Messenger Lecturer

Sendhil Mullainathan
The Peter de Florez Professor, In Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and in Economics, Massachusetts Institute for Technology

Monday, November 11
PUBLIC LECTURE: Tools of Thought: Building Algorithms
that Enhance Human Capacity
Time: 3:45 pm – 4:45 pm
Location: Baker Lab, 200
Reception following in the Baker Portico

Tuesday, November 12
Incorporating Behavioral Science into Computational Science
Co-sponsored with the CS Colloquium and the ORIE Colloquium
Time: 11:45 am – 12:45 pm
Location: Gates Hall, G01

Wednesday, November 13
Incorporating Algorithms into Economics and Policy
Co-sponsored with the Law, Economics, and Policy Seminar
Time: 1:30pm – 2:45 pm
Location: ILR Conference Center, Room 423

Summary from the October 30, 2024 Cornell Chronicle article:

[Professor] “Mullainathan is the Peter de Florez Professor in electrical engineering and computer science and in economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was awarded a MacArthur fellowship, commonly known as the “genius” award, and was designated a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum. He co-founded ideas42, a nonprofit to apply behavioral science, and the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab, a center to promote the use of randomized control trials in development. He co-authored the book “Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much” (2013) with psychologist Eldar Shafir.”

Messenger Lecturer

Cynthia Dwork
Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science at the John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard, Radcliffe Alumnae Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Affiliated Faculty at the Harvard Law School and the Harvard Department of Statistics, and a Distinguished Scientist at Microsoft
Lecture titles: “TBD”
Date: May 5-7, 2025
Time: TBD
Place: TBD

Summary from nomination:

Renowned for placing privacy-preserving data analysis on a mathematically rigorous foundation, a cornerstone of Dwork’s work is Differential Privacy, a strong privacy guarantee permitting sophisticated data analysis. Differential Privacy is widely in use in industry, including in every Apple device. Dwork’s earliest work established the pillars on which every fault-tolerant system has been built for decades. Her innovations modernized cryptography to the ungoverned interactions of the internet and the era of quantum computing, formed the basis of crypto-currencies, and gave the first general approach to ensuring statistical validity in exploratory data analysis. Dwork is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the American Philosophical Society, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Her recent rewards include the 2017 Gödel Prize, the 2020 IEEE Hamming Medal, and the 2020 ACM-IEEE Knuth Prize.

University Lecturer

Dan Fagin is an associate professor of journalism and the director of the Science, Health, and Environmental Reporting Program at New York University’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. For fifteen years, he was the environmental writer at Newsday, where he was twice a principal member of reporting teams that were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize.

Lecture Titles: “The future of the monarch butterfly and biodiversity in the Anthropocene” and a second lecture, “Science communication in the age of denialism”
Date: TBD (2024-25 academic year)
Time: TBD
Place: TBD

Summary from NYU faculty profile page:

Dan Fagin is the director of the Science, Health and Environmental Reporting Program, in which he teaches Environmental Reporting and Current Topics in Science, Health and Environmental Journalism. He is also the founder and director of the Science Communication Workshops at NYU.

Professor Fagin was awarded the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction for his latest book, Toms River: A Story of Science and Salvation. Two Chinese language editions of Toms River were published in 2015, and it was named a Book of the Year by the Beijing News and the China Times.

Professor Fagin’s recent bylines include The New York Times, Nature, Scientific American and Slate. His next book is about monarch butterflies and the future of biodiversity in the Anthropocene. His articles on cancer epidemiology were recognized with the Science Journalism Award of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Science in Society Award of the National Association of Science Writers.