The Late Night Conference with Wilhelm Huck is back again on Thursday 17th March, 20h00 CET!

 

This third episode of season 2 of the Late Night Conference with Wilhelm Huck will be streamed live on our YouTube channel Late Night Conference with WH (don’t forget to subscribe & watch our previous exciting episodes!) from Theaterzaal C, where we are excited to have you in our audience!! Get your free ticket here to watch the show LIVE*. Please pay attention – no ticket is needed if you only want to watch the stream on YouTube!

With us will be Josh Bongard , Professor of Computer Science at the University of Vermont and director of the Morphology, Evolution & Cognition Laboratory, who will be guiding us through his fantastic research on Xenobots!

 

What would life look like on other worlds? Harnessing ideas from evolutionary biology, Josh Bongard and his team have evolved virtual creatures on the computer to not only study this curious question, but also to engineer better and more adaptive robots in real life. By creating multiple virtual worlds each with their own forms of artificial life, unique phylogenetic trees emerge to give us a glimpse into the wonders of evolution! Taking this concept further, Josh and his collaborators have engineered soft robots using frog cells (Xenobots) whose 3D structure was inspired by virtual robots. Amazingly, these Xenobots can move and assemble new versions of themselves!

 

Also don’t miss out our second episode of this exciting season. You can follow us on Twitter and Instagram, as well as subscribe to our mailing list for the latest updates.

*corona rules permitting

We are excited to share that our second episode of the second season of the Late Night Conference will not only be streamed on YouTube, but also have a live audience in Theatrezaal C!

This time our guest is John Glass!

John Glass
Professor of Synthetic Biology, J. Craig Venter Institute

As professor and leader of the JCVI Synthetic Biology Group, John Glass pushes the boundaries of synthetic biology. Dr. Glass was part of the team responsible for creating the famous synthetic bacterial cell, Synthia. With an expertise at the intersection of molecular biology, microbial pathogenesis, RNA virology and microbial genomics, he has led numerous society-changing projects over the course of his career. Some of which include the development of a synthetic influenza, as well as creating cells and organelles with redesigned genomes to engineer microbes to make useful products. This lecture is not to be missed!

Watch the episode live on YouTube Thursday 10 February 2022, 20.00-21.00 CET.

There is a yearly tradition to exchange socks and write poems during The Secret Socks Santa game every December in our Physical Organic Chemistry department. We also have to guess who was our Secret Santa after carefully reading the poem. This makes the activity a really fun game!