By Hua (Lyon) Li, news correspondent
Northeastern students covered scientific topics ranging from malaria research to new forms of transportation at a TEDx-style event in the Curry Student Center Monday.
The event, called “NU Talk 2017,” was organized by the Northeastern Biology Club in association with the Colleges of Science, Engineering and Computer and Information Science. Student presenters were made up of freshmen to seniors from a variety of majors within the affiliated colleges and the Bouvé College of Health Sciences.
“I think the show went amazingly; it went pretty much as well as I could have expected,” said Alexander Farahani, senior biochemistry major and one of the event organizers. “All the speakers gave genuinely TED Talk-style talks and I really felt like they gave their best out there.”
The event kicked off with third-year neuroscience major Patrick Glover. He highlighted how the recent open source revolution—which makes more source code, software and information open to the public—helped make neuroscience research more accessible to people who aren’t scientists, especially youth.
Freshman computer science major Mahitha Valluru said Glover’s speech gave her a novel perspective about open source and made her realize more about its real-life application.
“I came here to explore a little more how computer science broadens its depth,” she said. “I think open source is really interesting […] and hearing behavioral neuroscience majors talk about it might give me a new perspective on open source.”
Brandon Yip, a third-year nursing major, and Derek Schuster, a sophomore computer science major, talked about the upcoming changes in medical service.
They said current technological advancements have the potential to reduce overall health care costs and allow patients to find better treatment. These advancements could also allow people to foresee their percentage risk of getting particular illnesses as much as 20 years earlier, they said.
Yip said he was inspired to do NU Talk after working with one of last year’s speakers. He said he wanted to talk to communicate what he cares about.
“I just want to have a platform for me to communicate about why medication nonadherence and why nursing is important,” he said. “And although I wasn’t able to necessarily talk as much from a nursing perspective, I was still able to alert people and bring people insight to the future of what our health care will look like.”
Farahani said he hopes the program’s speakers gained knowledge and useful skills from their presentations.
“On the whole concept of growth, ensuring that this wasn’t just an opportunity for speakers to just go on stage, but a process through which that at the end of it they will really grow as individuals and grow as public speakers,” he said.
Photo by Mary Incera
