The LASERs (Leonardo Art Science Evening Rendezvous) are an international program of evening gatherings that bring artists and scientists together for informal presentations and conversation with an audience. See the program for the whole international series and the dates for the Bay Area.
Send an email to "scaruffi at stanford dot edu" if you want to be added to the mailing list for the LASERs.
Where:
LiKaShing LK120
There should be ample parking in the structure on corner of Campus Drive West and Roth Way (355 Roth Way).
Parking is mostly free at Stanford after 6pm.
Stanford events page
Program (the order of the speakers might change):
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Tanya Luhrmann (Stanford Anthropology) on "Voices"
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Muhammad Khatib (Stanford) on "Fiber Bioelectronics for Precision Medicine"
If you missed this presentation, you can view it by clicking on the image:  .
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Nitya Thakkar (Stanford Medicine) on "AI for Precision Health"
If you missed this presentation, you can view it by clicking on the image:  .
- Discussions, networking
You can mingle with the speakers and the audience
Bios:
- Muhammad Khatib (Stanford) is an engineer and innovator working at the intersection of technology and medicine. He specializes in bioelectronic devices that interact with the human body for sensing and stimulation, providing new opportunities in health monitoring and interventions. Muhammad currently serves as a research professional in the Department of Chemical Engineering at Stanford University. He develops high-density, soft bioelectronic fibers as thin as a human hair for biomedical applications. These fibers enable minimally invasive access to internal tissues, allowing precise sensing and targeted stimulation within the body. Muhammad earned his BSc in Biochemical Engineering and PhD in Chemical Engineering from Technion, where his research spanned areas including functional materials, sensors, electronic skins, and wearable devices. His achievements have been recognized with multiple honors and awards, including the Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship, selection for Forbes' 30 Under 30, and Rising Star in Engineering in Health. Muhammads vision is to leverage advances in engineering to create and commercialize bioelectronic technologies that enable more precise, less invasive, and data-driven healthcare.
Electronic fibers have emerged as a new class of biomedical devices designed to interact with the human body in a minimally invasive way, sensing internal activity and delivering targeted stimulation. However, current devices are often limited by rigidity and the challenge of integrating complex functionality into very thin, compact structures. This is largely because most electronic manufacturing techniques are designed for flat surfaces rather than long, fiber-like geometries. In this talk, Muhammad will present a scalable approach to fabricating electronic fibers by transforming ultra-thin electronic films into soft, hair-like structures. This method enables the integration of hundreds to thousands of electronic components within flexible fibers. The resulting devices combine high functionality with the ability to operate within narrow and dynamic environments in the body, including the brain and gastrointestinal tract. Looking ahead, this platform enables a new generation of bioelectronic technologies for more precise monitoring, targeted therapies, and personalized, data-driven healthcare, while illustrating how advances in materials, electronics, and manufacturing can converge to reshape medicine.
- Tanya Marie Luhrmann is the Albert Ray Lang Professor in the Stanford Anthropology Department, with a courtesy appointment in Psychology. Her recent work has been on voices, visions, felt presence and other remarkable events in psychiatric illness and in religious experience. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2003, received a John Guggenheim Fellowship award in 2007, and was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2022. She has published over thirty OpEds in The New York Times, and in many other literary outlets such as Harpers. Her books include Persuasions of the Witchs Craft, The Good Parsi, Of Two Minds, When God Talks Back, Our Most Troubling Madness (co-edited with Jocelyn Marrow), and How God Becomes Real. In 2027 she will publish Voices.
- Nitya Thakkar is a third-year Computer Science PhD student at Stanford University, advised by James Zou and supported by the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship and Stanford Graduate Fellowship. Her research focuses on developing AI and computational methods to advance precision medicine, with a focus on integrating multimodal data. Prior to Stanford, she received her BS in Computer Science from Brown University.
- Piero Scaruffi is a cultural historian who has lectured in three continents and published several books on Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science, the latest one being "The Nature of Consciousness" (2006). He pioneered Internet applications in the early 1980s and the use of the World-Wide Web for cultural purposes in the mid 1990s. His poetry has been awarded several national prizes in Italy and the USA. His latest books of poems and meditations are "Synthesis" (2009) and "Dialogue of the Lovers". As a music historian, he has published ten books, the latest ones being "A History of Rock and Dance Music" (2009) and "A History of Jazz Music" (2007). His latest book on technology are "A History of Silicon Valley" (2011, revised edition in 2022) and "Intelligence is not Artificial" (2013, expanded edition 2019). The first volume of his free ebook "A Visual History of the Visual Arts" appeared in 2012. "A Cultural History of California" appeared in 2026. He has also written extensively about cinema and literature. He founded the Leonardo Art Science Evening Rendezvous (LASER) in 2008. Since 2015 he has been commuting between California and China, where several of his books have been translated.
Photos and videos of this evening
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