Events
Past Event
CANCELLED - POSTPONED: WED@NICO SEMINAR: Alina Arseniev-Koehler, Purdue University "Stigma's Uneven Decline"
Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO)
12:00 PM
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Lower Level, Chambers Hall
Details
This talk is postponed and will be rescheduled. We look forward to welcoming Professor Arseniev-Koehler in the next academic year.
Speaker:
Alina Arseniev-Koehler, Assistant Professor, Sociology, Purdue University
Title:
Stigma’s Uneven Decline
Abstract:
Has the stigma targeting diseases declined? We analyze 4.7 million news articles to create new measures of stigma for 106 health conditions from 1980-2018, using word embedding methods for text analysis. We then examine how this stigma changed for different types of conditions across time using mixed effects regression modeling. We find that in the 1980s, most diseases were marked by strong connotations of disgust, immorality, and negative personality traits. Since then, stigma declined dramatically for chronic illnesses: cancers, neurological conditions, genetic diseases, and many other conditions have shed most of their negative connotations. But for other types of conditions, stigma proved especially resistant to change. Across the decades, behavioral health conditions (mental illnesses, addictions, and eating disorders) persistently connoted immorality and negative personality traits. Infectious diseases remained strongly linked to attributions of disgust. Stigma has transformed from a sea of negative connotations surrounding most diseases to a narrower set of judgments targeting conditions where the primary symptoms are aberrant behaviors. (This talk is based on research with Rachel Best at the University of Michigan).
Speaker Bio:
Alina Arseniev-Koehler is a computational and cultural sociologist with substantive interests in language, health, and social categories. Alina strives to clarify core concepts and debates about cultural meaning in sociology. For example, how do individuals learn and deploy stereotypes? Empirically, Alina focuses on cases where meaning is linked to inequality and health, such as the moral meanings attached to body weight, the stigmatizing meanings of disease, and gender stereotypes. To investigate these topics, Alina uses computational methods and machine learning, especially computational text analysis.
Alina’s work also circles around a methodological question: how can scientists measure meanings encoded in text data, such as news articles and social media posts? Computational text analysis requires scientists to mathematically model the nuanced ways in which human language encodes and conveys meaning. As highlighted by Alina’s work, innovation in computational text analysis is tightly intertwined with innovation in theoretical understanding of meanings.
Alina received a B.A. in Sociology from University of Washington in 2014, and a master’s and Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2022.
About the Speaker Series:
Wednesdays@NICO is a vibrant weekly seminar series focusing broadly on the topics of complex systems and data 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, March 8, 2023 at 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM
Location
Lower Level, Chambers Hall Map
Contact
Calendar
Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO)
WED@NICO SEMINAR: Lightning Talks w/ Northwestern Scholars!
Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO)
12:00 PM
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Lower Level, Chambers Hall
Details
Speakers:
Yessica Herrera, Visiting Scholar, Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems
Talk Title: The Body Speaks: Visual Patterns of Psychological Stress
Aakriti Kumar, Post-Doctoral Fellow, Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems
Talk Title: Evaluating Elements of Empathic Communication with Experts, Crowds, and Large Language Models
Tingyu "Mark" Zhao, PhD Student, Industrial Engineering and Management Sciences
Talk Title: Noise Filtering in Complex Networks
Sign Up:
Sign up to present at a future Lightning Talk session. NICO Lightning Talks are open to graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and visiting scholars.
Location:
In person: Chambers Hall, 600 Foster Street, Lower Level
Remote option: https://northwestern.zoom.us/j/95387714084
Passcode: NICO25
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, May 14, 2025 at 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM
Location
Lower Level, Chambers Hall Map
Contact
Calendar
Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO)
WED@NICO SEMINAR: Rosemary Braun, Northwestern University "The Scale of Life"
Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO)
12:00 PM
//
Lower Level, Chambers Hall
Details
Speaker:
Rosemary Braun, Associate Professor, Department of Molecular Biosciences, Northwestern University
Title:
The Scale of Life
Abstract:
Living systems exhibit surprising and beautiful self-organization at all scales. At the atomic level, proteins self-assemble into macromolecular complexes. The function of these machines is orchestrated within the cell by regulatory networks, whose activity is in turn dictated by, and coordinated with, the cells environment. This coordination takes place across large spans of space and time: the size and lifetime of organisms as large as the blue whale. Populations and ecosystems of many organisms in turn exhibit remarkable emergent dynamics. Today, advances in single-cell assays enable us to probe the molecular state of every cell in a sample in high-dimensional detail. But is this the correct scale at which to probe living systems? What can we learn from this data, and how can we abstract from the microscopic details to macroscopic phenotypes? In this talk, I will discuss some of our recent work bridging the cell and tissue/organism scales, and discuss some challenges and opportunities for the future.
Speaker Bio:
Rosemary Braun is an Associate Professor of Molecular Biosciences, Applied Mathematics [ESAM], and Physics at Northwestern University. A theoretical physicist by training, she earned her PhD in Physics from the University of Illinois, followed by a Masters in Biostatistics from Johns Hopkins University. She completed her postdoctoral training at the National Cancer Institute (NIH) before joining Northwestern as a faculty member. Today, she works at the intersection of statistics, mathematics, and biology to develop computational tools for analyzing high-dimensional data. In addition to her Northwestern affiliations, she is also Associate Director of the National Institute for Theory and Mathematics in Biology, as well as external faculty of the Santa Fe Institute.
Location:
In person: Chambers Hall, 600 Foster Street, Lower Level
Remote option: https://northwestern.zoom.us/j/97015976754
Passcode: NICO25
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, May 21, 2025 at 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM
Location
Lower Level, Chambers Hall Map
Contact
Calendar
Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO)