Events and Activities
Events and Activities
The Mind Brain Behavior Interfaculty Initiative has held a variety of public events over the years, including distinguished lectures, interdisciplinary panels, and movie discussions. These are advertised on our website and elsewhere well ahead of such events, which vary from year to year.
MBB also offers several annual events for undergraduates: an undergraduate symposium, a research showcase that highlights the work of MBB seniors, and a senior recognition ceremony. Closely related to MBB program offerings are the activities of the Harvard Undergraduate Mind Brain Behavior (HUMBB) student organization; be sure to check out its website.
The annual MBB Undergraduate Symposium offers students a chance to investigate, both in both theoretical and concrete ways, how creative new research possibilities may emerge at the frontiers of the different fields concerned with mind, brain, and behavior. It is designed for the junior year and as such serves as a midway fulcrum in your education, following up on your disciplinary training in your specific track and your exposure to a range of MBB issues through Psychology 1 and Neuroscience 80.
The symposium develops out of the perspective that animates MBB: we cannot adequately address the great intellectual questions and social challenges we confront with a single approach; rather, we must consider them from multiple perspectives. Scholarly disciplines emerge, evolve, converge, merge, and disappear as the problems that motivate them change. Each discipline is a kind of toolbox that provides a unique theoretical orientation, language, and methodology for generating and solving problems. One of the most exciting moments in the life of a discipline happens when boundaries become more porous or shift to make room for ideas and techniques from other fields, and we begin to see new ways to tackle old problems. Each symposium models this interdisciplinary enterprise through exploring a topic that currently engages a broad range of mind brain behavior researchers.
Each year's symposium examines a different theme.
Information forthcoming
2025-2026: How Early Adversity Gets Under the Skin
2024-2025: Music and Health: Putting Knowledge into Practice
2023-2024: New Ways to Study the Human Brain
2022-2023: Two Brains, One Organism: Gut and Brain
2021-2022: COVID-19 and Mind Brain Behavior
2019-2020: How the Brain is Shaped by Experience
2018-2019: Hatred and Aggression: An MBB Perspective
2017-2018: Sex, Mind, and Brain
2016-2017: Measuring, Explaining, and Creating Cognition
2015-2016: What Makes Human Cognition Powerful?
2014-2015: Mind, Brain, and the Wonderful World of Animal Behavior
2013-2014: New Methods in Brain Science: Optogenetics, the Connectome, and Functional Imaging 2.0
2012-2013: What is Reality? Perception in Wake, Sleep, and Psychosis
2011-2012: Social Vision
2010-2011: Concepts and Conceptualization
2009-2010: Aggression
Each spring as classes come to an end, MBB presents a poster session highlighting the thesis research of graduating seniors as well as graduate student and postdoctoral fellow research it has funded. This is a great opportunity to see the wide range of research possibilities in MBB, particularly what you can accomplish in a lab or other research project as an undergraduate.
Each year, MBB hosts a graduation event during Commencement Week to celebrate the accomplishments of its senior class of track and secondary field students. Students and their families gather at the Faculty Club to enjoy a buffet breakfast and hear remarks from MBB faculty leaders and from student prize winners and graduating class representatives.
The 2027 Senior Recognition Ceremony will take place on Wednesday, May 26th from 9 to 10:30 a.m. Invitations to seniors and their families will be sent in late April.