With “Lunch and Learn,” the Kempner Offers a New Forum for Knowledge Building, Teaching, and Collaboration
Created by Kempner Research Fellow Ilenna Jones, the informal lecture series is wrapping up a successful inaugural year
Kempner Research Fellow Ilenna Jones (left) created the Lunch and Learn series to facilitate knowledge sharing and collaboration within the Kempner Institute.
Photo credit: Ilenna Jones
Kempner Research Fellow Ilenna Jones studies dendrites, exploring how the computational properties of these structures in biological neurons can contribute to the next generation of brain-inspired AI. Alongside this research on neuronal networks, she has been hard at work developing another sort of network within the Kempner Institute: a collaborative network dedicated to education and mentoring.
At the Kempner, Jones is the driving force behind the Institute’s Lunch and Learn program, a bimonthly series of informal gatherings for Kempner community members to explore new topics, ask questions, and practice research presentation skills in a friendly and supportive environment.
“I thought, wouldn’t it be great to create a low-stress, collaborative place where folks can come together and teach each other what they know?” says Jones. “There is such a wide variety of research and knowledge within the Kempner community, and I wanted to create an intentional space to share that.”
A different kind of lecture series
Every other Monday at noon, a dozen or so Kempner community members stream into the Institute’s light-filled seminar room. They chat and grab a plate, pile it with Thai or Indian take-out, and then settle in front of the white board to learn about the latest ideas and techniques at the intersection of biological and artificial intelligence.
Past topics have included reinforcement learning, test-time compute in large language models, and Jones’s own research focus, dendritic computation. Lectures aim to offer high level content for scholars who know a lot about the field in general, but might have little background in a particular topic.
“There is a gap of the level of information out there for students and researchers,” says Emma Finn, an undergraduate studying math and classics with a concurrent masters in statistics, who works with Jones to organize the program. “You can find blog posts aimed at a general audience and technical papers that are really high level, but there’s not a lot at this middle level.”
Designed and run by Jones, Lunch and Learn is structured to allow participants to ask questions, bridge gaps in knowledge, find collaborators, and discover new research directions. There is no pressure to have a polished presentation or know all the answers. Participants are invited to interrupt the speaker with questions. Presentations quickly turn into conversations. It’s a space to explore.
“There are undergrads, post-bacs, Ph.D. students, and research fellows, all in the same room, interested and curious about the same topic,” says Emmanuel Rassou, an undergraduate student studying computer science, statistics and applied math. “And there is an incredible diversity of knowledge and experience. It’s a nice way to create a bridge between the different schools at Harvard.”
New conversations and new research directions
Lunch and Learn participants say that the program offers the opportunity to expand the scope of their research and to better understand complex topics that are adjacent to their own projects but outside of their expertise.
“I love the talks that are outside of my wheelhouse,” says Finn, who studies creativity in a type of artificial neural network called a diffusion model. “It’s amazing to get to see neurocomputation talks, and I’ve enjoyed getting to understand how the brain works. It allows me to be more conversant with other scientists, and to ask more interesting and informed questions about their work.”
The Lunch and Learn series is a microcosm of the wider Kempner community: attendees span disciplines ranging from computer science and engineering to biology and psychology.
For his part, Rassou, who studies optimization of ML systems, says that the cross-disciplinary interactions have empowered him to explore new topics and apply them to his own area of study. “We each have a niche area of research, but it is really important to have a broad foundation of what is out there,” he explains. “The last Lunch and Learn was about learning dynamics and was my first introduction to this idea and ended up really informing how I approached my neuroscience project this semester.”
For Jones, this is exactly the point. “We all spend so much time digging deep into research topics, and so often all that work and knowledge doesn’t make it into the final presentation or paper,” she says. “Lunch and Learn is a place where you can take all that work and put it to good use for others.”
Beyond gaining knowledge by hearing others’ talks, the participants say that the process of giving presentations in a low-stakes environment has allowed them to hone their presentation skills and learn through the process of teaching.
“There is no better way to learn than to teach and this is a great way to do that,” says Finn. “There is no downside to presenting. It’s impossible to look silly and its so much fun to get excited about ideas you find interesting with other people who also find those ideas interesting.”
“Plus,” she adds, “The food is fantastic.”
Spotlight: Research Fellow Ilenna Jones
From Cambridge to Cape Town and Back: A Passion for Community-Building Rooted in South Africa
Research Fellow Ilenna Jones’s mentoring and community-building work at the Kempner has been informed by work on the other side of the Atlantic, teaching computational neuroscience at the Simons Computational Neuroscience Imbizo in Cape Town, South Africa. An intensive three week summer program, the imbizo offers African and international students the opportunity to learn from the world’s leading experts in the field.
“Usually, neuroscience research is extremely expensive, but computational neuroscience research is a lot more accessible,” says Jones. “All you really need is a whiteboard or pen and paper, and some ‘compute’ [computational resources], and then you’re good.”
Jones has carried lessons learned from her teaching and community-building at the Imbizo back to Cambridge, and her work in Cape Town plays an important role in how she sees her collaboration and mentorship role at the Kempner.
“It’s so much fun to see how the students come up with their own ideas,” says Jones. “My role is to empower them to ask: What do you know? Where do you want to go? What do you want to learn? That process of guidance is something that I really enjoy, and I want to continue on when I am a professor.”
At the Kempner, Jones continues to develop her mentoring abilities with students as well as colleagues.
“Ilenna is a great peer mentor,” says Maceo Richards, a Kempner post-bac scholar and a co-organizer of the Lunch and Learn series. “She is unique in that she facilitates this cross-disciplinary language between machine learning and neuroscience, and she speaks both of those languages very well.”
Through Lunch and Learn, Jones has, in a way, created her own version of an imbizo at the Kempner. An open and welcoming place for community, for connection, for knowledge-sharing and for skill-building among the Institute’s students and researchers. And, while her colleagues may not have spent time in Cape Town, many are learning and growing from the valuable lessons that Jones has brought back from her experiences there.
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.
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Deborah Apsel Lang | (617) 495-7993
