The Picower Institute Fall 2025 Symposium: "Circuits of Survival and Homeostasis"Date: Tuesday, October 21, 2025Time: 9::30am - 4::30pmLocation: 46-3002, Singleton Auditorium (Third Floor of MIT Building 46)Faculty Organizer: Sara PrescottRegistration: Free but required. Please click here to register.Understanding how the brain senses and responds to internal physiological states—like hunger, thirst, and inflammation—is vital to survival. Recent advances are revealing the circuits that link body and brain to maintain homeostasis and shape behavior. The Picower Institute's Fall 2025 Symposium, "Circuits of Survival and Homeostasis," gathers leading researchers exploring how these systems monitor, regulate, and repair fundamental physiological functions, offering insights into their mechanisms and potential therapeutic targets.Presenters:Ya-Chieh Hsu, PhD, Harvard Zachary Knight, PhD, University of California, San Francisco, HHMIMark Krasnow, PhD, Stanford University Qin Liu, PhD, Washington University in St. LouisYuki Oka, PhD, CaltechClifford B. Saper, Harvard Li Ye, PhD, Scripps Research Institute, HHMI

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.

MAD Reads! A book Club on design that meets quarterlyThis October, we're discussing Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making by Tony Fadell.THE BOOKAs a prelude to iPod designer Tony Fadell’s fireside chat with MoMA Senior Curator of Architecture and Design Paola Antonelli on October 22, we will be discussing Fadell's book, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making.In this candid guide, Fadell outlines a roadmap for starting and managing new ventures, working with hardware, software, and people, navigating failure, and acting decisively in the midst of uncertainty.As part of the discussion, we will look at some of the book’s key themes:Do Fail LearnData Versus OpinionMaking the Intangible TangibleStorytellingMarrying F\for MoneyYou Can Only Have One CustomerBuilding Your TeamA limited supply of complimentary copies are available from MAD; contact mitmad@mit.edu.MAD PREPBelow are optional activities you can pursue in advance of the meeting to enrich your book club experience:Reflect on a time when you moved forward but things didn’t go as expected. What lessons did you learn, and how did those lessons shape your future decisions?Fadell states that “college is a time to take risks.” What risks have you taken?Fadell asserts, “What you do matters. Where you work matters.” Why does it matter – and to whom?Consider what it means to be exacting and expecting great work. In the workplace how does this relate to “micro managing”?Choose a product. What story is it telling—and how?Think of a user experience that was especially positive. What made it successful?Think of a user experience that was frustrating. How could it be improved? ADDITIONAL RESOURCESBuild: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making by Tony Fadell – Reading ListTony Fadell TED Talk on Habituation: The first secret of design is … noticingTony Fadell 2015 Reading List on Creativity (blog.ted.com)

Are you creating or managing research data? This hands-on workshop will provide an overview of data management topics, including file organization and naming, data security and backups, tools for collaborating with others in the lab, and data publishing, storage and sharing. We'll also cover journal publisher requirements and writing the data management plans that are required by most funders, as well as data management issues related to closing out projects and moving between institutions. Geared towards those in postdoc or research scientist roles, but all are welcome.

High-performance reusable rocket engines recently developed by SpaceX and Blue Origin, and newer ones in development for low-cost heavy-lift launch vehicles, will enable next-generation space economics and accessibility. This talk will describe the work of MIT AeroAstro’s Zachary Cordero and his group along these lines, leveraging modern materials design, advanced manufacturing, and computational design tools to develop and manufacture the specialized materials that will power the future of spaceflight.

Speaker: Michal Shavit (NYU)Title: Weak turbulence of 2D internal gravity wavesAbstract:Our work addresses a long-standing problem: describing internal wave turbulence in the ocean from the governing equations. A promising avenue lies in the kinetic approach. But the stratified Euler equations form an anisotropic, non-canonical Hamiltonian system, making the classical wave-turbulence approach inapplicable. We take a new route: studying the singular limit of vanishing rotation, where rotation acts as a regulator near the curve of zero-frequency slow modes. This regime is both mathematically tractable and oceanographically relevant. In this limit, we derive the turbulent spectrum of 2D weakly interacting internal gravity waves, which matches the celebrated Garrett–Munk spectrum known from observations, for the first time from first principles.