Kempner Institute Announces Speaker Lineup for 2025-26 Kempner Seminar Series
Series brings cutting-edge researchers to Harvard for talks about intelligence in natural and artificial systems
The Kempner Seminar Series is an in-person, research-level seminar series open to the public. The series brings leading intelligence researchers to Harvard to discuss their latest research.
Cambridge, MA– The Kempner Institute for the Study of Natural and Artificial Intelligence at Harvard University is pleased to announce the speaker lineup for the 2025-26 season of the Kempner Seminar Series, a research-level seminar series that covers topics related to the basis of intelligence in natural and artificial systems.
The series features prominent, cutting-edge experts from academia and industry who study the basis of intelligence, with specialties ranging from machine learning to neuroplasticity. Speakers focus on emerging research topics in artificial intelligence, natural intelligence and the intersection of the two.
The Kempner will kick off the 2025-26 seminar series on Sept. 12 with a talk entitled “Developing Intelligence: Insights from Spatial and Social Cognition” by Moira Dillon, Assistant Professor of Psychology at New York University.
Details, including talk titles and abstracts, for the 2025-26 Kempner Seminar Series will be made available on the Kempner Institute events page. Check back for updates about the series.
The Kempner Seminar Series is held in-person on Fridays and is open to the public. Past talk recordings are available the week following each event.
Kempner Seminar Series 2025-26 Speakers
- 9/12: Moira Dillon, Assistant Professor of Psychology at New York University
- 9/26: Kevin Ellis, Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Cornell University
- 10/3: Tatsunori Hashimoto, Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University
- 10/10: Leyla Isik, Clare Boothe Luce Assistant Professor of Cognitive Science at John Hopkins University
- 10/17: Hannah Choi, Assistant Professor of Mathematics at Georgia Tech
- 10/24: Sanjeev Arora, Charles C. Fitzmorris Professor of Computer Science at Princeton University
- 10/31: Sherry Yang, Staff Research Scientist at Google Deepmind
- 11/7: Kamalika Chaudhuri, Professor of Computer Science & Engineering at UC San Diego
- 1/16: Kyunghyun Cho, Professor of Computer Science and Data Science at New York University
- 1/23: Irina Higgins Jurenka, AI in Education Research Lead at Google Deepmind
- 1/30: Hannaneh Hajishirzi, Torode Family Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington, Senior Research Director at the Allen Institute for AI
- 2/6: Stephanie Chan, Staff Research Scientist at DeepMind
- 3/27: Stella Biderman, Lead Scientist – Mathematician at Booz Allen Hamilton and Executive Director at EleutherAI
- 4/17: Judith Ellen Fan, Assistant Professor of Psychology, by courtesy, of Education and of Computer Science at Stanford University
- 5/1: Azalia Mirhoseini, Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University
- 5/8: Danqi Chen, Associate Professor of Computer Science at Princeton University
- 5/15: Tatiana Engel, Assistant Professor of Neuroscience at Princeton University
- 5/22: Lenka Zdeborová, Professor of Physics and of Computer Science in École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne
- Date TBD: Albert Gu, Assistant Professor of Machine Learning at Carnegie Mellon University
About the Kempner Institute
The Kempner Institute seeks to understand the basis of intelligence in natural and artificial systems by recruiting and training future generations of researchers to study intelligence from biological, cognitive, engineering, and computational perspectives. Its bold premise is that the fields of natural and artificial intelligence are intimately interconnected; the next generation of artificial intelligence (AI) will require the same principles that our brains use for fast, flexible natural reasoning, and understanding how our brains compute and reason can be elucidated by theories developed for AI. Join the Kempner mailing list to learn more, and to receive updates and news.
PRESS CONTACT:
Deborah Apsel Lang | deborah_apsel_lang[at]harvard.edu
