With a $25-million gift, part of the University’s BrownTogether campaign, Brown will establish the Jonathan M. Nelson Center for Entrepreneurship, combining real-world experience with academic expertise to equip students for lives of innovation and impact.

Film star Michael Douglas and Israeli public figure and former Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky will speak at Brown University Jan. 28 about Judaism, Israel and anti-Semitism. Free registration is required to attend the event, which is open to the public.

Aaron Held’s research merges and draws on the expertise of two of the labs in Brown’s broad effort to combat ALS. That role has given him several opportunities to learn novel skills and new science during graduate school.

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis — ALS — can arise from aberrant genes. A group of five Brown University professors proposes that a cure may also come from aberrant genes — genetic mutations that suppress ALS. A new research grant supports their comprehensive investigation of ALS in flies, worms, mice and human cells.

For their accomplishments in biotechnology, professors Jeffrey Morgan and Anubhav Tripathi have been elected fellows of the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering.

Jonathan L. Walton, a noted social ethicist, scholar of American religions, and professor at Harvard University, will deliver the 2016 Martin Luther King Jr. Lecture on Tuesday, February 2, 2016. Walton will speak about "Love, Power and Empathy in an iLife Era." His presentation is free and open to the public and begins at 6 p.m. in Salomon Center for Teaching, De Ciccio Family Auditorium.

Brown University’s School of Professional Studies announces a new 16-month program leading to an Executive Master in Cybersecurity degree. Enrollment is underway for the fall session of the new degree program, created for individuals with five to 15 years of managerial experience and responsibility for information security.

A portrait of Ruth J. Simmons, Brown’s 18th president, has been completed and hung in Sayles Hall. The painting, by renowned portraitist Steven Polson, joins the University’s collection of 317 portraits of presidents, chancellors, deans, faculty, and benefactors commissioned throughout Brown's 250-year history. Thirty-five of those portraits currently hang in Sayles Hall.

The idea of legalizing physician assistance in the planned death of terminally ill patients is rapidly gaining political traction across the United States, write Eli Adashi and Ryan Clodfelter in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Eric S. Estes, currently vice president and dean of students at Oberlin College and Conservatory, has been named vice president for campus life and student services at Brown University. Estes will begin his work at Brown on July 1, 2016, succeeding Margaret Klawunn.

Machine learning software designed by a Brown computer scientist is helping the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization monitor the globe for evidence of nuclear tests.

Doctors have no approved medicine to help treat marijuana dependence and abuse, but in small new clinical trial topiramate reduced the amount of cannabis heavy smokers used when they lit up. The results also show, however, that many volunteers couldn’t tolerate the drug’s side effects.

Brown University president Christina Paxson, an economist, has been elected to the Board of Directors of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston.

Among HIV-positive patients with Hodgkin lymphoma, a new study finds that blacks are significantly less likely than whites to receive treatment for the cancer, even though chemotherapy saves lives.

A pair of slavery shackles of the type used to transport captured Africans to slavery in the Americas is on display at the John Hay Library. The shackles, on loan from the International Slavery Museum in Liverpool, will remain at the Hay through March 13, 2016, and then return to Liverpool for permanent display.

The Brown University Orchestra is featured in a just-released CD of well-known American and British works in jazz and popular song recorded with pianist Jeffrey Biegel.

Atmospheric models have suggested that a vast majority of nitrogen deposited in the open ocean is derived from human activities, but a new study suggests that’s not so.

The Humanity Centered Robotics Initiative aims to explore the intersection between robotic technologies and society. New support from Brown University will help spur innovative interdisciplinary research.

A new study reports one of the most explosive movements in the animal kingdom: the mighty tongue acceleration of a chameleon just a couple of inches long. The research illustrates that to observe some of nature’s best performances, scientists sometimes have to look at its littlest species.