Events
Past Event
NICO SUMMER SEMINAR: Christopher Donohue, National Institutes of Health "Tacit Knowledge and the Limits of Our Tools"
Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO)
11:00 AM
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Lower Level, Chambers Hall
Details
Speaker:
Christopher Donohue Ph.D., Historian of the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) at the National Institutes of Health
Title:
Tacit Knowledge and the Limits of Our Tools: Lessons from a Fully Digital Archive
Talk Abstract:
The History of Genomics Program, founded by Eric Green, Director of the National Human Genome Research Institute in 2012, and managed by Christopher Donohue and Kris Wetterstrand, seeks to preserve the history of genomics and the Human Genome Project and promote scholarly research in the history, philosophy and sociology of genomic science. The archive (as of 2019) is close to twenty million pages of saved material and is totally digital, enabling remote access and efficient searches but posing unique problems: How to such a huge amount of data which is homogeneous and has a great deal of conceptual repetition and overlap? How do you interpret nearly identical search results for researchers? How is research in the archive done when the resource is almost nearly always available because it is online? The key to all of these questions is "tacit knowledge" or a "feeling for the digital organism." Like research generally, archival queries and archival questions, rather than simply exploratory fieldwork, need to be defined by ever-more precise questioning which is defined by intimate knowledge of the dataset on the part of researchers, as well as archivists working in dynamic to address those questions.
Speaker Bio:
Christopher Donohue Ph.D. is Historian of the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda Maryland. He is also the founder of their institutional archive (which now contains over 25 million pages of documents) and also serves as co-manager of the History of Genomics Program. The goal of this program is to promote the history and philosophy of contemporary biology and genomics at the National Human Genome Research Institute. In this capacity, he has conducted over sixty oral history interviews of leading biologists, while also leading the planning for two international conferences per year (since 2015) on the history and philosophy of contemporary science. He also directs a three times yearly seminar series. He is the editor most recently of a special issue in "History of Genomics and the Human Genome Project" published by the Journal of the History of Biology in 2018. He is also the editor of a special issue on the uses and appropriations of biological and genetic evidence by the social sciences, in press, from Studies in the History and Philosophy of Biology and the Biomedical Sciences. He has given, since 2012, over forty conference presentations and lectures, having been frequently invited by the Higher School of Economics in Moscow, as well as universities in England, France, Scotland, Greece, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Israel, Hungary, Belgium, Poland and the United States. He is the associate editor of the Ideology and Politics Journal which focuses on the political philosophy of post-Soviet and post-communist states. He serves on the editorial board of Carnet Zilsel , one of the leading (if relatively new) French journals in the history and sociology of science. He also has served as a referee of several journals (including history and anthropology) as well as a few popular presses. He is currently at work on a history of the Human Genome Reference Consortium and is finishing his monograph on the history of human variation programs funded by the NHGRI, from the HapMap to 1000 Genomes.
Time
Tuesday, June 11, 2019 at 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Location
Lower Level, Chambers Hall Map
Contact
Calendar
Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO)
No Classes - Martin Luther King Jr. Day (University Offices Closed)
University Academic Calendar
All Day
Details
No Classes - Martin Luther King Jr. Day (University Offices Closed)
Time
Monday, January 20, 2025
Contact
Calendar
University Academic Calendar
WED@NICO SEMINAR: István Kovács, Northwestern University "The Brain as a Critical Spatial Network"
Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO)
12:00 PM
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Lower Level, Chambers Hall
Details
Speaker:
István Kovács, Assistant Professor, Department of Physics and Astronomy, Northwestern University
Title:
The Brain as a Critical Spatial Network
Abstract:
Recent cellular-level volumetric brain reconstructions have revealed petabytes of information about the astronomical level of anatomic complexity. Determining which structural aspects of the brain to focus on, especially when comparing with computational models and other organisms, remains a major challenge. Recently, we utilized tools from statistical physics to show that cellular brain anatomy satisfies universal scaling laws, establishing the notion of "structural criticality" in the cellular structure of the brain. For example, we obtain estimates for critical exponents in the human, mouse and fruit fly brains and show that they are consistent between organisms, to the extent that data limitations allow. Such universal quantities are robust to many of the microscopic details of the cellular structures of individual brains, providing a key step towards generative computational models, and also clarifying in which sense one animal may be a suitable anatomic model for another. Therefore, our framework provides clear guidance in selecting informative structural properties of cellular brain anatomy. Similarly, in terms of the complex interplay between the spatial and topological aspects of the neural connectome, we showed that brain networks share simple organizing principles across the studied organisms. We used these observations to design scalable generative network models, and demonstrated predictive power beyond the input data, as they capture several additional biological and network characteristics, like synaptic weights and graphlet statistics. Currently, with our experimental collaborators, we are working on incorporating transcriptomics data into our models to also understand the underlying genetic wiring rules of brain organization. As in the brain the hardware is the software, even with all the remaining open questions, our results are expected to have broad implications on brain function and dynamics.
References:
[1] H. S. Ansell and I. A. Kovács (2024) Unveiling universal aspects of the cellular anatomy of the brain, Communications Physics, 7, 184
[2] A. Salova and I. A. Kovács (2024) Combined topological and spatial constraints are required to capture the structure of neural connectomes, Network Neuroscience, 1-41
Speaker Bio:
István Kovács is Assistant Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Northwestern University, a core member of NICO and NITMB, with a courtesy appointment in the Department of Engineering Science and Applied Mathematics. He is a recipient of the 2025 NSF CAREER Award, the Karl Rosengren Faculty Mentoring Award in 2021 and 2023, and was selected for the 2021-2022 Faculty Honor Roll at Northwestern University, for powerful and exceptional impact on student experience. Previously he was a postdoctoral fellow in the Network Science Institute at Northeastern University, a visiting researcher in the Center for Cancer Systems Biology at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and at University of Toronto, as well as at the Department of Network and Data Science of the Central European University. He received a PhD in Physics from the Eötvös Loránd University in Hungary, working at the Wigner Research Centre for Physics. His group develops novel methodologies to predict the emerging structural and functional patterns in problems ranging from systems biology to quantum physics, in close collaboration with experimental groups.
Location:
In person: Chambers Hall, 600 Foster Street, Lower Level
Remote option: ZOOM TBA
Passcode: TBA
About the Speaker Series:
Wednesdays@NICO is a vibrant weekly seminar series focusing broadly on the topics of complex systems, data science and network science. It brings together attendees ranging from graduate students to senior faculty who span all of the schools across Northwestern, from applied math to sociology to biology and every discipline in-between. Please visit: https://bit.ly/WedatNICO for information on future speakers.
Time
Wednesday, January 22, 2025 at 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM
Location
Lower Level, Chambers Hall Map
Contact
Calendar
Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO)
Winter Classes End
University Academic Calendar
All Day
Details
Winter Classes End
Time
Saturday, March 15, 2025
Contact
Calendar
University Academic Calendar
Spring Classes Begin - Northwestern Monday: Classes scheduled to meet on Mondays meet on this day.
University Academic Calendar
All Day
Details
Spring Classes Begin - Northwestern Monday: Classes scheduled to meet on Mondays meet on this day.
Time
Tuesday, April 1, 2025
Contact
Calendar
University Academic Calendar