Course Description
Please join us for this free webinar series where FAES faculty expand on topics they teach in their FAES courses.
The Brain Mechanisms of Afterimages
Wednesday, May 27, 2026, 12PM – 12:30PM ET
Speaker: Sharif I. Kronemer, PhD (NEUR 305)
Afterimages are common visual illusions that have attracted interest for hundreds of years. The precise physiological mechanisms of afterimages are unknown. Sharif will share details of a recent study highlighting for the first time the whole brain and cortical layer signals linked with afterimage perception. This work is broadly significant for addressing the neural mechanisms of conscious experience.
Sharif I. Kronemer, PhD is a Postdoctoral Fellow at NIMH studying the neural basis of visual consciousness. Trained at Ohio Wesleyan, University College London, and Yale, his work uses fMRI, EEG, MEG, and machine learning to investigate perception, illusions, and conscious states, with applications to both healthy individuals and clinical populations. Dr. Kronemer will be teaching NEUR 305 I Neural Mechanisms of Consciousness this summer with FAES.
Click here to view an archive of our past webinars, many with full recordings.
Join FAES for the Following Upcoming Events:
Virtual Information Session: FAES Summer Session B Programming
May 12, 2026 from 12 – 12:30PM ET
Location: Online Synchronous
Join the FAES Academic Programs Team to learn more about our Summer courses, workshops, and our scholarship program.
Register now
FAES Science Insight Series: Leveraging Data Science to Advance Maternal and Child Health Research
May 21, 2026 from 11:45 – 1:00 pm ET (must arrive by 12PM)
Location: FAES Learning Labs Classrooms
Speaker: Quynh Nguyen, Ph.D., MSPH., Investigator at NINR and director of the HashtagHealth Lab
Dr. Nguyen will lead a discussion on harnessing data science to better understand and address maternal and child health disparities. She will highlight examples from her own research, including: 1) developing and evaluating an AI-powered health education chatbot to improve maternal and infant health outcomes; and 2) applying computer vision models to Google Street View images to generate national indicators of neighborhood-built environments and investigate their associations with health outcomes, such as motor vehicle collision fatalities among children.
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Trust Through Knowledge Grounding: AI Agents in Biomedicine
June 9, 2026 from 11:45 – 1:00 pm ET (must arrive by 12PM)
Location: FAES Learning Labs Classrooms
Speaker: Zhiyong Lu, PhD FACMI, FIAHSI, Senior Investigator, NIH, Professor of Computer Science (Adjunct), UIUC
Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have enabled powerful AI agents for biomedical research, yet their adoption in high-stakes settings remains limited by concerns about hallucination, opacity, and reliability. In this talk, I discuss how expert-curated domain knowledge can be used to help mitigate these challenges in general-purpose LLMs. Drawing on real-world systems and case studies such as GeneAgent (Nature Methods 2025), I will highlight design principles for building AI agents that are scientifically sound, interpretable, and suitable for biomedical research and clinical applications.
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The Foundation for Advanced Education in the Sciences (FAES) at NIH seeks to foster education and research in the biomedical sciences by providing instruction at the cutting edge of biological science and its evolving applications. Our goals also include responding to the educational and cultural needs of the NIH community and projecting FAES educational assets globally. All courses and workshops are open to the public. NOTICE OF NONDISCRIMINATORY POLICY AS TO STUDENTS FAES admits students of any race, color, national and ethnic origin to all the rights, privileges, programs, and activities generally accorded or made available to students at the school. It does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, national and ethnic origin, sex, disability, or age in administration of its educational policies, admissions policies, scholarship programs, and other school-administered programs.
