POSTPONED — Science Under Attack

All Communications Forum events are postponed until Fall, 2020

The anti-immigration rhetoric that is dominating American politics has myriad effects on both scientists and students. Dr. Ahmed Ghoniem, Director of MIT’s Reacting Gas Dynamics Laboratory, and Dr. Sam Sinai, an MIT alum who is the co- founder of Dyno Therapeutics, discuss the challenges of doing research in the current political climate and how U.S. immigration policy is affecting the country’s ability to attract scientific talent. Ana Campoy, a senior reporter at Quartz, will moderate.

All Communications Forum events are postponed until Fall, 2020

Speakers

Dr. Ahmed Ghoniem is the Ronald C. Crane professor of Mechanical Engineering, the director of the Center for 21st Century Energy at MIT, and the director of MIT’s Reacting Gas Dynamics Laboratory. He holds bachelors and masters degrees in Mechanical Engineering from Cairo University in Egypt and a Ph. D. from the University of California, Berkeley. Since 1983, he has been at MIT where he established the Reacting Gas Dynamics Laboratory. He is a fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers and associate fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics.

Dr. Sam Sinai is the co-founder and lead machine learning scientist at Dyno Therapeutics where he builds machine learning and sampling algorithms for efficient protein design. Starting his education at Tehran University of Medical Sciences, Sinai holds bachelors and masters degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT and a Ph.D. in Evolutionary Biology from Harvard.

Ana Campoy is a senior reporter at Quartz who writes about immigration, trade and Latin America for a global business audience. Previously, she was a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, where she covered stories including the Fort Hood shooting in Texas, the first Ebola infection in the U.S. and the rise of Central American immigration. Her collaboration with Puerto Rico’s Center for Investigative Journalism and the AP on deaths caused by Hurricane Maria won the Philip Meyer Award, the Data Journalism Award for Investigation of the Year, and the Javier Valdez Latin American Prize for Investigative Journalism. Campoy also was part of a team of reporters that won a Gerald Loeb Award for a series of stories on BP’s Deepwater Horizon disaster. As a fellow at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard, she is currently studying the backlash against globalization and the social and economic policies that can help address it.

All Communications Forum events are free and open to the general public. Seating is given on a first come, first served basis. There are no tickets. This event is co-sponsored by Radius at MIT.