MIT Free English Class is for international students, sholars, spouses. Twenty seven years ago we created a community to welcome the nations to MIT and assist with language and friendship. Join our Tuesday/Thursday conversation classes around tables inside W11-190.

Have some fun(nel) on a tunnel or sun(nel) walk! Join us for a 30-minute volunteer-led walk either through MIT’s famous tunnel system or around Killian Court. As the weather gets warmer, walk leaders may choose to take the group outside. Is the weather warm and you missed the start? Find the group on Killian Court and join in!Sun(nel) Walk Leaders will identify themselves by holding a white flag at the meeting location.Location details: Meet in the atrium by the staircase. [See image below]Prize Drawing: Attend a walk and scan a QR code from the walk leaders to be entered into a drawing for a getfit canvas boat tote bag at the end of the getfit challenge. The more walks you attend, the more entries you get. Winner will be drawn and notified at the end of April. Winner does not need to be a getfit participant.Disclaimer: Tunnel walks are led by volunteers. In the rare occasion when a volunteer isn’t able to make it, we will do our best to notify participants. In the event we are unable to notify participants and a walk leader does not show up, we encourage you to walk as much as you feel comfortable doing so. We recommend checking this calendar just before you head out.Getfit is a 12-week fitness challenge for the entire MIT community. These tunnel walks are open to the entire MIT community and you do not need to be a current getfit participant to join.

The Whitehead Innovation Initiative is pleased to host AI: Advancing Foundational Biology on April 8, 2025. This symposium will explore how artificial intelligence and machine learning are transforming foundational biological research, featuring insights from pioneering computational biologists and AI experts.This half-day event includes talks from leaders successfully integrating AI into biological discovery, a discussion with Innovation Initiative co-founder, Michael Chambers, and a poster session that offers attendees an opportunity to engage with cutting-edge AI applications in research.AI: Advancing Foundational Biology Tuesday, April 08, 2025 2:00 - 5:00 pmWhitehead Institute 455 Main Street Cambridge, MA 02142Symposium followed by poster session and receptionRegister today! For questions, email events@wi.mit.edu.Featured Speakers: Elham Azizi - Professor of Cancer Data Research, Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering, Columbia University Peter Koo - Associate Professor, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories Na Sun - AI Fellow, Whitehead Institute Caroline Uhler KEYNOTE - Andrew and Erna Viterbi Professor of Engineering, MIT; Core Institute Member, Broad Institute; Director, Eric and Wendy Schmidt Center Bo Wang - Assistant Professor, Departments of Computer Science and Laboratory Medicine & Pathobiology, University of Toronto; Chief Artificial Intelligence Scientist, University Health Network

Join us for our April MIT TUG meeting!What's in the Tableau Upgrade?IS&T is upgrading the Tableau Server to 2023.3 this month. Want to know what's new (to us)? We'll cover and demo some of the highlights in Tableau Desktop, Tableau Prep Builder, and Tableau Server.Chat with fellow MIT TUG membersShare what you've learned recentlyHear what others are working onGoing to Tableau Conference? Gone in the past? Share tips, tricks, and and for handling the conference and what you're most looking forward to Talk about whatever strikes your fancyRegisterRegister on ZoomIf you require any accessibility accommodations, please email MIT TUG leads to make your accommodation request. Some accommodations require 2-3 weeks to arrange; every effort will be made to accommodate advance requests.What is the MIT TUG?We've started a Tableau User Group at MIT (MIT TUG) to build a Tableau community at MIT by providing a space where Tableau users at MIT can:Meet other Tableau usersShowcase what we're working on and our user adoption effortsLearn about and see applications of new (to us) features in Tableau (and related data products)If you want to present at a future MIT TUG meeting:Slack us at #ask-mit-tug-leadsEmail the MIT TUG co-leads at mit-tableau-user-group-admin@mit.edu

"Managers and the Cultural Transmission of Gender Norms" | Trang Nguyen (Northwestern Kellogg)

Speaker: Saverio E. Spagnolie (University of Wisconsin-Madison)Title: Active matter in complex fluidsAbstract:Microorganisms often navigate environments with unique and counterintuitive physics, with significant consequences for evolutionary biology and human health. For example, mucus is both viscoelastic and anisotropic, profoundly influencing locomotion. This can be advantageous, as for mammalian spermatozoa swimming through cervical fluid, or detrimental, as with the Lyme disease spirochete Borrelia burgdorferi traversing the extracellular matrix of human skin. Complex fluid phenomena can also enhance or retard a microorganism's swimming speed, and can even change the direction of swimming, depending on the body geometry and the properties of the fluid. Analytical and numerical investigations of swimming in model viscoelastic (Oldroyd-B) and liquid-crystalline (Ericksen-Leslie) fluids will be discussed, emphasizing the critical and often dominant influence of nearby boundaries.Extending this work, we will then unify a broad spectrum of systems — from active suspensions in Newtonian fluids to individual active particles in confined or bulk complex flows — using three dimensionless parameters. The first is the Deborah number, which compares the timescales of particle activity and environmental relaxation; the second is a similar comparison but of length scales, which we term the Benes number; and the third is the active particle volume fraction. Motivated by this map to navigate towards new research areas, we will describe a mean-field theory describing the dynamics of active suspensions in bulk viscoelastic and anisotropic environments, predicting novel arrested states, traveling waves, and more dramatic thrashing modes.