SCIENCE ON SCREEN®

An initiative of the COOLIDGE CORNER THEATER

With major support from the ALFRED P. SLOAN FOUNDATION

MELANCHOLIA

with Guest Speaker

DR. PETER VEREš

Thursday, February 16th @ 7:30pm

FREE ADMISSION

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CLICK HERE TO WATCH TRAILER

Prior to the film, Harvard-Smithsonian Astronomer Peter Vereš will give a presentation entitled

“DART – A Successful Planetary Defense Mission.” about NASA’s recent Double Asteroid Redirection Test

In this beautiful movie about the end of the world, Justine (Kirsten Dunst) and Michael (Alexander Skarsgård) are celebrating their marriage at a sumptuous party in the home of her sister Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg), and brother-in-law John (Kiefer Sutherland). Despite Claire’s best efforts, the wedding is a fiasco, with family tensions mounting and relationships fraying. Meanwhile, a planet called Melancholia is heading directly towards Earth… MELANCHOLIA is a psychological disaster film from director Lars von Trier.

Peter Vereš is an astronomer and research scientist at Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, MA and at the Minor Planet Center (MPC). He received his PhD at Comenius University in Slovakia. Since his graduate years, he was interested in minor bodies of the Solar system – asteroids, meteors and comets. He studied the physical properties, orbital parameters and size-frequency distribution of Near-Earth asteroids (NEOs) and the connection between NEOs and meteoroids. Since 2011, he worked at the University of Hawaii at Pan-STARRS, a new survey telescope, discovering numerous asteroids and comets. In 2015, he joined Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Center for NEO Studies, simulating performance of the future LSST (VRO) telescope in discovering NEOs. Since 2017, he is a staff scientist at MPC, the center that receives observations of asteroids and comets from all around the world, computes orbits, assigns designations to new objects and offers many services to the professional and amateur community.

EX MACHINA

with Guest Speaker

YOGESH GIRDHAR

Prior to the film, WHOI Computer Scientist Yogesh Girdhar will give a presentation entitled

“Enabling Ecologically Curious Robots for Monitoring Coral Reefs”

Wednesday, March 8th @ 7:30pm

FREE ADMISSION

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Alex Garland, writer of 28 Days Later and Sunshine,makes his directorial debut with the stylish and cerebral thriller, Ex Machina. Caleb Smith (Domhnall Gleeson), a programmer at an internet-search giant, wins a competition to spend a week at the private mountain estate of the company’s brilliant and reclusive CEO, Nathan Bateman (Oscar Isaac). Upon his arrival, Caleb learns that Nathan has chosen him to be the human component in a Turing Test—charging him with evaluating the capabilities, and ultimately the consciousness, of Nathan’s latest experiment in artificial intelligence. That experiment is Ava (Alicia Vikander), a breathtaking A.I. whose emotional intelligence proves more sophisticated––and more deceptive––than the two men could have imagined.

Yogesh Girdhar is a computer scientist, and the PI of the WARPLab (http://warp.whoi.edu) at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), in the Applied Ocean Physics & Engineering department. He received his BS and MS from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY; and his Ph.D. from McGill University in Montreal, Canada. During his Ph.D. Girdhar developed an interest in ocean exploration using autonomous underwater vehicles, which motivated him to come to WHOI, initially as a postdoc, and then later continue as a scientist to start WARPLab. Girdhar’s research has since then focused on developing smarter autonomous exploration robots that, through the use of AI, can accelerate the scientific discovery process in oceans. Some notable recognition of his work includes the Best Paper Award in Service Robotics at ICRA 2020, finalist for Best Paper Award at IROS 2018, and honorable mention for 2014 CIPPRS Doctoral Dissertation Award.

FORCE MAJEURE

with Guest Speaker

Dr. JOHN DENNINGER

Prior to the film, Dr. John Denninger, director of genomic research at the Benson-Henry Institute for Mind Body Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital will give a presentation entitled

“The Effects of Panic on the Brain”

Friday, March 31st @ 7:30pm

FREE ADMISSION

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This wickedly funny and precisely observed psychodrama tells the story of a model Swedish family—handsome businessman Tomas, his willowy wife Ebba and their two blond children—on a skiing holiday in the French Alps. The sun is shining and the slopes are spectacular but during a lunch at a mountainside restaurant, an avalanche suddenly bears down on the happy diners. With people fleeing in all directions and his wife and children in a state of panic, Tomas makes a decision that will shake his marriage to its core and leave him struggling to reclaim his role as family patriarch.

John Denninger, MD, PhD, is director of genomic research at the Benson-Henry Institute for Mind Body Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH). He also serves as a Psychiatrist at MGH, as Instructor in Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, and as Senior Advisor in the MGH/McLean Psychiatry Residency Research Concentration Program.

Dr. Denninger has received many awards for his research and teaching, including the NCDEU New Investigators Award and the Harvard Medical School Students Award for Teaching.

Dr. Denninger’s work overseeing the Benson-Henry Institute’s research program explores the relationship between stress reduction, resiliency enhancement and health in both clinical and basic domains. His research focuses on answering two questions about mind-body medicine interventions: (1) Assessing how well these interventions can help to promote wellness in a broad range of people and (2) determining how these interventions work, by exploring details of mechanism from genes, to biochemistry, to physiology, to brain activity.