Dear All,
You are most cordially invited to the ICTP 2025 Salam
Distinguished Lecture series by Prof. Aleksandra Walczak, École
normale supérieure, Paris
, on "Prediction in immune repertoires:
learning rules in a self-organised mess".
The lectures will take place (in presence) in the Budinich
Lecture Hall, Leonardo building, on Monday 27 January, at
11:00 and 14:00 hrs, and Tuesday 28 January at 11:00 hrs.
Aleksandra
Walczak received her PhD in physics at the University of
California, San Diego, working on models of stochastic gene
expression. After a graduate fellowship at KITP, she was a
Princeton Center for Theoretical Science Fellow, focusing on
applying information theory to signal processing. Currently she
is a CNRS research director at the Ecole Normale Superieure in
Paris, interested in collective behaviour, fly development and
statistical descriptions of the immune system. She was awarded
the “Grand Prix Jacques Herbrand de l’Académie des sciences" in
2014, the bronze medal of CNRS in 2015, the American Physical
Society Fellowship, the Prix Jean Ricard of the French Physics
Society in 2021 and the silver medal of CNRS in 2024.
The Salam Distinguished Lecture Series is an annual
presentation of talks by renowned, active scientists. The aim is
to showcase important research developments as well as provide a
visionary forward view. The lecture series is generously
supported by the Kuwait Foundation for the Advancement of
Sciences (KFAS). The overarching title of the three talks will
be: "Prediction in immune repertoires: learning rules in
a self-organised mess"
Abstract:
Immune repertoires provide a unique fingerprint reflecting
the immune history of individuals, with potential applications
in precision medicine. Can this information be used to identify
a person uniquely? If it really is a personalised medical
record, can it inform us about the outcomes of a COVID-19
infection? I will show how even a system as complicated as the
immune system has reproducible outcomes. Yet predicting the
future state of a complex environment requires weighing the
trust in new observations against prior experiences. In this
light, I will present a view of the adaptive immune system as a
dynamic Bayesian machinery that updates its memory repertoire by
balancing evidence from new pathogen encounters against past
experience of infection to predict and prepare for future
threats. I will then attempt to connect data to phenotypic
models of evolution and show how the evolution of pathogens is
constrained by selection pressures coming from immune systems.
Together, I will present examples of how statistical analysis
described immune repertoires on different scales.
There will be 3 lectures with the following titles:
Lecture 1: How personalised is your immune repertoire?
Monday, 27 January 2025 starting at 11:00 hrs
Lecture 2: Optimal immune systems
Monday, 27 January 2025 starting at 14:00 hrs
Lecture 3: Viral—immune co-evolution
Tuesday, 28 January 2025 starting at 11:00 hrs
The lectures will also be livestreamed from the ICTP website
Looking
forward to your participation.
With best regards,
Erica Sarnataro, Quantitative Life Sciences section
for the Director's Office, ICTP