2 and 3 December 1984 a toxic gas release from the Union Carbide pesticide factory in Bhopal, India caused thousands of deaths and hundreds of thousands of life-changing injuries. Forty years later, the rusting factory equipment still towers above buried hazardous waste in the abandoned factory. I visited the site of the former Union Carbide site in Bhopal India to try to understand what went so horribly wrong.
1. What caused the worst accident in the history of the chemical industry? 2. Why was the accident never properly investigated? 3. What can we learn about process safety from revisiting the accident? 4. Why has no clean-up been undertaken in 40 years?
- Speaker: Professor Fiona Macleod
- Tuesday 06 May 2025, 14:30-15:15
- Venue: Lecture Theatre 1, Department of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology, West Cambridge Site.
- Series: Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology; organiser: ejm94.
Thu 18 Sep 13:00: Seminars in Cancer
Abstract not available
- Speaker: Professor Ahmed Ahmed, University of Oxford
- Thursday 18 September 2025, 13:00-14:00
- Venue: CRUK CI Lecture Theatre.
- Series: Cancer Research UK Cambridge Institute (CRUK CI) Seminars in Cancer; organiser: Kate Davenport.
Thu 26 Jun 16:00: Title to be confirmed
Abstract not available
- Speaker: Jianbo Cui (The Hong Kong Polytechnic University)
- Thursday 26 June 2025, 16:00-17:00
- Venue: Centre for Mathematical Sciences, MR14.
- Series: Applied and Computational Analysis; organiser: Georg Maierhofer.
Thu 26 Jun 15:00: Title to be confirmed
Abstract not available
- Speaker: Liying Sun (Chinese Academy of Sciences)
- Thursday 26 June 2025, 15:00-16:00
- Venue: Centre for Mathematical Sciences, MR14.
- Series: Applied and Computational Analysis; organiser: Georg Maierhofer.
Thu 08 May 15:00: Causal Representation Learning
Machine learning (ML) has shown great success in learning low-dimensional and semantically interpretable representations of high-dimensional data. Recent leaps in designing transformers have further proliferated representation learning. Despite such success, strong generalization — transfer of the learned representations to new problems — is still an unsolved problem. Addressing strong representation requires moving away from learning good enough representations to learning ground truth representation. As a key step toward strong generalization, causal representation learning (CRL) has emerged as a cutting-edge field that merges the strengths of statistical inference, machine learning, and causal inference. Its objective is to estimate the ground truth latent representation of the data and the rich structures that model the interactions among the variables in the latent space.
In this talk, we will explore the latest advancements in the emerging field of CRL . We will introduce the foundational concepts and motivations behind combining representation learning with causal inference. Following a brief history of CRL , we will describe its primary objectives and the theoretical challenges. We will then review the key approaches to address these challenges, including CRL with multi-view observations, CRL with interventions on latent variables, and CRL applied to temporal data. We will also highlight real-world application opportunities, discuss the challenges in scaling CRL to practical use cases, and discuss open questions for CRL related to theoretical and empirical viewpoints.
Bio: Ali Tajer received a B.Sc. and an M.Sc. degree in Electrical Engineering from Sharif University of Technology, an M.A. in Statistics, and a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Columbia University. During 2010-2012, he was a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Princeton University. He is currently a Professor of Electrical, Computer, and Systems Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. His research interests include mathematical statistics, machine learning, and information theory. He is currently an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory and a Senior Area Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing. In the past, he has served as an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing, an Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Communications, and a Guest Editor for the IEEE Signal Processing Magazine. He received the Jury Award (Columbia University), School of Engineering Research Excellence Award for Junior Faculty (Rensselaer), School of Engineering Classroom Excellence Award (Rensselaer), James M. Tien ‘66 Early Career Award for Faculty (Rensselaer), School of Engineering Classroom Excellence Award for Senior Faculty (Rensselaer), a CAREER award from the U.S. National Science and a U.S. Air Force Fellowship Award. He is a member of the 2025-2026 class of Distinguished Lecturers of the IEEE Information Theory Society.
- Speaker: Prof. Ali Tajer, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
- Thursday 08 May 2025, 15:00-16:00
- Venue: JDB Seminar Room, CUED.
- Series: Signal Processing and Communications Lab Seminars; organiser: Prof. Ramji Venkataramanan.
Thu 15 May 15:00: New Insights on High Wave Scattering by Multiple Open Arcs: Exponentially Convergent Methods and Shape Holomorphy
In this talk, we focus on the scattering of time-harmonic acoustic, elastic, and polarized electromagnetic waves by multiple finite-length open arcs in an unbounded two-dimensional domain. We begin by reformulating the corresponding boundary value problems with Dirichlet or Neumann conditions as weakly and hypersingular boundary integral equations (BIEs), respectively. We then introduce a family of fast spectral Galerkin methods for solving these BIEs. The discretization bases are built from weighted Chebyshev polynomials that accurately capture the solutions’ edge behavior. Under the assumption of analyticity of the sources and arc geometries, we show that these bases yield exponential convergence with respect to the polynomial degree.
Numerical examples will illustrate the accuracy and robustness of the proposed methods, with respect to both the number of arcs and the wavenumber. Additionally, we demonstrate that, for general weakly and hypersingular BIEs, the solutions depend holomorphically on perturbations of the arc parametrizations. These results are crucial for establishing the shape holomorphy of domain-to-solution maps arising in boundary integral equations, with applications in uncertainty quantification, inverse problems, and deep learning, among others. They also raise new questions—some of which you may have the answer to!
- Speaker: Carlos Jerez Hanckes (University of Bath)
- Thursday 15 May 2025, 15:00-16:00
- Venue: Centre for Mathematical Sciences, MR14.
- Series: Applied and Computational Analysis; organiser: Georg Maierhofer.
Thu 27 Mar 16:00: 'Targeting CD4+ T Cells to Enhance Tumour Immunity'
This Cambridge Immunology and Medicine Seminar will take place on Thursday 27 March 2025, starting at 4:00pm, in the Ground Floor Lecture Theatre, Jeffrey Cheah Biomedical Centre (JCBC)
Speaker: Professor Awen Gallimore, Co-Director of Systems Immunity Research Institute, Cardiff University
Title: “Targeting CD4 + T Cells to Enhance Tumour Immunity”
Host: Maike De La Roche & Tim Halim, CRUK Cambridge Institute
Refreshments will be available following the seminar.
- Speaker: Professor Awen Gallimore, Co-Director of Systems Immunity Research Institute, Cardiff University
- Thursday 27 March 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 17 Apr 17:00: Cambridge RNA Club - ONLINE
Dr. Adam Cawte: Persistent association with chromatin facilitates the spreading and retention of Xist RNA on the inactive X-chromosome.
Prof. Isaia Barbierii: mRNA 5’-cap trimethylguanosine synthase TGS1 promotes oxidative phosphorylation in acute myeloid leukaemia.
- Speaker: Dr. Adam Cawte (University of Oxford, UK), Dr. Isaia Barbieri (University of Turin, IT)
- Thursday 17 April 2025, 17:00-19:00
- Venue: Online (Zoom).
- Series: Cambridge RNA Club; organiser: cambridgeRNA.
Tue 20 May 16:00: Title to be confirmed
Abstract not available
- Speaker: Rajalakshmi Nandakumar, Cornell University
- Tuesday 20 May 2025, 16:00-17:00
- Venue: Online.
- Series: Mobile and Wearable Health Seminar Series; organiser: Cecilia Mascolo.
Thu 24 Apr 10:00: César Milstein Lecture: Mechanisms driving the rapid evolution of genomes
Genome evolution has long been viewed as a gradual process, with small-scale genetic alterations accruing over many generations. However, it is now appreciated that saltatory mutational events, driving rapid evolution, can be layered onto gradual Darwinian evolution. These episodic events are particularly common in cancer, where they generate highly rearranged genomes. At least some of these processes cause human congenital disease, can be passed through the germline, and may contribute to organismal evolution. My group has contributed to this paradigm by identifying mechanisms and consequences of these catastrophic mutational events, linking them to common errors in cell division. My talk will focus on the mechanism of chromothripsis, a catastrophic mutational process that originates from aberrations in the architecture of the nucleus. I will focus on the processes that fragment chromosomes during chromothripsis.
- Speaker: David Pellman - Dana-Faber Cancer Institute, Harvard University
- Thursday 24 April 2025, 10:00-11:00
- Venue: In person in the Max Perutz Lecture Theatre (CB2 0QH) and via Zoom link https://mrc-lmb-cam-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/97042445746?pwd=rjwSiStXxjdk1Q2tPOdRnqr8aM3qwn.1.
- Series: MRC LMB Seminar Series; organiser: Scientific Meetings Co-ordinator.
Tue 25 Mar 10:00: Irreducibility of Severi varieties on toric surfaces
Severi varieties parametrize integral curves of fixed geometric genus in a given linear system on a surface. In this talk, I will discuss the classical question of whether Severi varieties are irreducible and its relation to the irreducibility of other moduli spaces of curves. I will indicate how tropical methods can be used to answer such irreducibility questions. The new results are from ongoing joint work with Xiang He and Ilya Tyomkin.
- Speaker: Karl Christ, Università degli studi di Torino
- Tuesday 25 March 2025, 10:00-11:00
- Venue: CMS MR13.
- Series: Algebraic Geometry Seminar; organiser: Dhruv Ranganathan.