The Paul Levinger Professorship Pro Tem in the Economics of Health Care
David R. Williams, MPH, PhD
Florence Sprague Norman and Laura Smart Norman Professor of Public Health
Chair, Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences
Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health

Dr. Williams is an internationally recognized social scientist focused on social influences on health. He has been invited to keynote scientific conferences in Europe, Africa, Australia, the Middle East, South America and across the United States. His research has enhanced our understanding of the complex ways in which socioeconomic status, race, stress, racism, health behavior and religious involvement can affect health. He is the author of more than 475 scientific papers and he has served on the editorial board of 12 scientific journals and as a reviewer for over 75 others. The Everyday Discrimination Scale that he developed is the most widely used measure of discrimination in health studies.

Registration is required. Link to Zoom webinar will be provided after registration.

The Decoding Disparities Lecture Series

The Decoding Disparities Lecture Series is sponsored by The Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University and the Brown School of Public Health to examine health inequity and to outline steps toward a more equitable and just health care system.

The series is supported by The Paul Levinger Professorship Pro Tem in the Economics of Health Care. This lecture was established in 1987 to honor the memory of Paul Levinger by a gift from his wife, Ruth N. Levinger, on behalf of the Levinger family. The Levingers’ daughter and son-in-law, Bette Levinger Cohen and John M. Cohen ’59, MD were instrumental in Mrs. Levinger’s decision to make this gift.

Continuing Medical Education

This live activity is approved for AMA PRA Category 1 Credit™

Physicians: To be eligible to claim CME credit, please register for this event at cme-learning.brown.edu

Title:  How cells use chemistry and physics to break and remodel the bones that power their movement

This event will require a password. If you are not part of the MCB Graduate Program and would like to participate, please contact the program coordinator for the password.

Please join us on Wednesday, December 2nd at 1 PM EST for a presentation with Co-Founder and CEO of Sproutel, Aaron Horowitz: “Designing With Empathy: Creating a Companion for Children With Cancer.” Sproutel leverages a unique patient-centered design process to create products hand-in-hand with patients. This talk will focus on sharing the story of designing My Special Aflac Duck, a social robot for children with cancer, providing the audience with insight into how to collaborate with patients to design products and the key advantages to this approach.

*When: Wed. December 2nd @ 1 PM EST

*Location: Zoom Meeting

*RSVP here - after registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

Aaron Horowitz is a maker; from sculptures to business, he is fascinated with the process of taking an idea from concept to reality. His experience growing up with human growth hormone deficiency inspired a desire to bring empathy, design, and a patient-centered mindset to healthcare. He is the co-founder and CEO of Sproutel, a research and development workshop focused on creating play-based healthcare innovations. Sproutel is best known for their work creating Jerry the Bear, a best friend for children with type 1 diabetes, and My Special Aflac Duck, a robotic companion for children with cancer. The White House and Barack Obama recognized Sproutel as one of 32 companies representing diversity in tech in 2015, and Aaron as one of 50 honored makers in 2014. He holds a degree in Mechatronics and User Interaction Design from Northwestern University, a major he created to pursue a passion for understanding how people play with robots! Through his work, Aaron is on a mission to design technology with purpose. When unplugged Aaron is likely either carving stone or surfing.

BRENDEN LAKE

Assistant Professor of Psychology and Data Science, NYU

LEARNING THROUGH THE EYES OF A CHILD

Young children have meaningful expectations about the world around them. What is the origin of this early knowledge? How much can be explained through generic learning mechanisms applied to sensory data, and how much requires more substantive innate inductive biases? Addressing this fundamental question in its full generality is infeasible, but we can hope to make real progress in more narrowly defined domains, such as the development of high-level visual categories, thanks to new datasets and progress in deep learning. We train large-scale neural networks through the eyes of a single developing child, using longitudinal baby headcam videos (Sullivan et al., 2020, PsyArxiv). Our results show how high-level visual representations emerge from a subset of one baby’s experience, through only self-supervised learning.

Biography

Brenden builds computational models of everyday cognitive abilities, focusing on problems that are easier for people than they are for machines. The human mind is the best-known solution to a diverse array of difficult computational problems: learning new concepts, learning new tasks, understanding scenes, learning a language, asking questions, forming explanations, amongst many others. Machines also struggle to simulate other facets of human intelligence, including creativity, curiosity, self-assessment, and commonsense reasoning.

In this broad space of computational challenges, Brenden’s work has addressed a range of questions: How do people learn a new concept from just one or a few examples? How do people act creatively when designing new concepts? How do people learn qualitatively different forms of structure? How do people ask questions when searching for information?

By studying these distinctively human endeavors, there is potential to advance both cognitive science and machine learning. In cognitive science, building a computational model is a test of understanding; if people outperform all existing algorithms on certain types of problems, we have more to understand about how people solve them. In machine learning, these cognitive abilities are both important open problems as well as opportunities to reverse engineer human solutions. By studying human solutions to difficult computational problems, Brenden aims to better understand humans and to build machines that learn in more powerful and more human-like ways.

Follow Brenden on Twitter: @LakeBrenden

DSI & CCMB Data Wednesday Seminar Series

The Data Science Initiative (DSI) joins the Center for Computational and Molecular Biology (CCMB ) every Wednesday afternoon, 4 – 5 pm during the academic year to present lecturers in various mathematical and statistical fields worldwide, as well as local researchers on Brown’s campus. The aim is to provide students, staff, faculty, and visitors with an introduction to current research topics in the fields of data science, mathematics, statistics, and computer science. Please check our events page for more information on these and other events of interest.

Desmond Upton Patton, PhD
Associate Professor of Social Work; Associate Dean of Curriculum Innovation and Academic Affairs
Columbia University School of Social Work

Desmond Upton Patton’s research uses qualitative and computational data collection methods to examine the relationship between youth and gang violence and social media; how and why violence, grief, and identity are expressed on social media; and the real-world impact these expressions have on well-being for low-income youth of color. He studies the ways in which gang-involved youth conceptualize threats on social media, and the extent to which social media shapes and facilitates youth and gang violence.

The Decoding Disparities Lecture Series

The Decoding Disparities Lecture Series is sponsored by The Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University and the Brown School of Public Health to examine health inequity and to outline steps toward a more equitable and just health care system.

The series is supported by The Paul Levinger Professorship Pro Tem in the Economics of Health Care. This lecture was established in 1987 to honor the memory of Paul Levinger by a gift from his wife, Ruth N. Levinger, on behalf of the Levinger family. The Levingers’ daughter and son-in-law, Bette Levinger Cohen and John M. Cohen ’59, MD were instrumental in Mrs. Levinger’s decision to make this gift.

Continuing Medical Education Credit

This live activity is approved for AMA PRA Category 1 Credit™

Physicians: To be eligible to claim CME credit, please register for this event at cme-learning.brown.edu

Join the Carney Institute for Brain Science for a conversation focused on how the brain gets things done, featuring David Badre, professor of cognitive, linguistic and psychological sciences at Brown University. 

This event will be moderated by Diane Lipscombe, Reliance Dhirubhai Ambani Director of the Carney Institute, and Christopher Moore, associate director of the Carney Institute.

Badre, a cognitive neuroscientist, discusses the neuroscience of cognitive control in his new book, On Task , which will be published in November, including the remarkable ways that our brains devise sophisticated actions to achieve our goals.