Aging Brain Seminar with Ronald A. DePinho, MD, MD Anderson Cancer CenterDate: Monday, February 24Time: 4:00pmLocation: 46-3310, Picower Seminar Room (in-person only)Talk Title: Telomerase in Cancer, Aging, and Alzheimer’sAbstract: Abstract to come.Ronald A. DePinho, M.D. is the past president and distinguished university professor at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas. He studied biology at Fordham University, received his M.D. degree with distinction from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, and performed his residency and postdoctoral training at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center. His research career began at Einstein as the Feinberg Senior Faculty Scholar in Cancer Research and an ACS Research Professor. He then joined the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School where he was the founding Director of the Belfer Institute for Applied Cancer Science. He is a member of the National Academy of Medicine and the National Academy of Science, and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Association of the Advancement of Science, and the American Association of Cancer Research.

Malika Korganbekova (University of Chicago)

Replicating RNA with RNAhttps://web.mit.edu/webcast/chemistry/s25/2/

Ekaterina Zhuravskaya Paris School of Economics

Stop by for snacks and tea with the SHASS community, students, and instructors!HumaniTea is a program partnering with other units in SHASS to gather, share some food and thought, and enrich our shared MIT experience in the process. Once a month, SHASS community members, instructors, and students from diverse fields of studies, backgrounds, and interests can stop in and enjoy a cup of tea or snack.Monday, February 24 Monday, March 17 Monday, April 7 Monday, May 5@ 4:15 – 5:45PM Building 14E-304**Directions: Third floor of Building 14 from the Lewis Music Library stairs, through the CMS/W doors. Alternatively, take the elevator to the 3rd floor and navigate to the opposite end of the hallway, through third floor and CMS/W doors!Sign up for HumaniTea info: bit.ly/mithumanitea

Speaker: Ben Knudsen (Northeastern University)Title: Probabilistic invariants of finite groupsAbstract: We continue the study of the probabilistic versions of the Lusternik–Schnirelmann category and topological complexity introduced in joint work with Weinberger and independently by Dranishnikov–Jauhari. In the aspherical context, where these invariants are group invariants, there is a universal upper bound in the finite case. We discuss progress toward calculating the exact value, which is equivalent to an interesting problem in equivariant homotopy theory. This talk is based on joint work with Shmuel Weinberger.