April 2017
Gascia Ouzounian – Powers of Hearing: Acoustic Defense and Technologies of Listening during the First World War
Gascia Ouzounian, Associate Professor and Lecturer at Brasenose College University of Oxford, will speak on "Powers of Hearing: Acoustic Defense and Technologies of Listening during the First World War." Open exclusively to Columbia affiliates.
Find out more »Ben Hayden – Neuronal Foundations of Economic Value
Value is a central concept in economic theory and in neuroeconomics. Nonetheless, we have only recently begun to understand how the brain evaluates options and compares values to make beneficial choices. These processes appear to involve the coordinated action of multiple prefrontal and striatal regions acting together. Our work suggests that value is an emergent process that depends on the coordinated action of component processes, including memory, executive control, and action selection.
Find out more »Reembodied Sound: A Symposium & Festival of Transducer-based Music and Sonic Art
Reembodied Sound is an interdisciplinary symposium focusing on the increasing use of transducers in music and sonic art, a subject which has received scant attention as a unified practice.
Find out more »History of Visualization / Visualization in History Workshop
This workshop brings together historians, sociologists and anthropologists studying practices of data visualization with historians and social scientists using many of those practices in the pursuit of history. The goal is a more reflective critical practice of visualizations within the social sciences and a less anachronistic technical history of data visualization practices, by bringing together the methodological sophistication of science and technology studies, digital humanities, and media theory.
Find out more »Carol D. Ryff – “Unequal Lives and Aging: What Do We Know? What Do We Need to Know?”
Dr. Ryff will review growing evidence on the health and longevity consequences of inequalities in educational attainment and income. She will highlight the work of MIDUS investigators in explicating the mechanisms (behavioral and biological) that link inequality to adverse health outcomes. MIDUS researchers have also advanced understanding of protective psychological and social factors that offer buffers against these pernicious processes. She will illustrate with a focus on “purposeful life engagement,” which is emerging as a key asset to healthy aging. Future directions will focus on two neglected topics (one negative, one positive) in the science of inequality: greed among privileged elites as an insufficiently studied fundamental cause, and the role of the arts and humanities in promoting better lives and more beneficent societies.
Find out more »Advocate for Science – brainNY
This program will provide an introduction to those who wish to become active in advocating for neuroscience and provide lessons and a plan to go forward with this newly gained knowledge.
Find out more »The Human Sense of Smell – Seminars in Society and Neuroscience
How does our brain make sense of scents and flavors? To explore the human sense of smell in its perceptual, neural, and cultural dimensions, the panel brings together cross-disciplinary perspectives from neuroscience, philosophy, and perfumery.
Find out more »Two Cultures Reading Group – CP Snow and the Atomic Bomb
The inaugural meeting of our reading group will take place on April 13 at 5 pm in 513 Fayerweather. We will be discussing "The New Men" (1954), a novel that centers around the British atomic bomb project in the 1940s. Together with "The Masters" it was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1954 but fell out of fashion only a few years later.
Find out more »Stephanie M. Fullerton – Practicing Precision: Reflections on the Pursuit of Genomic Research in Clinical Settings
Stephanie M. Fullerton gives a talk on Practicing Precision: Reflections on the Pursuit of Genomic Research in Clinical Settings. Precision medicine, defined by NIH as “an emerging approach for disease treatment and prevention that takes into account individual variability in environment, lifestyle and genes,” is predicated on programs of biomedical (especially genomic) research that gather, aggregate, and store for indefinite open-ended use patients’ biological specimens, self-reported (and soon mobile-mediated) lifestyle and environmental exposure data, as well as private health information.
Find out more »Language and the Brain: How Our Brains Turn Sounds into Words
Here’s your chance for a behind-the-scenes introduction to how neuroscience research works. Bring your family and friends to Late Night Science, a seminar series with lab tours by graduate students of Columbia University Neuroscience Outreach (CUNO).
Find out more »