You already know your body keeps time. What you probably don't know is that the timekeeping doesn't start in your brain. It starts inside individual cells, billions of them, each running its own clock built from nothing more than genes switching each other on and off.
It's a strange idea.
[TICKETS MUST BE PURCHASED ON LUMA HERE: FROM 12 EUROS](https://luma.com/x8o2wcfg?utm_source=meetup)
In this Growth Lab LIVE session Keith Kennedy, postdoctoral researcher at Universitat Pompeu Fabra, takes you inside the machinery. A cell has no hands, no pendulum, no battery. And yet networks of interacting genes can produce something that behaves remarkably like a clock, letting cells anticipate the day rather than just react to it.
Your brain's role is less about setting the time and more about conducting: keeping billions of independent clocks in agreement so the body works as one coordinated system rather than a crowd of cells all doing their own thing.
That system is robust enough to hold steady for a lifetime, yet flexible enough to be knocked sideways by a long-haul flight. Understanding how it does both tells you a lot about why some disruptions to your rhythm bounce back in a day and others take a week.
Keith is a postdoctoral researcher at Universitat Pompeu Fabra in the Dynamical Systems Biology group, where he builds mathematical models of biological systems to predict how they behave over time, from single genes inside a cell to the rhythms of a whole organism. He studied Mathematics in the United States before completing a PhD in Biomedicine here in Barcelona, and has taught systems biology to students learning to model living processes.
What you'll learn
• How a handful of interacting genes can function as a working clock, and why that matters for anything you want your body to do at a predictable time
• Why your brain acts as a conductor rather than a timekeeper, and what happens to performance when that coordination slips
• What jet lag actually is at a cellular level, and why recovery is uneven rather than linear
• How mathematical modelling lets researchers predict biological behaviour before testing it, a way of thinking that transfers well beyond biology
Agenda:
• 1845h - Doors open
• 1900h - Talk starts
• 2015h - Q&A
• 2045h - Drinks & Networking
Tickets from 12 euros (must be purchased on Luma): [https://luma.com/x8o2wcfg?utm_source=meetup](https://luma.com/x8o2wcfg?utm_source=meetup)
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