All events

Writing Together Online offers the structured writing time to help you stay focused and productive during the busy fall months. Join our daily 90-minute writing sessions and become part of a community of scholars who connect online, set realistic goals, and write together in the spirit of accountability and camaraderie. We offer writing sessions every workday, Monday through Friday. The program is open to all MIT students, postdocs, faculty, staff, and affiliates who are working on papers, proposals, thesis/dissertation chapters, application materials, and other writing projects.Please register for any number of sessions:Monday, Wednesday, and Friday 9:00–10:30am (EST) Tuesday and Thursday, 8:00–9:30am and 9:30-11:00am (EST)For more information and to register, go to this link or check the WCC website. Please spread the word and join with colleagues and friends. MIT Students and postdocs who attend at least 5 sessions per challenge will be entered into a gift-card raffle.

Writing Together Online offers the structured writing time to help you stay focused and productive during the busy fall months. Join our daily 90-minute writing sessions and become part of a community of scholars who connect online, set realistic goals, and write together in the spirit of accountability and camaraderie. We offer writing sessions every workday, Monday through Friday. The program is open to all MIT students, postdocs, faculty, staff, and affiliates who are working on papers, proposals, thesis/dissertation chapters, application materials, and other writing projects.Please register for any number of sessions:Monday, Wednesday, and Friday 9:00–10:30am (EST) Tuesday and Thursday, 8:00–9:30am and 9:30-11:00am (EST)For more information and to register, go to this link or check the WCC website. Please spread the word and join with colleagues and friends. MIT Students and postdocs who attend at least 5 sessions per challenge will be entered into a gift-card raffle.

On view October 1 -- December 11, 2025This exhibition draws on archival materials from the Aga Khan Documentation Center at MIT (AKDC) to explore a century of cultural heritage preservation in Aleppo, Syria. It takes as its point of departure the work of Kamil al-Ghazzi (1853–1933), the pioneering Aleppine historian whose influential three-volume chronicle, Nahr al-Dhahab fī Tārīkh Ḥalab (The River of Gold in the History of Aleppo), was published between 1924 and 1926.Ink, Stone, and Silver Light presents three modes of documentation—manuscript, built form, and photography—through which Aleppo’s urban memory has been recorded and preserved. Featuring figures such as Michel Écochard and Yasser Tabbaa alongside al-Ghazzi, the exhibition traces overlapping efforts to capture the spirit of a city shaped by commerce, craft, and coexistence. At a time when Syria again confronts upheaval and displacement, these archival fragments offer models for preserving the past while envisioning futures rooted in dignity, knowledge, and place.

Janet Echelman's Remembering the Future widens our perspective in time, giving sculptural form to the history of the Earth's climate from the last ice age to the present moment, and then branching out to visualize multiple potential futures.Constructed from colored twines and ropes that are braided, knotted and hand-spliced to create a three-dimensional form, the immersive artwork greets you with its grand scale presiding over the MIT Museum lobby.This large-scale installation by 2022-2024 MIT Distinguished Visiting Artist Janet Echelman, was developed during her residency at the MIT Center for Art, Science & Technology (CAST). Architect, engineer and MIT Associate Professor Caitlin Mueller collaborated on the development of the piece.The title, Remembering the Future was inspired by the writings commonly attributed to Søren Kierkegaard: "The most painful state of being is remembering the future, particularly the one you'll never have."As the culmination of three years of dedicated research and collaboration, this site-specific installation explores Earth's climate timeline, translating historical records and possible futures into sculptural form.Echelman's climate research for this project was guided by Professor Raffaele Ferrari and the MIT Lorenz Center, creators of En-ROADS simulator which uses current climate data and modeling to visualize the impact of environmental policies and actions on energy systems.Learn more about Janet Echelman and the MIT Museum x CAST Collaboration.Learn more about the exhibition at the MIT Museum.

Location: 46-3310Zoom: https://mit.zoom.us/j/96224282850Speaker: Andrea de VardaAffiliation: EvLab & Levy LabAbstract: Large language models (LLMs) have recently emerged as powerful candidates for modeling several domains of human cognition. Because they operate over natural language, they provide flexible representations that can be evaluated against human behavior and brain activity. In this talk, I will present two studies that use LLMs to test how far this modeling approach can go—first in the domain of language, and then in higher-level reasoning. In the first part, I ask whether multilingual language models can explain how the human brain processes the extraordinary diversity of the world's languages. Using fMRI data from native speakers of 21 languages spanning 7 language families, we show that model embeddings reliably predict brain responses within languages and, crucially, transfer zero-shot across languages and families. These results point to a shared representational component in the human language network, largely driven by semantic content, that aligns with the representations learned by multilingual models. In the second part, we move beyond language to ask whether LLMs can also serve as models of human reasoning. Here the question is not only whether models arrive at the correct answers, but whether they capture the cognitive cost associated with the reasoning process. Analyzing large reasoning models (LLMs further trained to generate explicit chains of thought), we show that the number of reasoning steps they take predicts human reaction times across seven diverse reasoning tasks, from arithmetic to relational inference. This alignment holds both within tasks, reflecting item difficulty, and across tasks, capturing broad differences in cognitive demand. Together, these studies show that models optimized on language can capture human brain responses to linguistic input across diverse languages, and reasoning-trained variants of these models can mirror the costs of higher-order cognition.

Learn how to read and interpret maps and data and use basic cartography principles to create maps that can be used in reports and presentations. In this introductory workshop, you'll learn about properties of geospatial data, how to work with GIS software, and how to visualize data. You will have the option of completing short exercises using QGIS or ArcGIS Pro as well as a longer exercise after the workshop for additional learning.

Speaker: Maria Avdeeva (Flatiron Institute)Title: A generative model of the first cell fate decision in mammalian developmentAbstract:The first cell fate bifurcation in mammalian development—the segregation of the trophectoderm (TE) and inner cell mass (ICM)—unfolds across asynchronous cell divisions, making its dynamics extremely challenging to reconstruct from fixed embryos. To overcome this, we developed a framework combining quantitative live imaging of key regulatory proteins with a generative probabilistic model, an approach broadly applicable to non-deterministic systems where live imaging is feasible. Our model fuses partial, pairwise observations of the transcriptional co-activator YAP with its targets, CDX2 (TE) and SOX2 (ICM), to reveal the joint dynamics of the complete regulatory network. This approach uncovered the time-dependent statistics of the cell fate allocation and allowed us to identify specific features of YAP's dynamic behavior necessary or sufficient for downstream gene induction. Notably, we uncovered significant temporal heterogeneity in SOX2 induction among ICM cells. Heterogeneities within the ICM have been linked to the initiation of the second cell fate decision in the embryo. Our work therefore sets the stage for dissecting subsequent lineage decisions and understanding how stochasticity in cell fate allocation leads to robust developmental outcomes, such as precise cell fate proportions and spatial patterning.

"Public R&D Meets Economic Development: Embrapa and Brazil's Agricultural Evolution" | Jacob Moscona (MIT)

Ten minutes for your mind@2:50 every day at 2:50 pm in multiple time zones:Europa@2:50, EET, Athens, Helsinki (UTC+2) (7:50 am EST) https://us02web.zoom.us/j/88298032734Atlantica@2:50, EST, New York, Toronto (UTC-4) https://us02web.zoom.us/j/85349851047Pacifica@2:50, PST, Los Angeles, Vancouver (UTC=7) (5:50 pm EST) https://us02web.zoom.us/j/85743543699Almost everything works better again if you unplug it for a bit, including your mind. Stop by and unplug. Get the benefits of mindfulness without the fuss.@2:50 meets at the same time every single day for ten minutes of quiet together.No pre-requisite, no registration needed.Visit the website to view all @2:50 time zones each day.at250.org or at250.mit.edu

Speaker: Roberto Svaldi (Università degli Studi di Milano)Title: Boundedness theorems for fibered varieties with trivial canonical bundleAbstract:I will explain ideas and techniques behind recent new results showing that several classes of fibered varieties with trivial canonical bundle are bounded, that is, they are parametrised by finitely many families of deformations. Namely, I will show how abelian or K3 fibered Calabi—Yau varieties are bounded, up to simple birational equivalences, in the algebraic category, and how the same results holds in the analytic category for Lagrangian holomorphic symplectic varieties. This is joint work with Engel, Filipazzi, Greer, Mauri.

Speaker: Andreas Wieser (Institute for Advanced Study)Title: Effective equidistribution of periodic orbits of semisimple groupsAbstract: Qualitatively, actions of unipotent groups on homogeneous spaces are very well understood after breakthrough works of Ratner from the 90's. The past two decades have seen dramatic progress in providing rates in these results. In this talk, we will be interested in the distributional properties of periodic orbits of semisimple groups. Here, the desire is to show that such a periodic orbit 'approximates' a periodic orbit of a larger group with a rate that is polynomial in the volume.In joint work with Einsiedler, Lindenstrauss, and Mohammadi, we prove such a result for compact (congruence) quotients with a rate this is explicit in all aspects (including the volume of the ambient space). This relies heavily on a variety of tools including uniformity of the spectral gap for periodic orbits in congruence quotients and polynomial properties of unipotent flows. We will discuss these results with an emphasis on the dynamical methods and mention applications in number theory briefly.

Pedro Martinez Bruera (MIT)

Nina Buchmann (Princeton)

Join the WriteWise workshop series to master essential research and writing skills. From getting started and honing your reading techniques to using sources effectively, explaining why your work matters and crafting impactful titles, each workshop equips you with the tools needed to excel in academia and beyond.Session 1: StartWise: Starting Your Research-Based Writing Project (Thurs., Sept. 11th) Session 2: ReadWise: Effective Reading and Note-Taking (Tues., Sept. 16th) Session 3: CiteWise: Citing Sources & Avoiding Plagiarism (Thurs., Sept. 18th) Session 4: SignificanceWise: Identifying the "So What" of Your Work (Tues., Sept. 23rd) Session 5: ProcessWise: Developing Your Project and Maintaining Writing Momentum (Thurs., Sept., 25th) Session 6: AbstractWise: Writing a Strong Abstract (Tues., Sept. 30th) Session 7: PolishWise: Fine-Tuning for Clarity and Style (Thurs., Oct. 2nd) Session 8: TitleWise: Crafting Effective Titles (Tues., Oct., 7th)For more information, visit the WCC website: https://cmsw.mit.edu/wcc-workshops/.

Speaker: Harris Daniels (Amherst College)Title: Near coincidences and nilpotent division fields of elliptic curvesAbstract:A natural question about the division fields of a fixed elliptic curve $E/\mathbb{Q}$ is whether there is a coincidence between the division fields. I.e. Are there distinct integers $m eq n$ such that the $m$-division field equals the $n$-division field. In 2023, Daniels and Lozano-Robledo gave partial answers to this question, using (among other tools) the fact that the $n$-th roots of unity often fail to lie in the $m$-division field, thereby preventing such coincidences.Motivated by this, we consider a broader notion of \emph{near coincidences}: when does there exist $E/\mathbb{Q}$ and distinct $m,n$ such that $$ \mathbb{Q}(E[n]) = \mathbb{Q}(E[m], \zeta_n)? $$ In the first part of this talk, we answer this question completely in the case where $m$ and $n$ are powers of the same prime.In the second part, we turn to a seemingly unrelated but natural problem: classifying all elliptic curves $E/\mathbb{Q}$ and positive integers $n$ such that $$ \operatorname{Gal}(\mathbb{Q}(E[n])/\mathbb{Q}) $$ is a nilpotent group. This question generalizes the classification of abelian division fields obtained by Gonz\'alez-Jim\'enez and Lozano-Robledo (2016). We present a conditionally complete classification of nilpotent division fields, under either a standard conjecture about rational points on modular curves attached to normalizers of non-split Cartan subgroups or a full classification of the Mersenne primes. This is joint work with Jeremy Rouse.

The MIT Sloan School of Management and the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing will welcome Hemant Taneja '97, MNG '99, SM '99, CEO of global venture capital firm General Catalyst, for a talk, discussion and audience Q&A on his new book, The Transformation Principles: How to Create Enduring Change.In the book, Hemant, a five-time graduate of MIT, explores the nine key principles at the heart of General Catalyst, and how today's entrepreneurs and leaders can apply these principles to building their own institutions that reshape industries and serve the world.

MIT Emerson/Harris Music Masterclass Series “Writing for large jazz ensembles. ”With composer, arranger, educator, and conductor Ayn Inserto.Tuesday, October 7, 5:30pm Killian Hall About the Artist"There's an energetic creative force on the horizon named Ayn Inserto, and... she's Maria Schneider on steroids." Harvey Siders, Jazz Times.Ayn Inserto is a groundbreaking composer who is emerging as one of the preeminent voices of her generation. She received her Master of Music degree in Jazz Composition from the New England Conservatory and is a winner of the IAJE/ASCAP Emerging Composer Commission honoring Frank Foster and the ASCAP Young Jazz Composers' Awards. She was picked by Bob Brookmeyer to study jazz composition as his protege. Her music has been performed at Carnegie Hall, Jazz at Lincoln Center Shanghai, Dizzy's Club (Jazz at Lincoln Center, NYC), the Berklee Performance Center, Boston Symphony Hall, JEN Conferences, Reno Jazz Festival, Billy Higgins Jazz Festival, New England Conservatory of Music, Brown University, Montreux Jazz Festival, the Umbria Jazz Festival, McGill University, Senigallia, Italy, Terni Jazz Festival, the Sant' Elpidio Jazz Festival, and the Fano Jazz Festival. Inserto has been commissioned by Carnegie Hall for the NYO Jazz Ensemble, The Jazz Education Network, ASCAP/IAJE, the Commission Project for JazzMN, Madison Technical College, Amherst College, Cal State University East Bay, Los Medanos College, Foxboro High School, Harvard Jazz Band, Marin Catholic High School, Fairfield High School, and Jennifer Wharton. She has given masterclasses and clinics at the Panama Jazz Festival, Brown University, IMEP Paris College of Music, International College of Music in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, Seoul Jazz Academy, Tokyo School of Music, Singapore Polytechnic, Arcevia Jazz Seminar, Rossini Conservatory of Music, the National Youth Jazz Orchestra from London, UK and the Sydney Conservatorium.In 2022, she was the musical director of the Frankfurt Radio Big Band (HR Big Band) for performances featuring Linda May Han Oh. Along with Jim McNeely, she orchestrated and arranged the concert featuring Linda's music.Inserto has served as a panelist for the Jazz Improv Convention with Dr. Billy Taylor in New York, the International Society of Jazz Arrangers and Composers, Women Jazz Composers: Empowering Equal Voices in the Large Ensemble Landscape, as well as for the Tribute to Bob Brookmeyer at New England Conservatory. She also has been a clinician for the JENerations Jazz Festival, an adjudicator for the Berklee High School Jazz Festival, the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts Fellowship, the Massachusetts Council for the Arts Composition Fellowship, and the International Alliance for Women in Music Jazz Composition Contest. She conducted the MMEA All-State Jazz Band with a program of women composers. She is a mentor for the Women in Jazz Organization and a member of the Board of Directors for the Jazz Education Network.She’s been an adjudicator for the Jack Rudin Championship at Jazz at Lincoln Center alongside Randy Brecker, Jeff Hamilton, Carlos Henriquez and Wynton Marsalis, as well as an initial adjudicator for the finalists for the 2023 Essentially Ellington competition presented by JALC. Her music is also published by ejazzlines and in the New Standards: 101 Lead Sheets By Women, a publication spearheaded by Terri Lyne Carrington and the Berklee Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice.Her big band, the Ayn Inserto Jazz Orchestra, has recorded three albums with special guests Bob Brookmeyer, John Fedchock, George Garzone and Sean Jones. The ensemble has garnered many positive reviews such as Downbeat Editor's Pick, The Boston Globe 2018 Best Jazz Albums, Top Ten Recordings of 2018 (Cadence Magazine) and the Jazz Journalists Association Best of 2018 (Large Ensemble) List. She currently resides in Boston where she is the Assistant Chair of Harmony and Jazz Composition at Berklee College of Music and is a Jazz Composers Present Artist."The bandleader conducts an agile, 17-piece ensemble made up of peers, friends, longtime collaborators and even family... Inserto has crafted a program that feels completely natural as big band music and includes five of her compositions. Some lesser orchestrators nowadays falter when they seize music originally penned for a combo and clumsily rework it with an arrangement that's actually ill-suited for a large ensemble. But Inserto-who studied with Bob Brookmeyer (1929-2011)- delivers a program that gracefully exploits the strengths of big band instrumentation, as evidenced by her two-part suite titled "Part I: Ze Teach" and "Part II: And Me." Elsewhere, Inserto offers a superb arrangement of Jones' "BJ's Tune," providing a showcase for the trumpeter's sumptuous tone. This album strikes the perfect balance between entertaining artistry and finely crafted arrangements that could be studied closely in the classroom." Bobby Reed, DownBeat Magazine, Down A Rabbit Hole Review (2018)

Free and open to all.Join us for a free, all levels yoga class! Led by Spira Politis of The Embody School, the class will begin gently and gradually increase in intensity, moving slowly and holding poses longer to focus on internal awareness of sensation.This class will take place outdoors - or, in case of inclement weather, indoors in the MIT Welcome Center. Please bring a yoga mat and wear layers as needed.All participants must sign a waiver - please register online in advance to do so, or arrive a few minutes early to complete one on site.This fall fitness class is presented in collaboration with the East Cambridge Business Association - check out the other events in this series:Dirty Water Fitness | September 16th, 6-7pmDirty Water Fitness | November 4th, 6-7pmYoga with The Embody School | December 9th, 6-7pm

Science, trust, and the future of our planet Join Whitehead Institute President and Director Ruth Lehmann, and former White House National Climate Advisor and United States Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Gina McCarthy, for a conversation about the role of science in informing sound policy, earning public trust, and providing the knowledge needed to protect the well-being of people and our planet.For questions, email marysull@wi.mit.edu.

Bohyun Yoon is a professor at Southern Illinois University and an independent studio artist. His work in glass is exploratory and conceptual, and his work reflects a singular sensitivity to light and shadow as powerful expressive tools. This lecture will be on Tuesday, October 7 at 6PM in room 10-250, and is free and open to the general public.

Presentation with JBG SMITHEvan Regan-Levine — Chief Strategy Officer of JBG SMITHMr. Regan‐Levine is Chief Strategy Officer of JBG SMITH. Mr. Regan‐Levine helps shape the firm’s investment approach with data and analytics and works on large scale strategic initiatives, investor relations/capital raising, and innovation projects as well as partnerships outside the traditional real estate transaction landscape. Mr. Regan-Levine’s work is typically cross-vertical focused on product or process enhancement – particularly at the intersection of market research and design. He manages JBG SMITH’s Venture Capital investments and is a member of the firm’s Investment Committee and Operating Committee.Prior to joining The JBG Companies (predecessor to JBG SMITH) in 2013, Mr. Regan‐Levine was an Associate with Monday Properties and served for two years in market research with JLL where he acted as an advisor for a wide variety of JLL’s investor and occupier clients and was involved in several national and international consulting and research projects often focused on location and market intelligence and analytics for large corporate relocation requirements and investor clients.Mr. Regan‐Levine graduated Magna Cum Laude in Government from Georgetown University.