How do you prevent brain injuries in sports? How do you more effectively get sperm to go to the egg? Come and learn more from the experts in the field!

Join us at our favorite bar to find out more! 

$5 in advance / $7 at the door

Food and drinks available for purchase.

Family friendly, bring your kid! 

Smart sperm: search strategies on the microscale

Justus Kromer

Postdoc, Stanford University

Sperm cells follow highly dilute chemical signal with a single objective: to find the egg. As cells can only get a rough estimate of the actual concentration of chemoattractant molecules, nature had to come up search strategies that perform robust in the presence of unreliable information on the target location. We apply game theoretical methods to understand search strategies on the microscale.

Shock absorbers for preventing traumatic brain injury

Michael Fanton

Graduate Student, Stanford University

Sports account for up to 38 million concussions per year, with the majority from helmeted activities such as bicycling or football. Most helmets use stiff foams designed to be able to withstand a “worst-case scenario” impact, making them too stiff to optimally protect the brain in typical lower-severity impacts that can still cause mild TBI. In my research, I develop soft, collapsible shock absorbers which passively adapt to exert the minimum force needed to absorb the energy of an impact.