Past Events

Gina McCarthy is Professor of the Practice of Public Health in the Department of Environmental Health at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the Director of the Center for Climate, Health, and the Global Environment (Harvard C-CHANGE). McCarthy has been a leading advocate for common sense strategies to protect public health and the environment for more than 30 years. She served under President Barack Obama as the 13th Administrator of the EPA from 2013–2017.

Founded in 1780, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences is both an honorary society that recognizes and celebrates the excellence of its members and an independent research center convening leaders from across disciplines, professions, and perspectives to address significant challenges. Early members included George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and Alexander Hamilton. Fellows Only.

Lydia Denworth is a Brooklyn-based science journalist whose work is supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. A contributing writer for Scientific American and Psychology Today, she has also written for the Atlantic and the New York Times.

Lisa Barsotti is a Principal Research Scientist at MIT’s Kavli Institute / LIGO Laboratory. Her primary research interests include Strong Gravity & Gravitational Radiation, Gravitational Wave Detection, LIGO and Quantum Measurements. She received her PhD in Applied Physics from Pisa University, Italy, in 2006. Her research has led to groundbreaking findings in the field of quantum measurements.

Biobot: Converting Sewers Into Public Health Observatories Mariana Matus and Peter R Chai   As Biobot’s CEO & Cofounder, Mariana Matus leads technology and product development. During her PhD in computational biology at MIT, Mariana co-founded the MIT Underworlds Project: an interdisciplinary research collaboration between the Alm Lab and Senseable City Lab to study a city’s collective microbiome for public health insights. Through Underworlds, she worked closely with engineers, designers, chemists, virologists, and public health practitioners to develop methods and…

Jason Jackson is Ford Career Development Assistant Professor in Political Economy and Urban Planning in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning. Jason’s research focuses on the relationship between states and markets. It seeks to understand the historical origins and evolution of the institutional arrangements through which states and markets are constituted from the late 19th century to the present. Jason’s work is particularly focused on the role of economic ideas and moral beliefs in shaping market institutions. Jason is…

Professor and Director of Affective Computing Research at the MIT Media Lab, Rosalind Picard invents technologies for understanding the emotions and behaviors that impact health and wellbeing. She wrote the book Affective Computing, which described how to give machines the skills of emotional intelligence, and is credited for launching the growing field of Affective Computing. Author of over 300 peer-reviewed scientific articles and inventor on over a dozen patents, Picard co-founded two companies: Empatica, providing the first AI-based smart watch…

Randall Davis has been a Full Professor in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department at MIT since 1989. He has served as Associate Director of MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (1993-1998), as a Research Director of CSAIL from 2003-2007, and as Associate Director of CSAIL from 2012-2014. Dr. Davis has been a seminal contributor to the fields of knowledge-based systems and human-computer interaction, publishing more than 100 articles and playing a central role in the development of several systems. He…

Mariette DiChristina is the dean of the College of Communication at Boston University and a nationally recognized science journalist. Before arriving in 2019, DiChristina was the editor-in-chief and executive vice president of Scientific American, as well as executive vice president, magazines, of the magazine’s publisher, Springer Nature. The first woman to head Scientific American since its founding in 1845, she led the editorial team to honors including the coveted National Magazine Award for General Excellence. In her Springer Nature role,…