Online Sunday Seminars

Mensa NZ is running monthly online seminars covering major issues that many people may want to know more about and/or know what they can do more about.


12 noon Sunday, March 2nd, 2025
Title:  Molecular Manufacturing and Microscopic Medical Robots

Description
Molecular manufacturing aims to produce products where nearly all atoms are precisely positioned and bonded. These products include much stronger and lighter materials and molecular machines for applications such as quantum computing, environmental remediation and medicine. These machines have the potential for significantly better functionality then the many biological molecular machines operating inside our cells.
 
Academic labs and government agencies such as DOE are laying the foundation for this technology through the use of tools such as scanning probe microscopes to manipulate individual atoms. However, there are significant challenges to extending this work to commercial-scale molecular manufacturing.
 

This talk will describe the promise and challenges of molecular manufacturing, its application to building microscopic robots for medicine and some ethical issues they raise.

Speaker
Tad Hogg is a Research Fellow at the Institute for Molecular Manufacturing. His research includes defect-tolerant nanoelectronics, potential medical uses of microscopic robots, and applications of quantum computing. He is a participant in the Foresight Institute’s exploration of molecular machines, which includes exploring ways to address major diseases cheaply and effectively. He was previously at Hewlett-Packard Labs and Xerox PARC, where his work included an early market-based distributed computer system and economic experiments involving quantum information exchange. 
 

Tad holds a PhD from Stanford and BS from Caltech, both in physics. He has been an industry advisor at the Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics (IPAM) at UCLA and a visiting faculty member at the University of Girona and the Santa Fe Institute summer school on complex systems. Tad is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), a Senior Member of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), and a Member of the Tau Beta Pi Engineering Honor Society.

 


How to Access the Seminars

Future Seminars

Seminars will take place from 12-1:30 pm NZ time the first Sunday of every month except January. Topic and speaker details will be provided via Menzed and the Mensa NZ website. New Zealand Mensa members will also be notified by e-mail. 

If you want to suggest topics or speakers for future seminars or to offer to speak yourself, please contact Mary Ellen Gordon (meg@maryellengordon.com).

Previous Seminars

December 1st, 2024
Topic: Climate change – what’s happening and what do we do about it? 
Speaker: James Renwick

December 8th 2024
Topic: The intergenerational value of regular population censuses whilst amidst a population storm
Speaker: Len Cook

February 2nd 2025
Topic: The past, present, and future of AI
Speaker: Hazel Watson-Smith