Nerdnite July 30: Inflammation and silk
Friends of Nerdnite,
The next edition of Nerdnite Boston takes place Monday July 30 at Middlesex lounge, and we’re pretty fired up about this month’s lineup. Come spend a summer evening enjoying a brew with fellow nerds and learning a thing or two about your immune system… plus, an answer to the question, “Silk: is there anything it can’t do?” As always, DJ Claude Money will provide the nerd-appropriate tunes. It’s a great lineup — hope to see you all there!
Talk 1:
“Too Close For Missiles, Switching to Guns: Stories From the Front Lines of an Immune Response”
by Sarah Bettigole
Sarah is a Ph.D. student in the Immunology program at Harvard studying how stress influences inflammatory processes. Her talk will illustrate the social network dynamics of immune responses in the context of various pathological events such as infection and cancer. Having tutored and taught extensively in college and graduate school, she likes doing 3D design and animation of biological processes in an attempt to make science more engaging to a general audience. And sometimes to her advisor.
Talk 2:
“Silk: The Ancient Material of the Future”
by Max Chalkin
Silk is a natural fiber that has been cultivated and fabricated into textiles for over 5,000 years. The Tufts Silklab is hard at work reinventing it. Max is a member of the Tufts research group led by David Kaplan and Fiorenzo Omenetto. His talk will cover many aspects of silk’s awesomeness. For instance, silk has a combination of properties not found in any comparable material used today — it is programmably degradable, biocompatible and edible, and completely sustainable. Silk has wide-ranging implications for high-technology, medicine, material science, and global health. To date, the Silklab at Tufts University has created implantable, fully-biocompatible sensors and optical components, refrigeration-free drug delivery systems, tissue scaffolds and orthopedic devices, and biodegradable ‘smart’ consumer goods. With silk and silk composites, we can imagine a world free of plastic bottles and Styrofoam cups, in which drugs are transported across the desert without the need for refrigeration, food tells us if it’s stale or contaminated, and our bodies alert us before we get sick. High-tech silk implants and hardware can deliver drugs, promote bone and tissue repair, and harmlessly dissolve in the body or remain stable for years. With silk, the possibilities are limitless.
Be there and be square!
Monday July 30, 8pm
Middlesex Lounge
315 Mass Ave, Cambridge MA
$5
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