Stratton Lecture: The Living Brain

The Stratton Lecture: The Epidemic of Loneliness

Date: Tuesday March 3

Time: 11:30pm - 1:00pm

Location: MIT Wong Auditorium (E51-115)

This event will be livestreamed.

Join us for The Living Brain: Health and Memory Across the Lifespan, a lecture that invites curiosity about how the human brain supports learning, thinking, and emotional life over time. Speakers will share insights into how scientists study the brain and what this research reveals about maintaining brain health and memory. Together, these perspectives offer a thoughtful look at how everyday experiences, biology, and care for the brain shape cognitive well-being across the course of life.

Keynote Speaker: Professor John D. Gabrieli

Remarks by: Dr. Mikki Tal
Remarks by: Professor Laura Lewis

Discussion Moderated by: Amy Brand, Director and Publisher of MIT Press

This event is co-sponsored by the MIT Retirees Association and MIT Press.

John Gabrieli is the director of the Athinoula A. Martinos Imaging Center at the McGovern Institute. He is an Investigator at the Institute, with faculty appointments in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and the Institute for Medical Engineering & Science, where he holds the Grover Hermann Professorship. He also has appointments in the Department of Psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital and the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and is the director of the MIT Integrated Learning Initiative. Prior to joining MIT in 2005, he spent 14 years at Stanford University in the Department of Psychology and Neurosciences Program. He received a Ph.D. in Behavioral Neuroscience in the MIT Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and a B.A. in English from Yale University. In 2016 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Michal Caspi Tal, PhD, is an immunoengineer, and a Principal Scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Dr. Tal leads the Tal Research Group within the department of Biological Engineering and also serves as the associate scientific director of the Center for Gynepathology Research. Michal is working to identify the connections between infections and chronic diseases. Her research is focused on creating predictive diagnostics, and generating actionable information providers can use to connect with and care for patients to improve diagnosis and treatments for invisible chronic diseases. From tick-borne disease to COVID, there are many similarities across chronic inflammatory diseases and important sex differences in these responses, which are the focus of the Tal group. Michal received her PhD at Yale University in Immunobiology under the mentorship of Dr. Akiko Iwasaki researching how immune responses to viruses are impacted by processes such as aging. Dr Tal then did her postdoctoral training in the laboratory of Irving Weissman at Stanford where she later became an instructor at the Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine at Stanford University leading the infectious disease team and studying immumodulatory mechanisms which impact immune clearance of infectious disease, with a focus on Lyme disease. Michal has been awarded NIH NIAID F31 and F32 pre and postdoctoral fellowships, as well as the Emerging Leader Award from Bay Area Lyme Foundation.

Laura Lewis is the Athinoula A. Martinos Associate Professor in IMES and EECS at MIT, and an Associate Faculty Member at the Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging at MGH. She completed her Ph.D. in Neuroscience, and conducted postdoctoral work in neuroimaging, in the Society of Fellows at Harvard University. Her research develops multimodal approaches for imaging the human brain, and applies them to study the neural circuitry that controls sleep, and the consequences of sleep for brain function. Her work has shown that fast fMRI can measure subsecond neural dynamics, and discovered waves of cerebrospinal fluid flow that appear in the sleeping human brain. Her research has been recognized by awards such as the Peter and Patricia Gruber International Research Award, the Sloan Fellowship, the McKnight Scholar Award, and the Pew Scholar Award.

Moderated by:

Amy Brand, director and publisher of the MIT Press, one of the largest university presses in the world, and an important figure in open access publishing. The MIT Press is well known for its publications in emerging fields of scholarship and its pioneering use of technology. Brand’s career spans a wide array of experiences in academia and scholarly communications. She received her doctorate in cognitive science from MIT and has held a number of positions in scholarly communications, publishing, and open information access at MIT, Digital Science, and Harvard before returning to the press in 2015 to serve as director. She was executive producer of the Emmy-nominated documentary Picture a Scientist, a 2020 selection of the Tribeca Film Festival that highlights gender inequality in science. Some of Dr. Brand’s awards include the Laya Wiesner Community Award, the American Association for the Advancement of Science Kavli Science Journalism Gold Award, and the Award for Meritorious Achievement issued by the Council of Science Editors.

About the Stratton Lecture

For more than 30 years, the Women’s League co-sponsored the Stratton Lectures in honor of former MIT first lady and longtime League member Catherine M. Stratton. Mrs. Stratton, fondly known to her fellow league members as Kay, was an energetic part of the MIT community for more than 75 years. She initiated the lecture series in 1988, and the Women’s League offered two lectures: Critical Issues and Aging Successfully, the latter in collaboration with MIT Medical and MIT AgeLab. The Stratton Lecture was paused during the COVID pandemic and relaunched to great success in 2024.

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