Salam Distinguished Lectures 2025

The Salam Distinguished Lecture Series is an annual event featuring presentations by prominent, active scientists, designed to highlight significant research advancements and offer an inspiring perspective on the future. The Series is generously supported by the Kuwait Foundation for the Advancement of Sciences (KFAS).

The 2025 Distinguished Lecturer is Aleksandra Walczak, a professor at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris. She will give a series of three talks entitled: "Prediction in immune repertoires: learning rules in a self-organised mess". The lectures will take place on 27 and 28 January in ICTP’s Budinich Lecture Hall.

Aleksandra Walczak received her PhD in physics at the University of California, San Diego, working on models of stochastic gene expression. After a graduate fellowship at KITP, she was a Princeton Center for Theoretical Science Fellow, focusing on applying information theory to signal processing. Currently she is a CNRS research director at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris, interested in collective behaviour, fly development and statistical descriptions of the immune system. She was awarded the “Grand Prix Jacques Herbrand de l’Académie des sciences" in 2014, the CNRS Bronze Medal in 2015, the American Physical Society Fellowship, the Prix Jean Ricard of the French Physics Society in 2021 and the CNRS Silver Medal in 2024.

Walczak’s lectures will focus on immune repertoires, which provide a unique fingerprint reflecting the immune history of individuals, with potential applications in precision medicine. Asking whether this information can be used to identify a person uniquely and, in that case, if it can inform us about the outcomes of a COVID-19 infection, she will show how even a system as complicated as the immune system has reproducible outcomes. Yet predicting the future state of a complex environment requires weighing the trust in new observations against prior experiences. In this light, she will present a view of the adaptive immune system as a dynamic Bayesian machinery that updates its memory repertoire by balancing evidence from new pathogen encounters against past experience of infection to predict and prepare for future threats. She will then attempt to connect data to phenotypic models of evolution and show how the evolution of pathogens is constrained by selection pressures coming from immune systems. She will also present examples of how statistical analysis described immune repertoires on different scales.

The three lectures will be as follows:

• Lecture 1: How personalised is your immune repertoire?
  Monday, 27 January 2025 at 11:00 hrs
• Lecture 2: Optimal immune systems
  Monday, 27 January 2025 at 14:00 hrs
• Lecture 3: Viral-immune co-evolution
  Tuesday, 28 January 2025 at 11:00 hrs

The lectures will also be livestreamed on www.ictp.it/livestream.

More information can be found at: https://indico.ictp.it/event/10923