[Sci-tech-public] Knight Science Journalism at MIT Seminars - Tuesday, November 22 and Tuesday, November 29

[Eric Strattman]

 Both seminars are from 4pm to 6pm, in the Knight Science Journalism at MIT seminar room, E19-623, MIT. 

 

November 22
Blind children see and in turn teach us neuroscience.
Pawan Sinha, Associate Professor of Vision and Computational Neuroscience, MIT. 


At Pawan Sinha's MIT lab, he and his team spend their days trying to understand how the brain learns to recognize and use the patterns and scenes we see around us. To do this, they often use computers to model the processes of the human brain, but they also study human subjects, some of whom are seeing the world for the very first time and can tell them about the experience as it happens. They find these unusual subjects through the humanitarian branch of their research, Project Prakash.

Project Prakash sets up eye-care camps in some of the most habitually underserved regions of India, and gives free eye-health screenings to, since 2003, more than 700 functionally blind children. The children are then treated without charge, even if they do not fit the profile that would make them eligible for Sinha's research.

Sinha's eventual goal is to help 500 children each year; plans are under way for a center for visual rehabilitation in new Delhi. The special relationship that Sinha has created between research and humanitarianism promises to deliver on both fronts.

November 29

The power of diversity: lessons from the smallest and most abundant green microbe in the sea.
Sallie "Penny" Chisholm, Martin Professor of Environmental Studies, Civil and Environmental Engineering and Biology, MIT. 


The overarching goal of Chisholm's lab is to advance understanding of the ecology and evolution of microbes in the oceans, and how they influence global biogeochemical cycles. In recent years her lab has focused its attention on the cyanobacterium Prochlorococcus, which is the smallest and most abundant microbe in ocean ecosystems — sometimes accounting for half of the total photosynthetic biomass. This minimal phototroph can create a living cell with 1700 genes, sunlight, and inorganic compounds.

Her lab is developing Prochlorococcus and its phage as a model system for studying life across all spatial scales, from genomes to the biosphere, and across evolutionary and generational time scales. They hope that by expanding systems biology across these dimensions for a single organisms, they will develop a more unified understanding of life processes.




    web.mit.edu/knight-science      knight-info at mit.edu
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