September 2017
Allison Werner-Lin – How Parents Understand and Act on Uncertain Prenatal Genetic Test Results
Rm. 405A and B, Irving Institute for Clinical and Translational Research 10th Floor, Presbyterian Hospital (PH) Building 622 W. 168th Street Speaker: Allison Werner-Lin, PhD, LCSW Prenatal genome-wide testing, such as chromosomal microarray analysis (CMA), increases the possibility of identifying uncertain results associated with variable or unpredictable phenotypes, including the possibility of neurocognitive impairment. How do prospective parents prepare for the birth of a child after learning these results? How do they approach parenting? What supports do they need to cope with distress? …
Find out more »Sidney Hankerson – Writing a New Story Together: Confronting Mental Health Disparities with Community Partnerships
This lecture will highlight an innovative, community-focused approach to delivering mental health services.
Find out more »Jeannette Wing – Using Data for Good: What does it mean?
The Data, Ethics, and Decision-making Speaker Series presents Dr. Jeannette Wing, the new director of Columbia’s Data Science Institute, on "Using Data for Good: What does it mean?"
Find out more »James Costa – Darwin’s Backyard: How Small Experiments Led to a Big Theory
Charles Darwin is an iconic figure in evolutionary biology, but behind the icon is a naturalist with a twinkle in his eye and a passion for “fool’s experiments.” Sometimes quirky, often amusing, and always illuminating, Darwin’s amazing array of hands-on experiments were an ever-present part of his home life. His inventive experiments yielded universal truths about nature, and evidence for his revolutionary arguments in On the Origin of Species and other watershed works. After the lecture, James Costa will sign books in the Mertz Library.
Find out more »Convergence: How Will Machine Learning (Really) Affect Labor?
Convergence is a live show and podcast that brings two people from vastly different fields into conversation about how emerging science and technology will affect culture, society, and politics in the near future. Hosted by Meehan Crist, writer in residence in biological sciences at Columbia University, each event will bring out themes and ideas missing when conversations stay siloed.
Find out more »Material and Institutional Aspects of Field and Discipline Formation
How do fields, disciplines, and larger formations such as “the sciences” or “the humanities” come into being? What roles do objects, institutions, and materialized concepts play in these processes? These are some of the questions addressed by this two-day exploratory workshop on September 25-26, 2017.
Find out more »Pierce Salguero – Chanting as Literature: Contemporary Buddhist Medicine
This lecture series will explore the enigma of how what we write relates back to the experience of bodies, healthy and unwell. Our speakers will explore how the medical humanities build on and revise earlier notions of the “medical arts.”
Find out more »Anne-Lise François – Fire, Water, Moon: Supplemental Seasons in a Time without Season
If the Anthropocene names the geological epoch defined by the radically destabilizing effects of human activity on geophysical processes, this talk asks about the continued relevance of other, relatively unchanged seasonal cycles and patterns of fluctuating intensities and regulated dearth and abundance (both cultural and geophysical).
Find out more »John Tresch – Barnum, Bache, and Poe: American Science and the Antebellum Public
This talk will explore how the sharp increase of printed matter and an elitist movement to unify knowledge through centralized institutions in the 1840s influenced Barnum, Bach, and Poe, therefore changing the relations of science and public in this early phase of industrialization.
Find out more »Immortal Life: The Promises and Perils of Biobanking and the Genetic Archive
Please join the Consortium for a reception at 5:30pm to meet and welcome historians of science, technology and medicine as they kick off the 2017-2018 academic year at the Consortium.
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