Fri 26 Sep 08:45: CamVet Clinial Research Grants
Tom Kearns: ‘Confirming lymph node metastasis in canine mast cell tumours: A new tool in our KIT ’
Identifying genetic risk factors for intervertebral disc disease and idiopathic epilepsy in Dachshunds Bruno Lopes
Micro-computed tomography to characterise myocardial infarcts in cats with hypertrophic cardiomyopathy Jose Novo Matos
Chaired by Kate Hughes
- Speaker: Bruno Lopes, Jose Novo Matos, and Tom Kearns, Department of Veterinary Medicine
- Friday 26 September 2025, 08:45-10:00
- Venue: LT2.
- Series: Friday Morning Seminars, Dept of Veterinary Medicine; organiser: Fiona Roby.
Thu 20 Nov 13:00: Targeting the interplay between oncogenic RAS signaling and tumour immune evasion in lung cancer
Abstract not available
- Speaker: Professor Julian Downward, Francis Crick Institute
- Thursday 20 November 2025, 13:00-14:00
- Venue: CRUK CI Lecture Theatre.
- Series: Cancer Research UK Cambridge Institute (CRUK CI) Seminars in Cancer; organiser: Kate Davenport.
Tue 10 Jun 11:15: Intuitive knowledge systems for discovery
Join us for an exploration of how intuitive knowledge systems might complement current approaches in scientific discovery. Drawing from conversations during her fellowship at the Cavendish, artist Akeelah Bertram examines the acknowledged limits of current calculation systems and the role of intuition for receiving unknown phenomena. Through readings from her developing publication “Sacred Architecture,” she reflects on parallel knowledge systems, drawing from Caribbean congregational practices and embodied ways of knowing. This talk explores questions about the convergence of rigorous scientific inquiry with intuitive methodologies, considering what might emerge when different ways of knowing are held in dialogue.
- Speaker: Akeelah Bertram (Cavendish Arts Science Fellow)
- Tuesday 10 June 2025, 11:15-12:00
- Venue: Coffee area, Battcock Centre.
- Series: Hills Coffee Talks; organiser: Charles Walker.
Wed 11 Jun 13:30: A near-optimal quadratic Goldreich-Levin algorithm
In this talk I will present an efficient algorithm for a central problem in quadratic Fourier analysis, and which can be seen as a quadratic generalisation of the celebrated Goildreich-Levin algorithm. More precisely, given a bounded function f on the Boolean hypercube {0, 1}n and any ε > 0, our algorithm returns a quadratic polynomial q: {0, 1}n → {0, 1} so that the correlation of f with the function (−1)q is within an additive ε of the maximum possible correlation with a quadratic phase function. This algorithm runs in O(n3) time and makes O(n2 log n) queries to f. As a corollary, we obtain an algorithmic inverse theorem for the order-3 Gowers norm with polynomial guarantees.
Our algorithm is obtained using ideas from recent work on quantum learning theory. Its construction significantly deviates from previous approaches based on algorithmic proofs of the inverse theorem for order-3 Gowers norms (and in particular does not rely on the recent resolution of the polynomial Freiman-Ruzsa conjecture).
Based on joint work with Jop Briët.
- Speaker: Davi de Castro Silva (University of Cambridge)
- Wednesday 11 June 2025, 13:30-15:00
- Venue: MR4, CMS.
- Series: Discrete Analysis Seminar; organiser: Julia Wolf.
Mon 09 Jun 14:00: Critical norm blow-up rates for the energy supercritical nonlinear heat equation
We study the behavior of the scaling critical Lebesgue norm for blow-up solutions to the nonlinear heat equation (the Fujita equation). For the energy supercritical nonlinearity, we give estimates of the blow-up rate for the critical norm. This is based on joint work with Jin Takahashi (Institute of Science Tokyo) and Hideyuki Miura (Institute of Science Tokyo).
- Speaker: Tobias Barker (University of Bath)
- Monday 09 June 2025, 14:00-15:00
- Venue: MR13.
- Series: Partial Differential Equations seminar; organiser: Giacomo Ageno.
Thu 04 Jun 17:00: Positional encodings in LLMs
Positional encodings are essential for transformer-based language models to understand sequence order, yet their influence extends far beyond simple position tracking. This talk explores the landscape of positional encoding methods in LLMs and reveals surprising insights about how these architectural choices shape model behavior.
We begin with the fundamental challenge: why attention mechanisms require explicit positional information. We then survey the evolution of encoding strategies, from sinusoidal approaches to modern techniques like RoPE, examining their architectural implications and trade-offs.
The talk delves into how these different encoding strategies fundamentally shape model architectures and representations. We analyze the specific limitations and trade-offs of each approach, examining how positional information propagates through transformer layers and influences the learned representations.
- Speaker: Valeria Ruscio
- Thursday 04 June 2026, 17:00-17:45
- Venue: Lecture Theatre 2, Computer Laboratory, William Gates Building.
- Series: Foundation AI; organiser: Pietro Lio.
Wed 04 Jun 11:30: Advancing precision health in neurodevelopmental conditions
Emerging data from basic sciences, clinical investigation and lived experience are challenging the ways we conceptualize diagnostic categories associated with neurodevelopmental differences and how such understanding should translate into meaningful interventions. The talk will review some such data from the Canadian context, position it in work from other jurisdictions, and propose potential paths forward.
- Speaker: Evdokia Anagnostou, University of Toronto
- Wednesday 04 June 2025, 11:30-12:30
- Venue: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/87076030035?pwd=XUpJuh8jiR0mae1AhkV79qbg8MtlSM.1.
- Series: ARClub Talks; organiser: Simon Braschi.
Tue 10 Jun 13:00: Derivatives of Rankin-Selberg L-functions and heights of generalized Heegner cycles
In the 1980s, Gross and Zagier obtained a formula expressing the heights of CM points on modular curves in terms of derivatives of certain L-functions, leading to applications towards the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture for elliptic curves. In this talk, I will present a formula for the heights of certain algebraic cycles first introduced by Bertolini, Darmon, and Prasanna. This formula generalizes the Gross-Zagier formula to higher dimensions and has applications to the Beilinson-Bloch-Kato conjectures, notably in the case of Jacobians with CM. This is joint work with Ari Shnidman.
- Speaker: David Lilienfeldt (Leiden)
- Tuesday 10 June 2025, 13:00-14:00
- Venue: MR12.
- Series: Number Theory Seminar; organiser: Jef Laga.
Mon 30 Jun 11:00: LMB Seminar - Cellular response to genetic change
The genetic landscape faced by a living cell is constantly changing. Developmental transitions, environmental shifts, and pathogenic invasions lend a dynamic character to both the genome and its activity pattern. We study a variety of non-canonical mechanisms that are utilized by cells adapting to genetic change and maintaining those adaptations through time and cell division. At the root of these studies are questions of how a cell can distinguish remember distinctions between “self” vs. “nonself” and “wanted” vs. “unwanted” gene expression.
- Speaker: Andy Fire - Stanford University School of Medicine
- Monday 30 June 2025, 11:00-12:00
- Venue: In person in the Max Perutz Lecture Theatre (CB2 0QH) .
- Series: MRC LMB Seminar Series; organiser: Scientific Meetings Co-ordinator.
Tue 03 Jun 14:00: Safer (cyber)spaces: Reconfiguring Digital Security Towards Solidarity
Misogyny and domestic abuse are old problems, but tech companies have enabled these harms to grow and proliferate on their platforms in new forms, such as social media harassment, cyberstalking, and deepfake intimate image abuse. This talk will summarise my work to build better systems for survivors of online gender-based violence across academia, advocacy, and policy. In my DPhil, I argued that due to its engineering focus on defending networks and information, cybersecurity neglects the human element, and particularly differences in power and relationships between humans that produce (in)security. I developed a new method, participatory threat modelling, which brings marginalised people and civil society groups into the process of systematically assessing digital security threats. As a part of the work, I co-founded a research collective named re:configure, which ran feminist digital security workshops with groups such as survivors of intimate image abuse, environmental activists, and migrant domestic workers. After my PhD, I worked at the online safety charity Glitch, I managed the delivery of and co-authored a quantitative research study on digital misogynoir (hate directed at Black women) across multiple tech platforms, including Meta, X/Twitter, and 4chan. I am now working as Senior Associate at Ofcom, the regulator in charge of implementing the UK’s Online Safety Act, to put this evidence into guidance for industry on online violence against women and girls.
Zoom link: https://cam-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/87951267899?pwd=96gCfOc00Q3OqG6MiDpl6pPQ9hhiwk.1
- Speaker: Dr Julia Slupska, Ofcom
- Tuesday 03 June 2025, 14:00-15:00
- Venue: Webinar (via Zoom online).
- Series: Computer Laboratory Security Seminar; organiser: Anna Talas.
Fri 13 Jun 14:00: Progress in Additively Manufactured Gradient Materials: Predicting, Making, and Qualifying
It is possible to affect a wide variety of gradients into additively manufactured components, including bulk structures and lattice structures. This talk will briefly describe how multiple gradients can be achieved, and some technical advances in the modeling associated with achieving sufficiently precise gradients. However, while demonstrating that it is possible to create precise gradients is a critical initial step towards a future where complex gradients are part of parts and components used in service, it is necessary to develop the predictive tools necessary for design engineers to incorporate spatially varying properties. In this work, we present an effort to predict the processing-materials state-properties-performance relationships in Ti-based gradient structures where both composition and aging temperatures are spatially controlled. Finally, recognizing that qualification (including post-manufacture nondestructive evaluation (NDE)) will be a challenging problem, we present a new concept where we extend the concepts of feasibility diagrams for processing to feasibility diagrams of inspectability.
Peter C. Collins joined the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Iowa State University in July, 2015. Dr. Pete Collins received his undergraduate degree in Metallurgical Engineering from the University of Missouri-Rolla, and his MS and PhD from The Ohio State University in Materials Science and Engineering. Prior to joining ISU , Dr. Collins served as a faculty member and undergraduate coordinator in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at the University of North Texas. Dr. Collins has also spent time standing-up a not-for-profit 501-3© manufacturing laboratory, and regularly engages with both industry and the government. His experiences and interests involve the practical and theoretical treatments of microstructure-property relationship, with an extension into composition-microstructure-property relationships derived for complex multi-phase, multi-component engineering alloys. He has extensive experience in participating in large industrial programs, has conducted studies into novel metal matrix composites, and has significant research experience with additive manufacturing techniques, and combinatorial materials science. Dr. Collins is an active member of TMS , past chairman of the ICME committee, member of the Titanium committee, and a member of the Materials Processing and Manufacturing Division. In recent years, Collins and his group have been actively involved in developing and building new types of instrumentation and experiments. These include developing the first 3D SRAS (spatially resolved acoustic spectroscopy) microscope, bicombinatorial techniques, reduced-cost wire-fed metal AM systems, and other techniques aimed at characterizing defects in additive manufactured materials.
- Speaker: Dr Peter C. Collins, Iowa State University
- Friday 13 June 2025, 14:00-15:00
- Venue: Oatley 1 Meeting Room, Department of Engineering.
- Series: Engineering - Mechanics and Materials Seminar Series; organiser: div-c.
Mon 03 Nov 19:00: Benefits of data openness in a digital world
We are at a moment of extreme pessimism about data with news stories implicating social media and mobile phones in cyberespionage. To many this is a worrying state of affairs but are we worrying too much? In this talk I will argue that data openness and data-drive advertising are good things and are misunderstood. In particular data-driven advertising is not about controlling behaviour but involves targeting groups of people which brings economic benefits. Internet search data has been used to meet public health challenges such as providing insights into Zika and Ebola. I will argue we should be targeting the distribution of digital power rather than concerning ourselves with business models of particular companies.
- Speaker: Sam Gilbert, Bennett Institute for Public Policy
- Monday 03 November 2025, 19:00-21:00
- Venue: The Statistical Laboratory,Centre for Mathematical Sciences,Wilberforce Road, Cambridge, CB3 0WB.
- Series: Cambridge Statistics Discussion Group (CSDG); organiser: Peter Watson.
Fri 13 Jun 16:00: Geometric Principles for Machine Learning Physical Systems
From classical mechanics, we know that mathematical descriptions of dynamical systems are deeply rooted in topological spaces defined by non-Euclidean geometry. In this talk we will investigate how these structure-rich, geometric representations could be key to improving generalization and parsimony when using machine learning to model physical systems from data.
- Speaker: Dr Zack X Conti, Alan Turing Institute
- Friday 13 June 2025, 16:00-17:00
- Venue: JDB Seminar Room, CUED.
- Series: Engineering - Dynamics and Vibration Tea Time Talks; organiser: div-c.
Mon 09 Jun 15:00: Climate beliefs across borders: National patterns and digital interventions
Like many social psychologists, I began my career thinking about the individual; how worldviews, ideologies, and belief systems shape people’s responses to climate change. Most of this work has been rooted in the Global North, where political ideology and education are often central. But climate change (in)action is not easily explained at the level of the individual. Rather, it’s a global phenomenon shaped by national histories, economies, and political systems. In this talk, I shift focus from the individual to the national level, drawing on international datasets, social media data, and machine learning to explore how country-level factors — such as GDP , fossil fuel dependence, and democracy — shape climate concern, scepticism, and activism. The findings underscore calls for a globally informed approach to climate psychology, one that takes seriously the political, economic, and structural context in which beliefs are formed. Finally, the talk turns to the dual role of artificial intelligence in this space, both as a vector for amplifying climate-related misinformation and as a tool for enhancing trust and promoting accurate scientific communication. I explore recent work testing AI-facilitated interventions to reduce conspiracy theories and misinformation about climate science and renewable energy, interventions that are potentially scalable to international contexts.
- Speaker: Matthew Hornsey (University of Queensland)
- Monday 09 June 2025, 15:00-16:00
- Venue: Ground Floor Lecture Theatre, Department of Psychology, Downing Site, Cambridge.
- Series: Social Psychology Seminar Series (SPSS); organiser: Yara Kyrychenko.
Thu 19 Jun 14:00: ECR Symposium 2025 Methodologies in Infection and Immunity
Cambridge Infectious Diseases and Cambridge Immunology Network ECR Symposium 2025
Methodologies in Infection and Immunity
Date & Time: Thursday 19th June, 2.00-5.00pm
Location: Ground Floor Lecture Theatre, JCBC , Cambridge Biomedical Campus
Programme includes: Rachel Jackson (CIMR): Pushing resolution limits of microscopy for intracellular bacteria
Daniel Nash (Pathology): Using reactive biotin to investigate herpes simplex mediated alterations to the plasma membrane proteome in human cortical neurones
Antonia Netzl (Zoology): Antigenic cartography as a tool to visualise virus evolution
Mahrukh Shameem (Babraham Institute): Unveiling the role of interleukins in respiratory infections and inflammation using ex vivo lung slices
Leonie Lorenz (EMBL-EBI): Methods for mathematical modelling of pathogen evolution: Model fitting with Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) and model comparison via likelihood-ratio tests
Sebastian Bruchmann (Medicine): Towards automated, high-throughput infection assays: Developing an affordable imaging platform for the honeycomb moth infection model
Any questions please contact: Maria Bargues-Ribera, Cambridge Infectious Diseases IRC Manager email: mb2464@cam.ac.uk
- Speaker: Various (see programme)
- Thursday 19 June 2025, 14:00-17:00
- Venue: Lecture Theatre, Jeffrey Cheah Biomedical Centre, Cambridge Biomedical Campus.
- Series: Cambridge Immunology Network Seminar Series; organiser: Ruth Paton.
Tue 03 Jun 13:00: Effective and minimal cones of weights for Hilbert modular forms (joint with P. Kassaei)
I’ll discuss some generalizations of the well-known fact that there are non non-zero modular forms of negative weight, even when working in characteristic p. In particular, for Hilbert modular forms associated to a totally real field of degree d, the weight is a d-tuple, all components of which are non-negative, if working in characteristic zero. But there are mod p Hilbert modular forms, called partial Hasse invariants, whose weight in some component is negative. I’ll explain joint work with Kassaei (from 2017/2020) that shows the possible weights of non-zero Hilbert modular forms in characteristic p lie in the cone generated by the weights of these partial Hasse invariants. In fact we prove a stronger result (motivated by the relation with Galois representations) which asserts that any form whose weight lies outside a certain minimal cone is divisible by a partial Hasse invariant. I’ll also discuss a recent generalization of these results to forms on Goren-Oort strata of Hilbert modular varieties.
- Speaker: Fred Diamond (KCL)
- Tuesday 03 June 2025, 13:00-14:00
- Venue: MR12.
- Series: Number Theory Seminar; organiser: Jef Laga.
Tue 10 Jun 13:00: All-atom Diffusion Transformers: Unified generative modelling of molecules and materials In-person and virtual (link coming soon) - and will be recorded.
I will introduce the All-atom Diffusion Transformer (ADiT), a unified generative modelling architecture capable of jointly modelling both periodic crystals and non-periodic molecular systems. ADiT is a latent diffusion model that embeds 3D atomic systems into a shared latent space, where it learns to sample new latents and map them to valid structures. ADiT achieves state-of-the-art performance for generative modelling across both molecules and materials, outperforming specialized system-specific methods while being significantly more scalable. I will show that scaling ADiT’s model parameters predictably improves performance, towards the goal of a unified foundation model for molecular design.
Link to paper: https://www.arxiv.org/abs/2503.03965
Bio: Chaitanya is a final year PhD student in Computer Science at the University of Cambridge, supervised by Prof. Pietro Liò. His research is about deep learning foundations for molecular modelling and design. He has previously interned at Prescient Design, Genentech and at FAIR Chemistry, Meta AI on the same.
In-person and virtual (link coming soon) - and will be recorded.
- Speaker: Chaitanya Joshi
- Tuesday 10 June 2025, 13:00-14:00
- Venue: Lecture Theatre 1, Computer Laboratory, William Gates Building.
- Series: Artificial Intelligence Research Group Talks (Computer Laboratory); organiser: Pietro Lio.
Thu 03 Jul 16:00: ‘Unpicking the biology of healthy human nasal microbiome’
This Cambridge Immunology Network Seminar will take place on Thursday 3 July 2025, starting at 4:00pm, in the Ground Floor Lecture Theatre, Jeffrey Cheah Biomedical Centre (JCBC)
Speaker: Dr Ewan Harrison, Head of Respiratory Virus and Microbiome Initiative, Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute
Title: ‘Unpicking the biology of healthy human nasal microbiome’
Host: Patrycja Kozik, MRC -LMB, Cambridge
Refreshments will be available following the seminar.
- Speaker: Dr Ewan Harrison, Wellcome Sanger Institute
- Thursday 03 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.
Wed 04 Jun 13:00: Title to be confirmed CANCELLED
Abstract not available
CANCELLED
- Speaker: Michael Diamond-Hunter (Department of History and Philosophy of Science)
- Wednesday 04 June 2025, 13:00-14:30
- Venue: Seminar Room 2, Department of History and Philosophy of Science.
- Series: CamPoS (Cambridge Philosophy of Science) seminar; organiser: Miguel Ohnesorge.
Tue 03 Jun 11:00: Quarkonia production in jets at LHCb and in Pythia 8
The main subject of this seminar is to understand the production of quarkonia in more detail, utilising their production in jets. Previous quarkonia in jets measurements from LHCb and CMS have shown discrepancies between data and current Pythia 8 MC predictions when measuring the normalised cross section vs. z(J/ψ) ≡ pT(J/ψ)/pT(jet) for prompt J/ψ’s. Pythia 8 predicts an isolated peak at z(J/ψ) ≃ 1 in comparison to data which is less isolated. First, new measurements performed by LHCb to try and understand this discrepancy will be discussed, namely normalised cross sections vs. z for different quarkonia (J/ψ, ψ(2S), Υ(1S), Υ(2S), Υ(3S) and X(3872)). Second, to address this discrepancy in Pythia 8 MC, the introduction of quarkonia fragmentation functions into the parton shower framework is discussed, which are calculations based on the effective field theory, non-relativistic QCD (NRQCD).
- Speaker: Naomi Cooke: University of Glasgow
- Tuesday 03 June 2025, 11:00-12:00
- Venue: Seminar Room -- RDC D2.002 .
- Series: Cavendish HEP Seminars; organiser: Dr Paul Swallow.