Loading...Core Lectures
The first four weeks centered on core lectures–five to seven lectures in each academic track (over 60 in total)–to provide an academic foundation for the entire program. These were designed to provide a broad survey of major topics and exponential trends in each field. By highlighting the multidisciplinary and exponential trends in each track, students who had an intuitive and often in-depth knowledge of exponential changes in their own fields and areas of expertise came to recognize the analogous changes in other fields.
During those four weeks about 60% of scheduled activities were core lectures and workshops, with the remaining 40% special guest lectures, team project preparation, and other activities.
The guest experts’ research exemplified the multidisciplinary nature of solutions to grand challenges. They showed that understanding political, cultural, legal and other types of change is as necessary as understanding scientific and technological developments when looking at a challenge such as pandemic disease detection, bioremediation of contaminants, or climate change.
These tightly interwoven connections were demonstrated throughout the core lectures. For example, Brad Templeton, internet entrepreneur and chairman of the Electronic Frontier Foundation showed how seemingly single-track (here, Networking and Computer Science) technical topics such as virtualization and networking standards could have significant human rights effects: cloud computing affects how the Bill of Rights applies to individuals in the United States.
In other core lectures, Biotechnology and Bioinformatics track chair Daniel Reda, who co-founded the company Cure Together to apply crowdsourcing to improve collaboration and research on diseases, gave an overview of biotech as becoming a “read, analyze, and write” technology. Dr. Andreas Kogelnik described how advances in computing power and algorithms make medical discoveries possible in large data sets, and Christopher deCharms of Omneuron covered how advances non-invasive scanning technologies are making possible real-time treatments for brain disorders such as depression.
In an applied demonstration of how these biotech and medicine breakthroughs are already making “Personalized Medicine 2.0″ possible, David Ewing Duncan described The Experimental Man Project, his personal exploration of the full range of gene, environment, brain and body tests available to individuals today. Lecturer and track advisor Andrew Hessel, founding director of The Pink Army Cooperative (open source personal drug development for breast cancer), spoke on how the move from chemical processes to biochemical processes through synthetic biology will significantly reduce the negative energy and environmental footprint of many industrial activities. The constellation of synthetic biology technologies could also remediate existing environmental damage.
Group Activities
In their group activity weeks–the fifth and sixth–students divided into smaller groups to dive more deeply into topics through activities and site visits. Generally they chose a group that covered tracks not in their original area of expertise. They also continued their team project planning, ramping up for the full-time team project work in weeks seven through nine.
Examples of site visits include one of the fastest supercomputers in the world: at NERSC students learned about implementation issues in how to have access to supercomputers when supercomputers have become essential tools in basic scientific research. At the nearby Joint BioEnergy Institute they saw how synthetic biology creates new methods to make energy-rich hydrocarbons.