Bengaluru: Kristu Jayanti to host panel discussion on Nobel Prize winners

Bengaluru: The Department of Life Sciences at Kristu Jayanti College (Autonomous) will host a panel discussion on November 5, spotlighting Nobel Prize-winning discoveries in Physiology and Medicine, including the groundbreaking contributions of 2024 laureates Dr Sarah Gilbert and Dr Albert Bourla in global health and scientific advancement.

This event is part of the college’s 'Nobel Prize Lecture Series', where academic departments present panel discussions and lectures focused on the achievements of Nobel Prize winners.

The series was inaugurated on October 10 by the Department of Physical Sciences with a lecture on the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics, awarded to John J Hopfield and Geoffrey E Hinton for their pioneering work on artificial neural networks.

Speakers Daya Janardhanan and Arnav S Madanan highlighted the significance of the Hopfield Network, an associative memory model that can retrieve data from incomplete inputs, and the Boltzmann Machine, a neural network model using statistical physics for pattern recognition.

On October 14, the Department of English held a panel discussion celebrating Han Kang, the winner of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature, exploring the South Korean writer's themes of identity, societal expectations, resistance, resilience, and the impact of political violence.

The Department of Economics held a panel discussion on October 15, focused on the work of the 2024 Nobel Laureates in Economics: Prof Daron Acemoglu, Prof Simon Johnson, and Prof James A Robinson.

Students examined the influence of laws and policies on the economic development of underdeveloped nations, with an emphasis on the lasting effects of British colonisation and India’s Independence movement on economic policies.