Biology & Medicine

73 speakers

Roundtables in biology and medicine examine life at every scale, from synthetic biology and gene editing to the future of psychiatry and the placebo effect. Speakers bring perspectives from genomics, systems biology, epidemiology, and clinical medicine to questions that transcend any single specialty.

View All 73 →

Neuroscience & Cognition

57 speakers

The Helix Center's most represented discipline features Nobel laureate Eric Kandel and the most-cited neuroscientist in history, Karl Friston. Roundtables probe consciousness, memory, perception, fear, and the mind-body problem, drawing on computational neuroscience, neuropsychoanalysis, and cognitive science.

View All 57 →

Physics & Cosmology

24 speakers

From particle physics to the search for extraterrestrial life, Helix Center roundtables tackle the biggest questions in the universe. MacArthur Fellow Sara Seager hunts for exoplanets, Paul Steinhardt challenges inflationary cosmology, and discussions range from the completeness of physics to the nature of mathematical reality.

View All 24 →

Mathematics & Computer Science

24 speakers

Roundtables explore mathematics as both tool and subject: the beauty and unity of mathematics, its permanence and impermanence, the mechanization of proof, and what mathematical structures reveal about mind and brain. Barry Mazur and colleagues bring pure mathematics into conversation with neuroscience and philosophy.

View All 24 →

Other/Interdisciplinary

18 speakers

Some scholars and practitioners resist disciplinary classification entirely. Librarians, activists, diplomats, and independent thinkers bring perspectives that bridge multiple fields, embodying the Helix Center's founding conviction that the most important questions require genuinely interdisciplinary investigation.

View All 18 →

Technology & Engineering

14 speakers

Engineers and technologists bring design thinking and empirical rigor. Rosalind Picard pioneers affective computing, Adrian Bejan applies constructal theory to design in nature, and roundtables on AI ethics, embodied AI, and synthetic consciousness examine technology's implications for human identity.

View All 14 →

Artificial Intelligence & Humanities

1 speakers

An emerging field at the intersection of AI and humanistic inquiry, examining how machine learning and natural language processing transform literary analysis, philosophical investigation, and our understanding of creativity and cognition.