At the spring 2009 symposium, "Improving Decision Making: Interdisciplinary Lessons from the Natural and Social Sciences," leading neuroscientists, behavioral economists, computer scientists, psychologists, and legal scholars discussed empirical and theoretical advances in understanding human decision making and the approaches they are investigating to improve decision making.

The 2008 symposium, "Origins of Life: The Earth, the Solar System, and Beyond," was cosponsored by the Origins of Live Initiative at Harvard University. Leading biologists, chemists, and planetary scientists convened to explore pathbreaking information about planetary processes and the possibility that the origin of life is grounded in them.

The fall 2006 symposium, “Frontiers of Tissue Engineering,” convened leading scientists, engineers, and clinicians in the application of engineering design methodologies to provide new perspectives on replacements for failing organ systems.

The spring 2006 symposium, “Biodiversity in the Anthropocene: Perspectives on the Human Appropriation of the Natural World,” explored the diverse perspectives on measuring and managing the human impact on nature.

The 2005 symposium, “Designing Biology,” featured expert speakers in the areas of molecular and cellular biology, nanotechnology, engineering, and business who addressed questions of how scientists aim to use biological principles to predict and control the behavior of biological systems by design, using tools developed at the interface of biomedical and physical systems.

The 2004 symposium, “Privacy and Security,” provided the opportunity for scientists and technologists, as well as legal and policy scholars, to come together to address the privacy and security issues that confront society, from problems with voting technologies to worries about medical information abuse to loss of control over the communication channels that citizens rely on daily.

The 2003 symposium, “Computational Biology,” drew on a broad interest in computational biology, encompassing both molecular and cellular biology and evolutionary biology as well as various mathematical and computational approaches to modeling. It presented the attendees with biological problems that can benefit from combining biological experiments with computational, engineering, and mathematical approaches.