Public Lecture
Cellular Cinema: Watching Immune Response Live
Elizabeth Jerinson
University of Chicago
Wed, Aug 16, 5:30–6:30pm
Our tissues and organs remain stable over years, but can also abruptly change their chemical and cellular composition locally to defend against pathogens or repair wounds. This remarkable process is called inflammation, and is both essential to our survival and extremely dangerous. How the living materials that make up our bodies control inflammatory responses — and why this control sometimes fails — remains largely mysterious. In this talk, I will describe emerging efforts to discover quantitative principles underlying these responses, driven by new tools from biology combined with theoretical physics. In particular, I will discuss how we can ‘watch the movie’ of inflammation in live cells and animals, and the avenues this opens for understanding dynamical control of these responses.
About Elizabeth Jerinson
Elizabeth Jerison works at the interface of physics and biology, studying the collective dynamics of tissues, with a focus on immunity. She joined the faculty of the University of Chicago as an Assistant Professor of physics in 2023. She received her Ph.D. from Harvard University, and was a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University prior to moving to Chicago. She is a recipient of the Burroughs Wellcome Career Award at the Scientific Interface.
Heinz R. Pagels Public Lecture Series
Heinz R Pagels was a professor of physics at Rockefeller University, president of the New York Academy of Science, a trustee of the Aspen Institute, and a member of the Aspen Center for Physics for twenty years, serving as a participant, officer, and trustee. He was also President of the International League for Human Rights. His work on chaos theory inspired the character of Ian Malcolm in the Jurassic Park book and movies. A part-time local resident, Professor Pagels died here in a mountaineering accident in 1988. His family and friends instituted the lecture series in his honor because he devoted a substantial part of his life to effective public dissemination of scientific knowledge.
