Food for Thought: A series of public events featuring research and creative projects by recent CAS Associates and Fellows.

We are delighted to showcase the work of some of our most productive and creative faculty in this informal series of intellectually and spiritually invigorating presentations. You are invited to drop in when you can to learn about the exciting projects undertaken by our faculty.

11:00am-11:45am: Nicholas Jackson, CAS Fellow 2025-26, Chemistry

Designing Polymers in the AI Era

Artificial intelligence has reshaped fields where data are plentiful and the goal is easy to state. Polymer science is neither: the molecules are large, defective, and flexible, the properties we care about emerge only from collective behavior, and the space of possible chemistries is enormous but constrained by what a chemist can actually synthesize. Professor Jackson will discuss how his group is designing AI methods that bypass these challenges to try to improve the design of polymers across numerous materials applications.

Noon-12:45pm: Stefan Vogler, CAS Fellow 2025-26, Sociology

Police Consciousness and the Potential for Reform

This talk develops the concept of “police consciousness” to explore how people understand policing either as a collective of autonomous individuals or as an institution with systemic influence. Drawing on a nationally representative survey of both LGBTQ and non-LGBTQ people and in-depth interviews with 59 LGBTQ survey respondents, Professor Vogler shows that this individual-institutional divide shapes attitudes toward police legitimacy and reform preferences. Those with institutional views are more likely to support more transformative and structural reforms, while those with more individualistic perspectives tend to favor reformist efforts focused on improving officers through things like training and weeding out “bad apples,” and these understandings and preferences are shaped by social identities.