Organizer: Aidan Gilligan (IRL), SciCom – Making Sense of Science.   Co-Organised by Dr. Michel Kazatchkine (FR), UN Secretary General’s Ban-Ki Moon’s Special Envoy on HIV/AIDS in Eastern Europe and Central Asia; Former Executive Director of the Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis & Malaria.

8:00 – 9:30 AM, Saturday Feb 13th, 2016
Marriot Wardman Park

https://aaas.confex.com/aaas/2016/webprogram/Session11488.html

Session Description

The ‘Brain Age’ is here. Massive investments in brain research and cognitive neuroscience are transforming understanding of the human mind. This session unites global teams racing to unlock the human brain and how individual cells and complex neural circuits interact in both time and space. It unveils first insights into how scientists are building “mini-brains” on a chip. The neurons of these 3-dimensional organoids communicate spontaneously by neurotransmitters and electrical depolarisation – they are thinking.

Organizer: Mr Daan du Toit (SA), Deputy Director-General, International Cooperation and Resources, Department of Science and Technology, Government of South Africa.  Co-Organised by Mr Satoru Ohtake (JP), Senior Executive Director, Japan Science & Technology Agency (JST).

1:00 - 2:30 PM, Saturday, February 13th 2016
Hoover (Marriott Wardman Park)

https://aaas.confex.com/aaas/2016/webprogram/Session11509.html

Session Description

Health diplomacy is the most active field of science diplomacy. This high-level talk maps the evolution of health from a restricted technical/medical area to today’s core role worldwide binding economic/trade/environment and human security/rights agendas. UN, African and Asian insights, amongst others, focus on how countries large and small, developed and developing, exercise health diplomacy through politics for the purpose of representation and cooperation, while improving systems and securing the right to science for vulnerable citizens. News of shared results and exciting new partnerships are given. Why health so dominates foreign affairs at regional, international and global levels is explained.

Addictions: Regulating Risk - 17-18 June 2015


Seizing the initiative of our lifelong experiences in science diplomacy and our appointments as President of the European Group on Ethics (EGE) and UN Special Envoy on HIV/AIDS, we are delighted to invite you to attend a one-day, High-Level Consultation Event titled: ‘Addictions: Regulating Risk’.

Organised by Dr. Michel Kazatchkine, UN Secretary General’s Ban-Ki Moon’s Special Envoy on HIV/AIDS in Eastern Europe and Central Asia; Former Executive Director of the Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis & Malaria. Co-organised by: Aidan Gilligan, Founder, CEO SciCom - Making Sense of Science; Member of the Governing Board of Euroscience.

Physics & Astronomy - AAAS 2015
Sunday, 15 February 2015: 1:30 PM-4:30 PM
Room LL21B (San Jose Convention Center)
https://aaas.confex.com/aaas/2015/webprogram/Session9409.html


Session Description

Astronomy is big business and just got bigger. This session tells the story of the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), the world’s largest, most powerful radio telescope extending over 2,000 miles. Co-located in 8 Sub-Saharan states with a core in South Africa and Australia, where the view of the Milky Way is best and radio interference the least, its image resolution will be 50 times that of the Hubble Space Telescope. Technology developments in antennas, fibre networks, signal processing, and software and computing place us within reach of surveying the sky thousands of times faster than ever before. But this requires high-performance computing and long-haul links with 10 times greater capacity than current global Internet traffic.