NIH Director’s Wednesday Afternoon Lecture Series

The NIH Director’s Wednesday Afternoon Lecture Series, colloquially known as WALS, is the highest-profile lecture program at the NIH. Lectures are held on most Wednesdays from September through June from 2:00 to 3:00 p.m. ET in Lipsett Amphitheater, Building 10, on the NIH Bethesda campus.

NOTICE: All WALS lectures are available to watch live at the time of event via https://videocast.nih.gov. Link there, look for the link to the WALS talk among all the offerings on any given day, and click forward to watch.

Sign up for notices about each lecture

The Past, Present, and Future State of Obesity Medicine

Jamy Ard, MD
Wake Forest University School of Medicine
Wednesday, May 27, 2026 at 2 p.m. ET

The Past, Present, and Future State of Obesity Medicine will examine the evolution of obesity care from a public health and clinical research perspective, beginning with the epidemiology of obesity and the biologic, environmental, and societal forces that have fueled the epidemic.

A Retrotransposon in Cancer: The Marker and the Mutator

Kathleen H. Burns, M.D., Ph.D.
Dana-Farber Cancer Institute: Harvard Medical School
Wednesday, June 3, 2026 at 2 p.m. ET

Our genome is replete with repetitive DNAs, many of which are accumulated self-propagating sequences. Long interspersed element-1 (LINE-1,L1) retrotransposons dominate this activity today, making copies of themselves by first being transcribed to RNA and then reverse transcribed to cDNA integrated into the genome. Increased L1 activity is a hallmark of cancers, and L1 insertions can act as driving mutations in tumorigenesis. L1 encodes a bicistronic RNA. The first of its open reading frames (ORFs) encodes ORF1 protein (ORF1p), which forms an RNA-binding homotrimer.

AI: Solution or Obstacle for Healthy Adaptation to Extreme Weather Events?

Francesca Dominici, PhD
Biostatistics, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health
Wednesday, June 10, 2026 at 2 p.m. ET

Artificial Intelligence is revolutionizing research, education, and business—unlocking unprecedented opportunities across the environment, health, and beyond. In our lab, we’re developing the first foundation model for healthy adaptation to extreme weather events, pre-trained on the complete US Medicare dataset and enriched with nationwide Census, weather, and pollution data. This model enables powerful “what-if” scenario forecasting, using synthetic ground-truth data to validate counterfactual predictions and guide impactful climate actions.