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, TODAY,
Monday 27 January, at 14:00 hrs, and TOMORROW, 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
Light refreshments will be served after the talk.
All are welcome to attend
Lecture 3: Viral—immune co-evolution
Tuesday, 28 January 2025 starting at 11:00 hrs
The lectures will also be livestreamed:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dr2K3nry4yA
Looking
forward to your participation.
With best regards,
Erica Sarnataro, Quantitative Life Sciences section
for the Director's Office, ICTP