Community Connections Events for Students

The Office of Emergency Preparedness and Safety will conduct the annual Fire Life Safety Evacuation Exercise on Wednesday, Feb. 4, from 10:40 to 11:10 a.m. This practice drill ensures that students, faculty, staff and visitors know exactly what to do and where to go in the event of a real fire or other life-safety emergency where an evacuation may be required.

At 10:40 a.m., the fire alarms will sound in the following buildings: Jacobs, Keck, Sprague, Parsons, Galileo, Olin, Beckman, McGregor, Shanahan Center, Kingston and the Platt Campus Center. When evacuating:

• Proceed to your building’s designated emergency assembly location.
• Check in for roll call by either:
  • Scanning the QR code provided by the evacuation coordinator, or
  • Checking in directly with the evacuation coordinator in-person.

For this exercise, you may re-enter your building once the fire alarm has been silenced. For more information regarding building evacuation procedures, please visit the HMC Emergency Preparedness and Safety webpage.

Save the date for the spring In-Person Career Fair! Join us in the Platt Living Room as employers hiring and graduate schools recruiting want to talk with you. Registration for students and alumni interested in participating in the event will open January 2026.

During the spring semester, President Nembhard’s office hours are open to all students, faculty and staff. These sessions provide an opportunity to discuss projects, ideas for the College, the strategic plan, issues affecting the community and other topics.

To request a meeting, please choose a preferred slot on the Doodle. Submitting a request does not guarantee an appointment, and a member of the President’s Office will follow up to confirm next steps.

Please note:
• Groups should be limited to no more than five people.
• Requests are reviewed and confirmed on a first-come, first-served basis and are subject to change.

The Cabinet is hosting informal coffee breaks in spring 2026 for students, faculty and staff. These coffee breaks will be attended by most of the Cabinet team and will provide an opportunity for the community to share ideas, express concerns and highlight successes.

All are welcome to stop by as schedules allow.

“Tilings on Polyhedra and Polyhedra on Tilings”

A talk in two acts. In the first act, “Tilings on Polyhedra,” we count a family of tilings first enumerated by the artist M. C. Escher, and then lift these questions into three dimensions. This allows us to answer questions such as: How many ways can we arrange panels on a soccer ball?
The second act, “Polyhedra on Tilings,” focuses on joint work with Prof. Andrés, describing an algorithm to count “generalized polyforms.” This algorithm counts objects such as the number of pieces in the (166 + 4)-piece 3D puzzle Hexacube, donated to the HMC Math Department by HMC alum Andy Niedermaier ’04, or the number of ways to arrange the building blocks of TOWARD, a temporary sculpture built in 2024 outside of Jacobs.

“Single Cells, Many Paths: The Role of Data Science in Drug Discovery”

We face a challenging reality that it takes $3.2 billion and 12 years on average to develop a new medicine that is approved for sale in the United States. Computational research holds promise to improve our ability to make medicines – through predictions of toxicity, generative design of molecules, mining public research, among many other examples. In this presentation I’ll focus on data science in the very first step of drug discovery: identifying disease-associated genes to drug. Leveraging genome-wide data from single cells, we use stochastic optimization and deep neural networks to create cell atlases. These cell atlases can be used to identify novel cell types, infer disease-associated cell state changes, and predict the effects of gene perturbations via transfer learning. We applied these techniques to identify anti-inflammatory genes for progressive multiple sclerosis, and further characterized the disease with dynamic spatial imaging from mouse tissue sections. I’ll conclude with comments on data science in the biotech and pharmaceutical industry – what careers look like, how to train toward this field, and the great opportunities for computational scientists to reimagine the paths towards innovative medicines for patients.

Speaker Bio

Sarah Spencer received a B.A. in biology from Washington University in St. Louis in 2009, and then pursued a PhD from MIT in computational and systems biology from 2011–2017. For the next three years, she joined CRISPR Therapeutics, researching gene editing and supporting the first clinical trials using CRISPR technology. She spent a year at Alltrna, a start-up engineering RNA drugs, prior to joining Novartis in 2022. As an associate director and senior principal scientist at Novartis, Sarah leads a computational research team focused on the very earliest stages of drug discovery.

“Finite-dimensionality in Fluids and Applications”

Fluids can be described by partial differential equations (PDEs). As such, their solutions are typically given by functions of several variables. In the modern theory of PDEs, solutions are viewed as belonging to vector spaces whose elements are functions; these spaces are typically infinite-dimensional. For instance, if one insists on solutions having “finite energy,” then it is often natural to assume that solutions should be elements of the vector space of square-integrable functions. This talk will present the fundamental equations of incompressible fluids in a simplified setting that allows one to see its infinite-dimensional nature, but nevertheless demonstrate that their long-time behavior is, in some sense, finite-dimensional. We will then discuss the importance of this property in the context of turbulence and weather prediction.

Interested in ways data science can help support societal impact? 🌎

Curious about how real-world data practitioners think about exploring and visualizing data? 🤔

Excited by free food and prize money? 🤑

The Harvey Mudd College Innovation Accelerator Laboratory for Data Science for Social Impact (DSSI) is hosting our second annual student datathon! Students can register in teams of two to three to work on exploring and visualizing trends in global health, population and nutrition. The two teams judged to have the most compelling results at the end of the day will receive a cash prize of $100/teammate. The only experience expected is some kind of coding up of data visualization. If you’ve ever made a plot in Python or R, you’re good to go. The dataset is new this year, so participants in last year’s datathon are welcome to participate again.

Program

🧠 10 a.m.–12:10 p.m.  Talks from awesome data science experts
📊 1–5 p.m.  An afternoon of data “hacking” and exploration, with support available from a few of your HMC DSSI faculty
🦚 5–7 p.m.  A chance to share your findings over a buffet dinner and celebrate the prize-winners!
🌮 Meals throughout the day: breakfast (9 a.m.), lunch (12:10 p.m.) and dinner (5 p.m.)

Don’t wait! Find a team and register today. For more information, email our team at dssi-datathon-l@g.hmc.edu.

Your DSSI Datathon Team,
Professors Lynn Kirabo, Haydee Lindo and Susan Martonosi