Condensed and Living Matter Seminar: "Bacterial swimming: internal clock and fluid environment"
Nuris Figueroa-Morales (Penn State University)
Bacterial suspensions are ubiquitous in naturally occurring and man-made scenarios. Their transport determines how infections spread and microbiota organize in guts or in soils. In addition, bacteria can turn common…
High Energy Theory seminar
Simon Ross (Durham University)
Condensed and Living Matter Seminar: "Fluid-structure interactions for energy and climate"
Ching-Yao Lai (Columbia University)
Understanding the interactions between soft structures and fluid flows is critical for a broad range of applications including energy, biotechnology, geophysics, and climate science. When fluid flows through a…
Mathematical Biology seminar: "Making Bayesian phylogenetics like training a neural network"
Erick Matsen (Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center)
Bayesian posterior distributions on phylogenetic trees remain difficult to sample despite decades of effort. The complex discrete and continuous model structure of trees means that recent inference…
Condensed and Living Matter Seminar: "Deconstructing how cellular interactions ensure robust morphogenesis"
Hannah Yevick (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
Correct tissue shape is essential for its proper function. It is therefore crucial that a developing tissue robustly assembles into its target structure. To change shape, cells within a tissue must exert…
Astronomy seminar: "Lensing and Delensing: Results and Updates from BICEP/Keck and the South Pole Telescope"
Kimmy Wu (University of Chicago)
Gravitational lensing of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) encodes information from the low-redshift universe. Therefore, its measurement is useful for constraining cosmological parameters…
Condensed and Living Matter Seminar: "Odyssey in the Critical Landscape: Quantum Phase Transitions beyond the Landau Paradigm"
Zhen Bi (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
Phase transitions are among the most complex and intriguing phenomena in physics. The Landau-Ginzburg-Wilson-Fisher theory of phase transitions, associated with the onset of a spontaneously broken…
Joint High Energy Theory/Experiment seminar: "Higgs EFTs and the Geometry of EWSB"
Nathaniel Craig (UC Santa Barbara)
Effective field theories of the Higgs boson not only allow for the sensible interpretation of Higgs coupling measurements, but also optimize the development of experimental analyses. Since the discovery…
Mathematical Biology seminar: "Mathematical models in biological pattern formation"
Chuan Xue (Ohio State University)
I will discuss two mathematical problems in biological pattern formation. The first is on modeling concentric ring patterns formed in engineered bacterial colonies. I will first present a hybrid model…
Condensed and Living Matter Seminar: "How life shapes the lifeless world: Self-organization and mechanics in biological active matter"
Shreyas Gokhale (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
Biological systems are composed of soft deformable components that are mechanically actuated by active agents such as molecular motors that locally consume free energy to generate motion. Beyond their vital role in…