Fung is recognized international for his pioneer studies on the mechanics of living tissues and organs.  His work was the first to use the principles of mechanical fluid dynamics to study living tissues and organs and has studied circulation, blood vessels, blood cells, the heart, the lung, the relationship between growth and physical stress, and tissue engineering.  Author of several books and hundreds of articles, Dr. Fung is a member of the U.S. Academy of Sciences, the U.S. National Academy of Engineering, and the U.S. Institute of Medicine.

Gems at the Border of Physical and Biological Sciences

Zierep is a professor emeritus at the University of Karlsruhe, Germany.  He is internationally recognized for his foundational studies of gas dynamics, transonic and hypersonic flows, and the shape and structures of shock waves. 

Dr. Zierep received a doctorate of engineering from the Technical University in Berlin.  He has published 157 scientific papers, including fix textbooks, and has supervised 40 doctoral students.  Dr. Zierep co-founded the periodical journal Acta Mechanica and has been co-editor since 1965. 

He has been president of the Society for Applied Mathematics and Mechanics (GAMM), 1983-1986; Honorary Professor at Beijing University, 1988; promoted Dr.techn.E.h. by the Technical University of Vienna, 1989 and received the Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany, 1995.

Condensation in Transonic Flow

Li was chairman and founder of Y.T. Li Engineering, Inc.; honorary chairman, treasurer and co-founder of Setra Systems, Zinc.  (1965- ), and president and co-founder of Dynisco Inc. (1952-1960).  He was professor emeritus of MIT (1947-1979), member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering, and second president of the National Association of Chinese Americans (1980-1984). 

Dr. Li received his B.S. from National Beijing University of Technology (1934), M.S. degrees from National Central University in Nanking (1936) and MIT (1938), and his Sc.D. from MIT in 1939. 

He was internationally known for his innovative engineering work and leadership.  Dr. Li’s work “Technological Innovation in Education and Industry” (Van Nostrand, 1980) has had significant impact on both engineering practice and national policy.  Deceased, 1914-2011.

Developing Orbital Rod Evaporator as a Model of Developing Technology-Intensive Industry in China

Using orbital evaporation to improve the performance of seawater desalination was initially used as an academic exercise in the early Eighties to illustrate the process of innovation and as an example for developing a technology intensive industry in China.

A DOE grant in 1982 was followed by the support of several US companies for biotech applications and the collaboration of the government agencies in mainland China and Taiwan for desalination applications.  This effort allowed the author to identify several interesting issues along the path of new product development, but without tangible commercial success.

A breakthrough occurred when the orbital technology was licensed to Paul Mueller Company for thermal energy storage application-making ice at night to be used in the daytime for air-conditioning.  That company now enjoys risk sales of their new ORE products in US, Japan and South Korea.  Another major US firm, Aqua-Chem, is now developing ORE under license for seawater desalination and waste treatment.

Kadanoff was the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Distinguished Service Professor in Physics and Mathematics at the James Franck Institute, University of Chicago. 

He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences, member of the American Philosophical Society, Fellow of the American Physical Society, Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, recipient of the Boltzman Medal of the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (1990), The Elliot Cresson Medal of the Franklin Institute(1986), Wolf Foundation Prize in Physics (1980), the Buckley Prize of the American Physical Society (1977), and the Onsager Prize of the American Physical Society (1998). 

He received A.B., M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Harvard University in 1957, 1958, and 1960; was National Science Foundation Fellow in 1957-61 and Sloan Foundation Fellow in 1963-67.  He was a faculty member of the University of Illinois, Urbana and Brown University before joining the University of Chicago in 1978. 

Dr. Kadanoff authored the book “Electricity Magnetism and Heat” and co-authored “Quantum Statistical Mechanics”. 

His research interests included dynamics in granular materials; development of singularities in fluid flow; turbulence and applications of dynamical systems theory.  Deceased, 1937-2015.

Drips and Jets:  Singularities, Topology Changes, and Scaling

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Harry L. Swinney (1999)

Swinney is the Sid Richardson Foundation Regents Professor in Physics at the University of Texas at Austin and Director of the Center for Nonlinear Dynamics also at the University of Austin.  He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Fellow of the American Physical Society, and member of the Johns Hopkins Society of Scholars. 

Other honors include:

• American Physical Society Fluid Dynamics Prize (1995)
• John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship (1983-84)
• Morris Loeb Lecturer, Harvard University (1982)

He received his B.S. degree with Honors from Rhodes College in 1961 and his Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University in 1968.  He was a faculty member of Johns Hopkins University, New York University, and City College of CUNY before joining the University of Texas at Austin in 1978. 

His current research interests include bifurcations and the formation of spatial and temporal patterns in fluid, chemicals and granular systems; dynamics of oceanic and atmospheric type flows and interfacial phenomena.

Emergence of Patterns in Nonequilibrium Systems

Ahlers is Professor of Physics at the University of California at Santa Barbara.  He is a Member of the National Academy of Sciences, Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and Fellow of the American Physical Society. 

Other honors include:

• Tenth Fritz London Memorial Award in Low Temperature Physics (1978)
• Morris Loeb Lecturer, Harvard University (1979)
• Alexander von Humboldt Senior U.S. Scientist Award (1989-90)
• Guggenheim Fellowship (1997-98)

He received his B.A. degree in Chemistry from the University of California at Riverside in 1959 and his Ph.D. in Physical Chemistry from the University of California at Berkeley in 1963.  He was a member of the Technical Staff at Bell Laboratories from 1963 until he joined the University of California at Santa Barbara in 1979. 

His current research interests include: critical phenomena near the superfluid transition of 4He; nonequilibrium phenomena with an emphasis on the problem of pattern formation; spatio-temporal chaos; formation of localized structures or pulses.

Fluctuations Near Bifurcations in Systems Far from Equilibrium

In spatially‑extended nonlinear dissipative systems far from equilibrium, bifurcations are usually discussed in terms of deterministic equations for the macroscopic variables which neglect the microscopic degrees of freedom.  An example is the use of the Navier‑Stokes equation for Rayleigh‑Bénard convection (RBC).  There is then a sharp bifurcation point R = Rc at which an exchange of stability occurs between the spatially‑uniform state and the state with spatial variation.

Sreenivasan is the Harold W. Cheel Professor of Mechanical Engineering, Physics and Applied Physics at the Mason Laboratory, Yale University.  He is a Member of the National Academy of Engineering, Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Foreign Fellow of the Third World Academy of Sciences, Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Science, Fellow of the American Physical Society, and Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. 

Other honors include:

• Humboldt Fellow (1983
• Guggenheim Fellow (1989)
• Otto Laporte Award of the American Physical Society (1995)
• Distinguished Scholar Award, American Chapter of the Indian Physics Association (1996)

He received his B.E. degree in Mechanical Engineering from Bangalore University in 1968, his M.E. and Ph.D. degrees in Aeronautical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Science in 1970 and 1975, and an M.A. (Privatim) degree from Yale University in 1985. 

His current research interests include fluid turbulence, complex fluids, combustion, cryogenic helium and nonlinear dynamics.

Convection

Barenglatt is Professor in Residence in the Department of Mathematics at the University of California at Berkeley, and Mathematician, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.  He is a Foreign Associate of the National Academy of Sciences, Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Foreign Associate of the National Academy of Engineering, and Foreign Member of the Royal Society of London. 

Other honors include:

• G.I. Taylor Medal of the Society of Engineering Science
• Modesto Panetti Prize and Medal
• J.C. Maxwell Medal and Prize from the International Congress for Industrial and Applied Mathematics

He received his D.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees from Moscow University, and M.A. degree from Cambridge University.  His current research interest include self-similarities, nonlinear waves and intermediate asymptotics, fracture, turbulence, and theory of fluid and gas flows in porous media.

Turbulence:  The Last Problem of Classical Physics, new approach and perspectives

Ruelle is Professor Emeritus at Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques, Bures-sur-Yvette, France.  He is a Foreign Associate of the National Academy of Sciences, Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Member of the Academie des Sciences de Paris, and Member of the Academia Europaea. 

Other academic honors include:

• Boris Pregel Award for Research in Chemical Physics, New York Academy of Sciences (1974)
• Prix Albert Ier de Monaco, Academie des Sciences de Paris (1979)
• Dannie Heineman Prize for Mathematical Physics, American Physical Society and American Institute of Physics (1985)
• Boltzmann Medal, IUPAP (1986)
• Holweck Medal, Societe Francaise de Physique and Institute of Physics (1993)
• Ludwig Boltzmann-Forschungspreis, Lane Steiermark and Universitat Graz (1995)

He obtained his undergraduate degree and a Ph.D. in Physics at the Free University of Brussels in 1957 and 1959 and was a Member of the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton in 1962-64 and 1970-71. 

His long term scientific interest are on the borderline between physics and mathematics: particularly dynamical systems on the mathematical side, and statistical mechanics on the physical SIDE.  Currently he works on the ergodic theory of hyperbolic differentiable dynamical systems and nonequilibrium (classical) statistical mechanics.

Statistical Mechanics far from Equilibrium: Towards a General Theory

Libchaber is the Detlev W.  Bronk Professor at the Center for Studies in Physics and Biology, Rockefeller University, New York.  He is a Corresponding Member of the French Academy of Sciences, Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and Member of the New York Academy of Sciences.  He served as Directeur de Recherche de Recherche Scientifique, France.

Other academic honors include:

• Grad de Physique, SFP (1980)
• Wolf Prize in Physics (1986)
• MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (1991)

He obtained his undergraduate degree in Mathematics from the University of Paris, and his Ph.D. in physics from the Ecole Normale Superieure, Paris, where he continued research until joining the faculty of the University of Chicago (1983).  Subsequent appointments were at Princeton University (1991) and Rockefeller University (1994). 

His current research interests include: self-assembly of the protein RecA on single-stranded DNA; “artificial cells” using wheat germ cell extracts and gene constructs in a micron-scale volume fed by micro-fluidic channels; molecular evolution focusing on the evolution of the transcription machinery of the phase T7; thermophoresis and its effect on DNA in Solution.

Techniques from Physics, Problems from Biology

This lecture has the following three themes:

• Optical resonances as ideal detectors in biology
• Thermal convection for a hypothesis on the origin of life
• Quantum dots for developmental biology

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Susan W. Kieffer (2005)

Kieffer is Walgreen Chair and Professor of Geology and Physics at the University of Illinois, Urbana, Illinois.  She is a Member of the National Academy of Sciences, and Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Other academic honors include: 

• Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship (1977-1979)
• Mineralogical Society of America Award (1980)
• W.H.  Mendenhall Lecturer of the U.S. Geological Survey (1980)
• Spendiarov Award of the USSR Academy of Sciences (1989)
• Day Medal of the Geological Society of America (1992)

She obtained her undergraduate degree in Physics and Mathematics from Allegheny College, Pennsylvania (1964), followed by an M.S. in Geological Sciences (1967) and a Ph.D. in Planetary Sciences (1971), both awarded by the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California.

Her previous appointments were:  Assistant Professor of Geology, University of California, Los Angeles (1973-1979), Geologist, U.S. Geological Survey, Flagstaff, Arizona (1979-1990), Professor and Regents’ Professor of Geology, Arizona State University (1990-1993), Professor and Head of Geological Sciences, University of British Columbia (1993-1995), and Mac Arthur Fellow (1995-2000).

Her current main research interests are: planetary sciences, geological fluid dynamics including geothermal, epithermal, and volcanic environments; solid-state geophysics and mineral thermodynamics.

Geysers and Volcanoes: Supersonic Challenges in Geology

Kopell is William Goodwin Aurelio Professor of Mathematics and Science and Co-Director of the Center for BioDynamics at Boston University, Boston, Massachusetts.  She is a Member of the National Academy of Sciences and Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Other academic honors include: 

• Honorary Woodrow Wilson Fellowship (1963-1964)
• N.S.F. Graduate Fellowship (1963-1967)
• Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship (1975-1977)
• J.S. Guggenheim Fellowship (1984-1985)
• John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship (1990-1995)
• Honorary Doctorate, New Jersey Institute of Technology (2006) 

She obtained her undergraduate degree in Mathematics from Cornell University, New York (1963), followed by an M.A. (1965) and a Ph.D. (1967) in Dynamical Systems, both awarded by the University of California at Berkeley, California.

Her previous appointments were: C.L.E. Moore Instructor of Mathematics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1967-1969); Assistant Professor of Mathematics, Associate Professor of Mathematics, and Professor of Mathematics, Northeastern University (1969-1986).

Her current research interests are: Biophysical bases of electrical activity of the nervous system; dynamics of networks of neurons; brain rhythms in olfaction, audition, attention, learning and recall; pathologies of normal brain rhythms in Parkinson’s Disease and Schizophrenia; mechanistic bases of anesthesia; dynamics of sleep rhythms and of dopaminergic neurons associated with reward signals; reduction of dimensions in neural systems, geometric singular perturbation theory.

Rhythms of the Nervous System:  From Biophysics to Cognition

Rubin was a Staff Member, Astronomy, at the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism at the Carnegie Institution of Washington since 1965, and became a Senior Fellow in 2001.  She was a Member of the National Academy of Sciences and the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Other academic honors include: 

• U.S. National Medal of Science (1993)
• Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society, London (1996)
• James Craig Watson Medal of the National Academy of Sciences (2004)
• Honorary Doctor of Science degrees from Creighton University (1978), Harvard University (1988), Yale University (1990), Williams College (1993), University of Michigan (1996), Ohio State University (1998), Smith College (2001), Grinnell College (2002), Ohio Wesleyan University (2003) 
• Honorary Doctor of Humane Letters from Georgetown University (1997)

She obtained her undergraduate degree in Astronomy from Vassar College (1948), an M.A. in Astronomy from Cornell University (1951), and a Ph.D. in Astronomy from Georgetown University (1954).

Her research interests included masses of galaxies, but mostly very small, very low surface brightness galaxies.  These galaxies are totally dark matter dominated, so may offer some insights missing from the study of large spirals.  They are also important in considerations of modifying Newton’s laws, rather than postulating the existence of dark matter.  Deceased, 1928-2016.

The Universe of Galaxies

Every civilization, from the time of the earliest humans to the present day, tells stories about the universe.  What we know about the universe is dictated in large measure by the available technology.  In the last century, we learned that we live in a galaxy of 200 billion stars, that the universe is populated by billions of galaxies, and that galaxies are moving away from each other.  Equally important, we now understand that everything evolves: stars are born, evolve, and die; galaxies grow at the expense of smaller galaxies and gas clouds in their neighborhood. 

Kalnay is a Distinguished University Professor in the Department of Atmospheric Oceanic Science (formerly the Department of Meteorology) and the Institute for Physical Science & Technology, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland; she is also the Eugenia Brin Professor in Data Assimilation at the University.  She is a Member of the National Academy of Engineering, Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Fellow of the American Geophysical Union and the American Meteorological Society, Foreign Member of the Academia Europaea, and Member of the Argentine Academy of Exact and Natural Sciences.

Other academic honors include: 

• Kirwan Faculty Research and Scholarship Prize, University of Maryland (2006)
• U.S. Department of Commerce Gold Medals (1997, 1993)
• U.S. Senior Executive Service Presidential Rank Award (1996)
• American Meteorological Society Jule G. Charney Award (1995)
• U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration Gold Medal (1981)

She obtained her undergraduate degree in Meteorology from the University of Buenos Aires (1965) and a Ph.D. in Meteorology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1971).

Her previous appointments include Director of Environmental Modeling Center of the National Centers for Environmental Prediction, U.S. National Weather Service (1987-1997), and Senior Research Meteorologist and Head, Simulation Branch, Goddard Laboratory for Atmospheres, U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (1979-1986).

Her current research interests are: data assimilation and predictability, ensemble Kalman Filtering, coupled ocean-atmosphere modeling, and climate change.

Amidst the Chaos, Good Predictions: How Meteorology Beats the Odds

We will review ideas of weather predictability, with the Lorenz (1963) discovery of chaos (a name coined by Jim Yorke in 1975).  Lorenz concluded that even if we had perfect models of the atmosphere and perfect knowledge of the initial conditions (“except for a butterfly”), we could not predict the weather beyond two weeks.  At that time, weather forecasts were useless beyond a day, so this limit on predictability was only of academic interest.

Levin is George M.  Moffett professor of Biology in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and Director of the Center for Bio-Complexity at Princeton University.  He is also Adjunct Professor in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology in the Center for Applied Mathematics at Cornell University, and Visiting Distinguished Professor at the University of California, Irvine.  He is a Member of the National Academy of Sciences, Member of the American Philosophical Society, Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and Fellow of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics.

Other academic honors include: 

• Foreign Member, Istituto Veneto de Scienze, Lettere ed Arti, Venice, Italy (2008)
• Beijer Fellow, Beijer Institute of Ecological Economics, Stockholm Sweden (2007)
• American Institute of Biological Sciences Distinguished Scientist Award (2007)
• SIAM I.E.  Block Community Lecture Award (2006)
• Kyoto Prize in Basic Sciences, Inamori Foundation, Japan (2005)
• Clay Mathematics Senior Scholar-in-Residence (2005)
• A.H.  Heineken Prize for Environmental Sciences, Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (2004)
• Medallion of the Universite de Montpellier (2004)
• Honorary Doctor of Humane Letters Honoris Causa, Whittier College (2004)

He earned his undergraduate degree in Mathematics from Johns Hopkins University (1961), and Ph.D. in Mathematics from the University of Maryland (1964).

His current research interests include: modeling of ecological systems; dynamics of populations and communities; spatial heterogeneity and problem of scale; evolutionary, mathematical and theoretical ecology and evolution of cooperation maintenance of social norms.

The Challenge of Sustainability: Lessons from an Evolutionary Perspective

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James A. Yorke (2010)

Yorke is Distinguished University Professor of the Departments of Mathematics and Physics and the Institute for Physical Science and Technology at the University of Maryland in College Park, Maryland.  Since 2007 he has been Chair of the Mathematics Department, and in 1988-2001 he was Director of the Institute for Physical Science and Technology.  He won the Japan Prize in Science and Technology in 2003.  He is a Guggenheim Fellow (1980), A Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1998), and a Fellow of the American Physical Society (2003).

Other academic honors include: 

• Annual Chaim Weizmann Memorial Lecture at the Weizmann Institute in Rehovot, Israel (1997)
• Centennial Speaker for the American Physical Society (1998-1999)
• Norbert Wiener Lecturer at Tufts University (2006)
• Marker Lecturer in Mathematics at Pennsylvania State University (2006)

He is the coauthor of three books on chaos and two books on dynamics.  He attained his undergraduate degree with major in Mathematics from Columbia University (1963), and Ph.D. in Mathematics from the University of Maryland (1966).

His current research interests include: period-doubling cascades galore; better methods for determining the genetic sequence of large genomes; modeling the population dynamics of HIV; chaos and weather prediction; a mathematical theory of observation; topological horseshoes and other topological phenomena; explosions of chaotic sets as a parameter is varied; tools for the numerical exploration of nonlinear dynamical systems and a physical realization of the Plykin attractor.

Chaos

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Andreas Acrivos (2011)

Acrivos is Professor Emeritus of Chemical Engineering at Stanford University.  He is also the Albert Einstein Professor Emeritus of Science and Engineering, and former Director of the Levich Institute in the City College of the City University of New York.  He is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering, and is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.  He received the 2001 National Medal of Science from the President of the United States, George W. Bush, at the White House in 2002. 

Other academic honors include:

• Colburn, Professional Progress and Lewis Awards from the American Institute of Chemical Engineers
• Fluid Dynamics Prize from the American Physical Society
• G.I. Taylor Medal from the Society of Engineering Science
• Bingham Medal from the Society of Rheology

He obtained his B.S. degree from Syracuse University in 1950, his M.S. degree from the University of Minnesota in 1951, and his Ph.D. degree from the University of Minnesota in 1954, all in Chemical Engineering. 

Although formally retired since 2000, Professor Acrivos remains active professionally and, via the internet, cooperates informally with a number of fluid dynamicists the world over.

The Rheology of Concentrated Suspensions of Non-Brownian Particles:  A Historical Survey of Some Recent Variations on a Theme by Albert Einstein

In one of his landmark 1905 papers, Albert Einstein published his famous expression for the effective viscosity of a dilute suspension of small, non-Brownian, spheres in viscous Newtonian fluids subject only to hydrodynamic forces, which, over the next half a century, was extended to higher particle concentrations by numerous investigators.  Underlying all these studies, however, has been the assumption (taken on faith) that, even at particle concentrations φ beyond the dilute regime, such two-phase materials flow exactly like a Newtonian (isotropic) fluid with its viscosity, relative to that of the suspending liquid, being a unique function of φ. 

Beginning in the mid-60’s, however, it was found experimentally that non-dilute suspensions flowed in a manner which, at times, was strikingly different from that of a corresponding Newtonian fluid due, as was eventually realized, to the fact that the chaotic motions of the hydrodynamically interacting particles create both a structure within such suspensions, which renders them anisotropic, as well as a shear-induced non-uniform particle concentration profile that greatly affects their rheology.  Several examples of such flows will be presented and discussed which illustrate these effects.

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Sir Michael Berry (2012)

Berry is Melville Wills Professor of Physics at the University of Bristol.  In 1962 he obtained a Bachelor’s degree in Physics with honors from Exeter University.  In 1965 he was awarded a Ph.D. in theoretical physics by St. Andrews University.  Subsequently, he was awarded a Doctor of Science Degree from Exeter University, an Honorary Professorship at Wuhan University, and Honorary Doctorates at ten other universities.  In 1967 Professor Berry joined Bristol University and in succession he has been Lecturer in Physics, Reader in Physics, Professor of Physics, Royal Society Research Professor, and Melville Wills Professor of Physics. 

He has been elected Fellow, Member or Foreign Member of: Royal Society of London, Royal Society of Arts, Royal Institution, Royal Society of Sciences in Uppsala, European Academy, Indian Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Science of the USA, London Mathematical Society, The Weizmann Institute, Institute of Physics, Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, Royal Society of Edinburgh, and the Mexican Mathematical Society. 

His prizes include:

• Maxwell Model and Prize (Institute of Physics)
• Julius Edgar Lilienfeld Prize (American Physical Society)
• Paul Dirac Medal and Prize (Institute of Physics)
• Naylor Prize (London Mathematical Society)
• Louis-Vuitton Moet-Hennessey Science for Art Prize (Paris)
• Hewlett-Packard Europhysics Prize
• Dirac Medal and Prize (Intl.  Centre for Theoretical Physics, Trieste)
• Knight Bachelor Queen’s Birthday Honours (London)
• Kapitsa Medal (Russian Academy of Sciences), Wolf Prize (Physics)
• IgNobel Prize (Physics), Onsager Medal (Norwegian Technical Univ.)
• 2002 Novartis/Daily Telegraph Visions of Science Competition, Polya Prize (London Mathematical Society)
• Chancellor’s Medal (University of Bristol)

Hamilton’s diabolical singularity

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Ellen Williams (2013)

Williams joined BP as Chief Scientist in January, 2010.  She is responsible for supporting the basic science that underpins the company’s technology programs, assessment and research in strategic technology issues and engagement with BP’s university research programs around the world.  Some of her technical priorities are the use of modelling and computation to speed discovery and development, use of sensors systems and data analytics to improve operations, and assessments of risks and opportunities related to natural resource constraints, climate variability and emerging technologies. 

Prior to joining BP, Ellen worked for over thirty years in academia, obtaining her Ph.D. at Caltech in 1981, and then moving to the University of Maryland, where she rose to become a Distinguished University Professor in the Institute for Physical Science and Technology and the Department of Physics. 

She founded the University of Maryland Materials Research Science and Engineering Center and served as its director for 15 years.  In parallel, Ellen has worked extensively in providing technical advice to the U.S. government, primarily through the Departments of Energy and Defense.

Energy and our other Natural Resources: Minerals, Land, Water and the Atmosphere

Energy is essential to human civilization, and
the production of energy and electrical power intersects other natural resources, specifically minerals, water, land and earth’s atmosphere.  Of these resources, the strongest energy linkage is with the atmosphere.  However, the growing quality of life for more and more of the world’s population places additional stresses on minerals, land and water, as well as increasing the demand for energy. 

In this talk, we will address the question of whether the growing demand for energy can be sustained in the face of competing pressures on our other natural resources.  The trends in GHG emissions, and the technical drivers for resource use, especially water, in energy production will be reviewed.  We will show how technical choices available now could prevent some energy-resource collisions, and discuss areas of continuing concern. 

Levelt Sengers was born and raised in the Netherlands.  She completed her undergraduate and graduate studies at the University of Amsterdam, Netherlands, obtaining her doctorate in Physics in 1958.  In 1963, she and her husband, Jan Sengers, immigrated to the United States.  She joined the U.S. National Bureau of Standards, later renamed National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).  She was a Group Leader from 1979 through 1987, became a NIST Fellow in 1984, and is presently a scientist emeritus at NIST.  As a research physicist, Dr. Levelt Sengers worked with collaborators on critical phenomena in fluids and fluid mixtures, from theory to experiment, and developed databases for practical applications.  She has held leadership positions and is an Honorary Fellow of the International Association for the Properties of Water and Steam, which serves the electric power industry.  She has published extensively in the archival literature, and contributed 14 book chapters. 

Dr. Levelt Sengers’ honors include:

• Member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and U.S. National Academy of Engineering
• Correspondent of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences
• Honorary doctorate from the Technical University Delft, Netherlands 

She is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.  She was elected the L’Oréal-UNESCO “For Women in Science” 2003 Laureate for North America.  In 2004/05, she co-chaired the Advisory Panel “Women for Science” of the InterAcademy Council.  In 2010, the Inter-American Network of Academies of Sciences (IANAS) appointed her chair of its new Women-for-Science Working Group, and in 2013 the group published a collection of inspiring stories in their book “Women Scientists in the Americas”.

Pride and Prejudice in Science and Engineering

Yang is a Distinguished Professor and the John L. Colaizzi Endowed Chair in the Department of Chemical Biology at the Ernest Mario School of Pharmacy of Rutgers University.  Dr. Yang received his B.S. degree from National Taiwan University and his Ph.D. degree in biochemistry and molecular biology from Cornell University.  After postdoctoral training at Scripps Institute and Yale University, he began his teaching/research career at New Jersey Medical School in 1971.  He moved to Rutgers University in 1988 as a Distinguished Professor and served as Chair of the Department of Chemical Biology from 2002 to 2010. 

Dr. Yang's major research interests are in the prevention of cancer and other diseases by tea, tocopherols (vitamin E) and other agents.  In the 1980s, he co-initiated the large scale US-China Collaborative Nutritional Prevention Studies for esophageal cancer prevention in Linxian, China.  He then characterized the molecular alterations of human esophageal cancer and created animal models for esophageal, colon and prostate cancers.  Recently, he has extended his tea studies to the prevention of metabolic syndrome and related chronic diseases.  He is also interacting with many scientists in China, including mentoring young scientists. 

Dr. Yang has been actively serving on journal editorial boards and grant review committees.  He has more than 500 publications and trained over 100 graduate students, postdoctoral fellows and research associates.  In 2010 he was elected Fellow of the American Association of the Advancement of Science.

U.S. Training of Chinese Scientists and Its Impact

In the 19th century, the agrarian Chinese society and the Manchu government could not defend China against the invasion of the industrialized Western powers.  After a series of humiliating defeats, the Chinese leaders realized the need to learn Western industry and military technology.  The government thereafter selected top students for training abroad.  Many of the scholars, such as Hu Shi and Zhu Kenzhen who came to the U.S. in 1910, made a major impact in China, not only in science and education but also in cultural movement and societal change. 

This lecture will highlight the stories of Professor Shih-I Pai and his contemporaries, who came from China to the U.S. to study in the 1930s and 1940s, and their contributions to both China and the U.S..  This group of scientists included the gifted inventor Yao-Tzu Li, the famous rocket scientist Qian Hsusen and the Nobel laureates Chen-Ning Yang and Tsung-Dao Lee.  After the normalization of diplomatic relationships between the U.S. and China in the mid-1970s, there has been tremendous scientific interactions, and many U.S.-trained Chinese scientists have actively contributed to the advancement of science and technology.  I will highlight some activities in the biomedical field that I witnessed. 

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Carlos J. Bustamante (2016)

Bustamante is Professor of Molecular and Cell Biology, Physics, and Chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator. 

Dr. Bustamante received his B.S. degree in biology from the Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia; his M.S. degree in biochemistry from the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos and his Ph.D. in biophysics from the University of California, Berkeley.  Dr. Bustamante’s laboratory develops and applies single-molecule manipulation and detection methods, such as optical tweezers, magnetic tweezers, and single molecule fluorescence microscopy to characterize the dynamics and the mechanochemical properties of various molecular motors that interact with DNA, RNA, or proteins. 

His lab also uses and develops novel methods for superresolution microscopy to study the organization and function of protein complexes in cells. 

Dr. Bustamante is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences and the Chilean Academy of Science and a member of the Board of Directors of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.  He is the recipient of the 2012 Raymond and Beverly Sackler International Prize in Biophysics for his seminal contributions to single molecule biophysics.

The Folding Cooperativity of a Protein is Controlled by the Topology of its Polypeptide Chain

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Danielle S. Bassett (2017)

Bassett is Associate Professor and Eduardo D. Glandt Faculty Fellow in the Bioengineering Department at the University of Pennsylvania.  Dr. Bassett received her B.S. (04) in physics from Pennsylvania State University and her Ph.D. (09) in physics from the University of Cambridge. 

Dr. Bassett’s research group studies biological, physical, and social systems by using and developing tools from network science and complex systems theory.  They are developing analytic tools to probe the hard-wired pathways and transient communication patterns inside the brain in an effort to identify organizational principles, to develop novel diagnostics of disease, and to design personalized therapeutics for rehabilitation and treatment of brain injury, neurological disease, and psychiatric disorders.

Dr. Bassett was a postdoctoral associate (09–2011) and a Sage Junior Research Fellow (11–2013) at the University of California, Santa Barbara, before joining the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania.  Her scientific papers have appeared in journals such as the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), Neuron, Nature Neuroscience, Physical Review E, Journal of Complex Networks, Journal of Computational Neuroscience and Chaos, among others.  In 2014 she became the youngest recipient of the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship.

Perturbation and Control of Human Brain Network Dynamics

The human brain is a complex organ characterized by heterogeneous patterns of interconnections.  New non-invasive imaging techniques now allow for these patterns to be carefully and comprehensively mapped in individual humans, paving the way for a better understanding of how wiring supports our thought processes.  While a large body of work now focuses on descriptive statistics to characterize these wiring patterns, a critical open question lies in how the organization of these networks constrains the potential repertoire of brain dynamics.

In this talk, I will describe an approach for understanding how perturbations to brain dynamics propagate through complex wiring patterns, driving the brain into new states of activity.  Drawing on a range of disciplinary tools – from graph theory to network control theory and optimization – I will identify control points in brain networks, characterize trajectories of brain activity states following perturbation to those points, and propose a mechanism for how network control evolves in our brains as we grow from children into adults. 

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Charles H. Bennett (2018)

Bennett, an IBM Fellow at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, received his B.S. in chemistry from Brandeis University in 1964 and his Ph.D. in the study of molecular dynamics (computer simulations of molecular movements) from Harvard University in 1971. 

He joined IBM's research labs in 1972 where he performed pioneering research in the physics of information processing, and in fundamental quantum mechanics.  Building on the work of IBM’s Rolf Landauer, he showed that general-purpose computation can be performed by a logically and thermodynamically reversible apparatus.  In collaboration with Gilles Brassard, Université de Montréal, he developed a system of quantum cryptography, known as BB84, which allows secure communication between parties who share no secret information initially, based on the uncertainty principle.

Bennett and Brassard, with collaborators, discovered “quantum teleportation,” an effect in which the complete information in an unknown quantum state is decomposed into purely classical information and purely non-classical Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR) correlations, sent through two separate channels, and later reassembled in a new location to produce an exact replica of the original quantum state that was destroyed in the sending process.

Bennett and colleagues. helped found the quantitative theory of entanglement and introduced several techniques for faithful transmission of classical and quantum information through noisy channels, part of the larger and recently very active field of quantum information and computation theory.

Bennett is the recipient of the Rank Award for Optoelectronics; Harvey Prize; Okawa Prize; Dirac Medal and the Wolf Prize in Physics.  He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and Fellow of the American Physical Society. 

Occam's Razor, Boltzmann's Brain, and Wigner's Friend

Ismael, Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University, received her Ph.D. from Princeton University, was a Mellon Fellow at Stanford, and taught at the University of Arizona before joining Columbia University in 2018.

Ismael's research focuses on the philosophy of physics and metaphysics, especially areas involving the structure of space and time, quantum mechanics, and the foundations of physical laws. She has published on such issues as the conflict between lived experience and physics, the implications of physics on issues of freedom, death, the nature of the self, and the problem of free will.

Ismael has held a number of prestigious fellowships, including an NEH fellowship at the National Humanities Center, a Queen Elizabeth II Research Fellowship from the Australian Research Council, and fellowships from the Templeton Foundation and CASBS (Center for Advanced Studies in Behavioral Science at Stanford).  She is a member of the Foundational Questions Institute.

Information, Time, and Life

The differences between past and future frame every aspect of our experience of the world. It is a remarkable fact that research that began in the mid-nineteenth century and was originally focused on trying to derive the phenomenological asymmetries embodied in the second law of thermodynamics from the time-symmetric laws of classical mechanics turned into a very general account of the sources of temporal asymmetry in our world. So a conversation that started by being about why (for example) gas will disperse to fill an open container, turned into a conversation about why we remember the past but not the future, why time seems to flow from past to future, and why we can affect the future but not the past. 

There is much that remains to be understood, but we can assemble the pieces that we have into a picture that has intelligible contours and gives us deep insight not only into the nature of time, but the asymmetries that structure living processes, and our own place in the universe. I’ll sketch the elements of this picture in broad strokes, highlighting the role of information.

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Alán Aspuru-Guzik (2020)

Alán Aspuru-Guzik is a professor of Chemistry and Computer Science at the University of Toronto since July 1st, 2018. He is also the Research Chair of Canada 150 in Theoretical Chemistry and a Canada CIFAR AI Chair at the Vector Institute. Alán began his career at Harvard University in 2006 and was a Full Professor at Harvard University from 2013-2018.

He conducts research in the interfaces of quantum information, chemistry, and machine learning. He was a pioneer in the development of algorithms and experimental implementations of quantum computers and quantum simulators dedicated to chemical systems. He has worked on molecular representations and generative models for the automatic learning of molecular properties. Currently, Alán is interested in automation and "autonomous" chemical laboratories.

He is the recipient of the Google Focused Award for Quantum Computing, the Sloan Research Fellowship, the Camille and Henry Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar award and an Early Career Award in Theoretical Chemistry from the American Chemical Society. In 2010 the MIT Technology Review selected Alán as one of the best innovators under the age of 35. He is an elected member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

Aspuru-Guzik received his B.Sc. from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) in 1999 and obtained a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 2004.

Where Computational Science Meets Experiment: Self-Driving Laboratories for Materials Discovery

To face the challenges of the 21st century, modern society requires the rapid discovery of better advanced and structural materials. These, in turn, can help alleviate needs of several sectors that range from health to energy to the environment. Scientific progress is relatively slow in comparison to the timescale of the problems at hand. It is widely recognized that we need to undertake massive immediate action in the timescale of a decade to enable a transition to a sustainable economy and energy systems to avoid catastrophic problems related to climate change. The current COVID19 crisis underscores the much-needed agility to solve problems that relate to molecules and materials in the area of health. Our laboratory's current research aims to accelerate scientific discovery by integrating several disciplines that used to collaborate with each other, but that in our opinion now should merge into a new field of accelerated science. These disciplines include traditional chemistry and materials science, artificial intelligence, data science, analytical and physical chemistry, and robotics. By concentrating on the workflow of scientific discovery and optimization, the concept of a materials acceleration platform or self-driving lab emerges. In this talk, I will describe the components of these platforms and our own efforts to either build them in our laboratory or collaborate with others. I will describe examples in the areas of organic materials and process optimization for the production of pharmaceuticals.

Video recording for this Zoom Webinar

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Hui Cao (2021)

Hui Cao is the John C. Malone Professor of Applied Physics and Professor of Physics and Electrical Engineering at Yale University. Professor Cao began her career at Northwestern University in 1997 before accepting a position at Yale in 2008.

Cao’s research interests and activities are in the areas of mesoscopic physics, complex photonic materials and devices, nanophotonics, and biophotonics. She has conducted experimental studies on unconventional lasers including random lasers and chaotic microcavity lasers, and found their applications in speckle-free imaging, multi-modality microscopy, and parallel random number generation. Another research direction is coherent control of light transport in diffusive media and multimode fibers, with applications to deep-tissue imaging and endoscopy. In addition to fundamental studies on complex, chaotic and disordered systems, she has harnessed disorder for photonic device applications, e.g., she invented a compact spectrometer based on a disordered photonic chip.

Professor Cao is an Elected Member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences: she is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineer, the American Physical Society and the Optical Society of America. Among her many awards, she is the recipient of the Maria Goeppert-Mayer Award, the Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, and the Outstanding Young Researcher Award by the Overseas Chinese Physics Association. She shared the 2015 William E. Lamb Medal for Laser Physics and Quantum Optics with A. D. Stone and V. V. Yakovlev.

Cao received her B.S. in Physics from Peking University in 1990, her M.A. from Princeton in 1992 and her Ph.D. from Stanford in 1997.

Structural Color - Origin and Evolution in Nature

Structural color originates from physical interaction of light with nanostructures. Most studies so far have focused on ordered structures which produce iridescent colors that change with viewing angle. However, nature has used extensively quasi-ordered structures to create weakly iridescent colors. An interdisciplinary team, consisting of optical physicists, material scientists, and biologists at Yale, has investigated the physical mechanism for coloration of nanostructures with short-range order in bird feather barbs. Inspired by nature, a simple technique is developed to fabricate large-scale biomimetic films which display isotropic structural color, that is amenable to potential applications in coatings, cosmetics, and textiles. In order to understand how the structural color evolves in nature, artificial selection has been conducted on a lab model butterfly to evolve the structural color of wing scales and compared to natural selection. This study reveals the physical mechanism of structural color evolution, which stands in sharp contrast to pigment color evolution.

Video recording for this Zoom Webinar

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Cristina Marchetti (2022)

Cristina Marchetti joined the faculty at Syracuse University in 1987, after postdoctoral appointments at the University of Maryland, Rockefeller University and City College of CUNY. In 2018 she joined the physics faculty at the University of California Santa Barbara.

Marchetti's research focuses on collective behavior in condensed matter and biological systems. Recently she has played a leading role in the development of the field of active matter. The active matter paradigm is relevant to phenomena on many scales, from the control of human crowds to the collective migration of epithelial cells in wound healing. It has additionally paved the way to the development of synthetic analogues that may serve as the base for the development of materials with life-like functions. Marchetti's research has shown that some of this complex behavior can be understood in terms of minimal models based on physical interaction and local rules. She has demonstrated that active systems spontaneously aggregate in the absence of any attractive interactions and has quantified the interplay of activity and topological effects in driving self-sustained flows in active liquid crystals. Her group is currently applying active matter ideas to problems in developmental biology.

Marchetti is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences. She has served on elected positions within the American Physical Society, including chair of GSNP and of GSOFT and as member-at-large of DCMP. She was awarded a Rotschild-Mayent Fellowship at the Institut Curie, a Simons Fellowship in Theoretical Physics, and the inaugural 2019 Leo P. Kadanoff Prize by the American Physical Society for "original contributions to equilibrium and non-equilibrium statistical mechanics, including profound work on equilibrium and driven vortex systems, and fundamental research and leadership in the growing field of active matter."

Marchetti earned her Laurea in Physics cum laude from the University of Pavia, Italy in 1978 and her Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida in 1982.

The Physics of Active Matter

Structural color originates from physical Birds flock, bees swarm and fish school. These are just some of the remarkable examples of collective behavior found in nature. Physicists have been able to capture some of this behavior by modeling organisms as "flying spins" that align with their neighbors according to simple but noisy rules. Successes like these have spawned a field devoted to the physics of active matter – matter made not of atom and molecules but of entities that consume energy to generate their own motion and forces. Through interactions, collectives of such active particles organize in emergent structures on scales much larger than that of the individuals. There are many examples of this spontaneous organization in both the living and non-living worlds: motor proteins orchestrate the organization of genetic material inside cells, swarming bacteria self-organize into biofilms, epithelial cells migrate collectively to fill in wounds, engineered micro-swimmers self-assemble to form smart materials. In this lecture I will introduce the field of active matter and highlight ongoing efforts by physicists, biologists, engineers and mathematicians to model the complex behavior of these systems, with the goal of identifying universal principles.

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Charles W. Clark (2023)

Charles W. Clark is a retired career employee of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), a NIST Fellow Emeritus, Affiliate of the Institute for Physical Science and Technology and Adjunct Professor and Fellow, Joint Quantum Institute, University of Maryland at College Park (UMCP). He also served as Program Manager for Atomic, Molecular and Quantum Physics, Office of Naval Research, United States Navy.

Clark’s primary research interests are in atomic, molecular, optical and neutron physics and their applications to quantum information, interferometry, communication, measurement and sensing. He is also a founding editor of the NIST Digital Library of Mathematical Functions (dlmf.nist.gov) and the associated NIST Handbook of Mathematical Functions (Cambridge University Press, 2010).

He has been active in the joint NIST/UMCP quantum enterprise, serving as NIST Co-Director of the Joint Quantum Institute (JQI) during 2011 - 2016 and contributing to the establishment of the Master of Professional Studies in Quantum Computing in the UMCP Science Academy in 2023.

Clark served as elected Chair of the Physics Section of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and of the Division of Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Physics of the American Physical Society. Among other recognitions, he received the Distinguished Presidential Rank Award of the U.S. Senior Executive Service. He earned a B.A. in Mathematics and Physics magna cum laude from Western Washington State College in 1974 and Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Chicago in 1979, under the supervision of Ugo Fano.

Generation, Detection and Application of Twisted Waves of Light and Neutrons

It was about 50 years ago today, when "Dislocations in wave trains" came into play. Twenty years on, "Dislocations" became a nineties hit following the ingenious experiments of Soskin et al., that showed the promise of applications of twisted or structured light with non-vanishing orbital angular momentum about its propagation axis. Modern use cases for such modalities include increased communication bandwidth for 6G applications. Quantum particle beams can also be shaped by analogue tools of optics. I shall present recent results for neutrons, made possible by microfabricated synthetic holograms containing millions of forked dislocation gratings of the type envisaged by Soskin, et al.

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Naomi Ehrich Leonard (2024)

Naomi Ehrich Leonard is Chair and Edwin S. Wilsey Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Princeton University. She is associated faculty with the Program in Applied and Computational Mathematics and the Biophysics Graduate Program, and affiliated faculty with the Princeton Neuroscience Institute. She was Director of Princeton's Council on Science and Technology from 2013 to 2023 and is Founding Director of CreativeX, a Princeton engineering-and-the-arts collective. She is Founding Editor of the Annual Review of Control, Robotics, and Autonomous Systems.

Leonard received her B.S.E. in Mechanical Engineering from Princeton University and her Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Maryland. She is a MacArthur Fellow, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a Fellow of the ASME, IEEE, IFAC, and SIAM. Recent awards include the 2023 IEEE Control Systems Award and the 2024 Richard E. Bellman Control Heritage Award. Leonard's background includes feedback control theory, nonlinear dynamics, geometric mechanics, and robotics, where she has contributed to theory and application. She studies and designs complex, dynamical systems comprised of many interacting agents, such as animals, humans, and autonomous vehicles, that move, sense, and decide together. She develops analytically tractable mathematical models of collective dynamics that provide the systematic means to examine the role of feedback, interconnection, and individual differences in the behavior, learning, and resilience of groups in changing environments.

Leonard's collaborators have included researchers in oceanography, ecology, evolutionary biology, neuroscience, and political science, and artists. Past art collaborations include "FlockLogic" (2010) with choreographer Susan Marshall and "There Might Be Others" (2016) with choreographer Rebecca Lazier and composer Dan Trueman. Her newest art project "Rhythm Bots" is a kinetic sculpture that explores synchrony, rhythmic entrainment, and human-robot interaction.

Fast and Flexible Group Decision-Making

A wide range of animals live and move in groups. Many animals do better in groups than alone when, for example, foraging for food, migrating, and avoiding predators. A key to group success is social interaction. Less well understood is how a group, with no centralized control, is capable of the fast and flexible decision-making required to carry out its tasks in an environment with uncertainty, variability, and dynamic change.

I will introduce an approach to modeling group decision-making dynamics that reveals the fundamental importance of nonlinearity, feedback, and social interaction. Analysis of the model provides new insights into fast and flexible decision-making: how indecision can be broken as fast as it becomes costly, and how sensitivity to stimulus can be tuned as context and environment change. I will discuss the significance of these results for the study and design of collective intelligence in nature and technology.

Lecture time, date and location