The 2025 Salam Distinguished Lecture Series will feature theoretical biophysicist Aleksandra Walczak.
 
Aleksandra Walczak received her PhD in physics at the University of California, San Diego, working on models of stochastic gene expression. After a graduate fellowship at KITP, she was a Princeton Center for Theoretical Science Fellow, focusing on applying information theory to signal processing. Currently she is a CNRS research director at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris, interested in collective behaviour, fly development and statistical descriptions of the immune system. She was awarded the “Grand Prix Jacques Herbrand de l’Académie des sciences" in 2014, the bronze medal of CNRS in 2015, the American Physical Society Fellowship, the Prix Jean Ricard of the French Physics Society in 2021 and the silver medal of CNRS in 2024.
 
The Salam Distinguished Lecture Series is an annual presentation of talks by renowned, active scientists. The aim is to showcase important research developments as well as provide a visionary forward view. The lecture series is generously supported by the Kuwait Foundation for the Advancement of Sciences (KFAS). The overarching title of the three talks will be: "Prediction in immune repertoires: learning rules in a self-organised mess"
 
Abstract:
Immune repertoires provide a unique fingerprint reflecting the immune history of individuals, with potential applications in precision medicine. Can this information be used to identify a person uniquely? If it really is a personalised medical record, can it inform us about the outcomes of a COVID-19 infection? I will show how even a system as complicated as the immune system has reproducible outcomes. Yet predicting the future state of a complex environment requires weighing the trust in new observations against prior experiences. In this light, I will present a view of the adaptive immune system as a dynamic Bayesian machinery that updates its memory repertoire by balancing evidence from new pathogen encounters against past experience of infection to predict and prepare for future threats. I will then attempt to connect data to phenotypic models of evolution and show how the evolution of pathogens is constrained by selection pressures coming from immune systems. Together, I will present examples of how statistical analysis described immune repertoires on different scales.
 
There will be 3 lectures with the following titles:
 
Lecture 1: How personalised is your immune repertoire?
Monday, 27 January 2025 starting at 11:00 hrs
 
Lecture 2: Optimal immune systems
Monday, 27 January 2025 starting at 14:00 hrs
 
Lecture 3: Viral—immune co-evolution
Tuesday, 28 January 2025 starting at 11:00 hrs
 
 
The three lectures will take place in ICTP's Budinich Lecture Hall.
 
 
All are welcome to attend. The lectures will also be livestreamed from the ICTP website.