Symposium

10:30 - 11:00

Welcome Reception 
Introduction: Dr. Pete Worden, Chairman of the Breakthrough Prize Foundation and Christopher McKee, Interim Vice Chancellor for Research, UC Berkeley

Symposium

Session 1

11:00-12:15

How the Brain Operates:
Development and Disease
View video here

Chair: 
Ehud Isacoff, UC Berkeley

Speakers:
Cornelia Bargmann, Rockefeller University
Genes, experience, and neurons:  How fixed circuits give rise to flexible behaviors
Mahlon DeLong, Emory University
Brain Disorders and Circuit Dysfunction-Surgical Approaches
Alim-Louis Benabid, U. Joseph Fourier
Perspectives for Deep Brain Stimulation; From Electrons to Photons

11:00-12:10

Panel Discussion introducing the 2016 Laureates in Fundamental Physics
View video here

Chair:
Stanley Wojcicki, Stanford

Panel moderated by Yuri Milner and featuring the 2016 Breakthrough Prize Laureates

11:00-12:20

Mathematical Horizons I
View video here
 

Chair:
David Eisenbud, UC Berkeley and MSRI

Speakers:
Sourav Chatterjee, Stanford
Nonlinear large deviations
Lauren Williams,  UC Berkeley
Combinatorics of hopping particles and orthogonal polynomials

Symposium

Session 2

1:20-3:00

Genetic Origin and Manipulation
of Disease
View video here

Chair: 
Ehud Isacoff, UC Berkeley

Speakers:
Gary Ruvkun, Harvard
The Tiny RNA World
Jennifer Doudna, UC Berkeley
The CRISPR-Cas 9 Genome Engineering Revolution
Napoleone Ferrara, UC San Diego
Targeting VEGF for age-related macular degeneration: a case study for reduction in the incidence of blindness
Robert Weinberg, MIT
The Engine Driving Malignant Progression

1:00-3:05

The Future of Particle Physics
View video here
 

Chair:
Steve Boggs, UC Berkeley

Speakers:
Nima Arkani-Hamed, Inst. for Advanced Study
Motivations for 100km Circular Colliders
Lawrence Hall, UC Berkeley
New Searches for Dark Matter in Particle Collisions
Beate Heinemann, UC Berkeley
The LHC and beyond: what can colliders teach us?
Gabriel Orebi Gann, UC Berkeley
Unravelling the Secrets of the Universe with Neutrinos
Thomas Shutt, Stanford
The Hunt for Dark Matter

1:10-3:10

Mathematical Horizons II
View video here

Chair:
David Eisenbud, UC Berkeley and MSRI

Speakers:
2016 Breakthrough Prize Laureate
Title to be announced
David Nadler, UC Berkeley
Back in Black: Geometry's Payment Plan to Number Theory
George Lakoff, UC Berkeley
The Brain's Mathematics: The Cognitive and Neural Foundations of Mathematics

Symposium

Session 3

3:30-5:00 Panel Discussion

A Multilingual Conversation in Science: from Quantum Mechanics to CRISPR to Chaos
View video here

This culminating joint session includes a panel of three scientists who will present on a project in their subject area. Each will then be an interlocutor, providing an interpretation of their colleagues talks that will result in an engaging discussion for this final session of the symposium.

Chair:  Saul Perlmutter, UC Berkeley

Moderator: I-han Chou, Nature

Fundamental Physics Speaker:  Raphael Bousso, UC Berkeley
    Geometry and Information: Hidden Patterns in Gravity and Quantum Mechanics
Life Sciences Speaker:  Jonathan Weissman, UCSF
    Turning human genes on and off with CRISPRi/a
Mathematics Speaker:  Maciej Zworski, UC Berkeley
    Linear vs Chaotic
 

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