March 29th , 2024, Harvard University, Alma Dal Co Memorial Lecture

School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard

Prof. Uri Alon during the Alma Dal Co Lecture at Harvard

The program of the week at Harvard & MIT

Alma Dal Co Memorial Lecture:

Professor Uri Alon, Department of Molecular Cell Biology, Weizmann Institute of Science, has delivered the lecture on:

A Circuit Approach To Understand Aging

Michael Brenner, the Michael F. Cronin Professor of Applied Mathematics and Applied Physics, who served as Alma’s postdoc supervisor, promoted the Lecture of professor Uri Alon

The space of music after the Lecture

Professors Uri Alon – guitar, and voice, Wendell Lim-harmonica

The Alma Dal Co Foundation and its scientific network provided financial support for early career researchers to attend the Lecture and spend one week at Harvard. They had the opportunity to visit the research facilities at Harvard and MIT and meet different research groups.

Marta Biondo is a physicist with a passion for biology and medicine with a background in statistical methods to explore the complexities of genomic data. Her PhD thesis, completed at the University of Turin, delved into the multiple layers of variability within single-cell data, exemplifying her successful fusion of diverse scientific interests. She is also fascinated by the evolving landscape of Artificial Intelligence.

Francesco Ferraro is a PhD candidate at the University of Padua, Italy, under the supervision of Amos Maritan, Sandro Azaele and Samir Suweis in the lab of Interdisciplinary Physics. He researches in the application of tools of statistical physics, specifically those from disordered systems, to the properties of large ecological communities. Leveraging on recent advances in the application of spin-glass techniques to ecology, he is studying what is the effect of noise, time-varying interactions and delayed interactions on the structure, dynamics, stability and phases of Lotka-Volterra communities.

Stella Kyomen completed her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Evolutionary Biology at the University of São Paulo. She is interested in the evolution of morphological diversity in vertebrates and its relationship to developmental processes and phenotypic integration. She is currently a PhD student at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology, where she is studying craniofacial variation and gene regulation under the supervision of Dr. Marketa Kaucka.

Ilaria Iuliani is a physicist fascinated by the study of complex biological systems. Her wide-ranging interests span bacterial cell cycle progression, organoids formation, and retinal vascular changes. She explores the how and why of complex systems functioning and evolution, employing diverse approaches such as image analysis, computational modeling, genetics, and deep learning.

Tommaso Jack Leonardi is a PhD student at the University of Padova, under the supervision of Amos Maritan and Sandro Azaele, in the Lab of Interdisciplinary Physics. He got a Master’s in Physics at the University of Cambridge. His work deals with the application of statistical mechanics to ecology, particularly through use of dynamical mean field theory and pattern formation in species and resource population models, as part of a holistic and interdisciplinary attempt to understand the relationship between the whole and the parts.

Malick Ndiaye is a Ph.D third year student in the lab of Philipp Engel at the Department of Fundamental Microbiology, University of Lausanne. He got a bachelor in Life Sciences at UNIL where he also did his master, with a thesis in the lab of Philipp Engel, where his research for his Ph.D. is continuing. His work focuses on elucidating the interactions between bacteria and their predating viruses, and more specifically, on how these interactions shape the composition and diversity of microbial communities, by employing a blend of metagenomics and wet lab experiments.

Malvika Srivastava is a doctoral student at ETH Zurich under Prof. Joshua L. Payne, previously with Prof. Ard Louis at Oxford. She has a background in Physics and she uses theory and computation to find general principles in evolutionary biology. Her work aims at answering questions such as: how does selection for intermediate phenotypic values affect adaptive evolution? How does the total number of amino acids affect the ability to reach optimal protein function? How do complex body forms evolve from simple body forms?