Math-Bio seminar: "A flexible inference of complex population histories and recombination from multiple genomes"
Champak Reddy, CUNY Graduate Center
Analyzing whole genome sequences provides an unprecedented resolution of the historical demography of populations. In the process, most inferential methods either ignore or simplify the confounding effects of…
Special Condensed Matter Seminar: "Manipulating Charge Carriers for Quantum Transport in Van der Waals Materials Nanostructures"
Ke Wang, Harvard University
Since the discovery of graphene via mechanical exfoliation, it has been shown that the electronic properties of solids can undergo dramatic change when the material thickness is reduced to the atomic limit. Recently…
Special Condensed Matter Seminar: "A Berry Phase Switch in Circular Graphene Resonators"
Fereshte Ghahari Kermani, National Institute of Standards and Technology
Berry phase is an example of anholonomy, where the phase of a quantum state may not return to its original value after its parameters cycle around a closed path; instead the quantum system’s wave function may acquire…
Astro Seminar: "Massive Neutrinos and Large-scale Structure: Forecasts for SKA"
Francisco Villaescusa-Navarro (Simons CCA)
In the first part of the seminar I will discuss some of the effects that massive neutrinos induce on the large-scale structure of the Universe, from their impact on the clustering of halos, galaxies and voids to…
Math-Bio seminar: "Covariate-corrected biclustering methods for gene-expression and GWAS data"
Adi Rangan, New York University
A common goal in data-analysis is to sift through a large matrix and detect any significant submatrices (i.e., biclusters) that have a low numerical rank. To give an example from genomics, one might imagine a data…
Special Condensed Matter Seminar: "Shining light on topological insulators and Weyl semimetals"
Liang Wu, University of California, Berkeley
The last decade has witnessed an explosion of research investigating the role of topology in band-structure, as exemplified by the wealth of recent works on topological insulators (TIs) and Weyl semimetals (WSMs). In…
Special Condensed Matter Seminar: "Probing Topological Valley Physics in Bilayer Graphene"
Long Ju, Cornell University
Graphene has been a model solid state system where novel quantum phenomena emerge from the interplay between symmetry, band topology and reduced dimensionality. In particular, AB-stacked bilayer graphene has a unique…
Astro Seminar: "Quenching and Bulge Growth Over Cosmic Time in Massive Galaxies"
Marc Huertas-Company (Paris Observatory)
The life of a galaxy is a balance between processes that trigger star formation by accelerating gas cooling and others which tend to prevent stars to form by expelling or heating gas. Over the past years, the…
Math-Bio seminar: "Fast, scalable prediction of deleterious noncoding variants from genomic data"
Adam Siepel, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
Across many species, a large fraction of genetic variants that influence phenotypes of interest is located outside of protein-coding genes, yet existing methods for identifying such variants have poor predictive…
Special Condensed Matter Seminar: "Non-equilibrium dynamics of a frustrated Mott insulator"
Zhanybek Alpichshev, M.I.T.
What happens to electrons when both the spin orbit coupling and inter-particle Coulomb repulsion are very strong? While SOC alone can change the topology of the single particle insulating state, even short range on-site…