Seminars

Leonardo Fernandes Fraceto explores the development of nanoherbicides for more efficient, sustainable weed control. This Spanish-language webinar covers design strategies, interactions between nanomaterials and plants, controlled release, reduced herbicide doses and potential reductions in environmental impact. It examines how these principles could support more precise crop management and discusses the practical benefits, barriers and opportunities associated with adopting nanoherbicides in real agricultural systems. Speaker: Dr. Leonardo Fernandes Fraceto, Universidade Estadual Paulista, Brazil. The registration page also lists Dr. Ingrid Montes, Universidad de Puerto Rico, Recinto de Río Piedras. Co-produced by ACS Webinars and Sociedad Química de México. Wednesday 30 September 2026, 14:00–15:00 America/New_York (EDT); the live registration page confirms 20:00 CEST. Online via Zoom Events, free registration required. Follow Regístrese Gratuitamente on the ACS event page to the verified Zoom Events registration page. A free ACS ID may be required. Slides are scheduled to be available on the webinar day.

Ivo D. Dinov examines augmented intelligence as a partnership between people and computational systems. The talk traces the technical and philosophical development of neural networks, then introduces complex-time, or kime, representations and the inference methods they support. Applications include medical imaging, healthcare and economic forecasting. It also considers the academic mission, societal consequences of AI and tensions between rapid technical development and human values, framing mathematical AI methods as extensions of human reasoning. Free hybrid seminar hosted by Wayne State University's Institute for AI and Data Science, AIDaS: CAD Seminar Series. Wednesday 30 September 2026, 14:30–15:30 EDT (America/Detroit; UTC−4). Attend in Room 1146, Faculty/Administration Building, 656 W. Kirby, Detroit, MI 48202, USA, or use the Zoom link on the official event page. Researchers, practitioners, students and faculty are welcome; the organizer encourages in-person attendance.

Tsion Firew examines lessons from Rwanda’s Marburg virus response, focusing on how emergency-care systems support rapid multidisciplinary coordination and frontline leadership. The talk considers remdesivir post-exposure prophylaxis, experimental vaccines, monoclonal antibodies and advanced intensive care as parts of the response, including protection of healthcare workers and reported reductions in case fatality. It connects clinical and operational experience with resilience, ethical leadership and the development of emergency systems prepared for future epidemics. Speaker: Dr. Tsion Firew, Chair of Emergency Medicine at Africa Health Sciences University, Rwanda, and Associate Professor at New York University. Organized by the Global Emergency Medicine Academy of the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine. Wednesday 30 September 2026, 14:00–15:00 America/Chicago (Central Daylight Time). Online via Zoom. Follow Register on the official event page to the GEMA Grand Rounds: September 2026 registration form. SAEM states that its webinars are free for members; non-member pricing is not specified on this event page.

Cryopreservation constrains manufacturing and clinical delivery of immune cells such as NK and T cells. DMSO protects against freezing but becomes toxic at physiological temperatures; associated infusion morbidity can require washing or divided dosing that diminishes therapeutic effectiveness. This talk presents an alternative in which reversible, cytocompatible hydrogels encapsulate cells before freezing without DMSO. The speaker examines evidence that encapsulation cushions osmotic stress, suppresses kinetic and phase transitions, and reduces injury caused by extracellular ice growth and fusion. The discussion covers recovery efficiency, function after thawing, control of biological stress responses, and the challenges of extending the approach to clinical-scale cell preservation.

Apurba Bhatacharya discusses the intellectual and aesthetic rewards of organic synthesis: devising a retrosynthetic plan and then realizing it experimentally. The talk considers how the distinct chemical properties of elements allow synthetic chemists to construct complex molecular networks. It connects this molecular craftsmanship with academic innovation and the sustained practical work of synthesis, presenting beauty and simplicity as ways to understand its apparent complexity. Speaker: Dr. Apurba Bhatacharya, Professor Emeritus, Department of Chemistry, Texas A and M University–Kingsville. Hosted by the School of Math and Physical Sciences, Chemistry Seminar Series. Wednesday 30 September 2026, 15:00–16:00 America/Chicago (CDT). The university invites attendees to Nierman Hall, Room 251, Texas A and M University–Kingsville, Kingsville, Texas, USA. Those attending remotely can use the public Zoom link or Join Stream button on the official event page.

Marco Giustetto examines how synthetic higher category theory can extend the proof methods of homotopy type theory. Internal reasoning in an infinity-topos can establish classical results about spaces in a form suitable for machine verification. For the next categorical dimension, Riehl and Shulman introduced synthetic (infinity, 1)-categories: simplicial objects satisfying finitely many conditions, whose finiteness brings technical advantages. The talk considers the extension to (infinity, n)-categories, identifying which features of the n = 1 theory survive and which cannot generalize. The work is joint with Lyne Moser and Jonathan Weinberger.

Ivo Düntsch presents an algebraic treatment of the ternary betweenness relation familiar from geometry. The talk introduces betweenness algebras and the logic K^#, which uses two complementary binary modalities. Its algebraic models are Boolean algebras equipped with two binary modal operators linked by a connecting condition. This extends unary mixed logic and increases the expressive power of classical modal logic. The presentation develops properties of these structures from joint work with R. Gruszczyński and P. Menchón at Nicolaus Copernicus University. Online via Chapman University GALAI Zoom. Wednesday 30 September 2026, 14:30 PDT (America/Los_Angeles; UTC−7). Use the current Zoom link at the top of the organizer’s seminar page. Organized by Peter Jipsen at Chapman’s Center of Excellence in Computation, Algebra and Topology. The usual seminar slot ends at 15:45; no event-specific end time is given. This listing advertises the remote option.

Marcos Petrúcio Cavalcante connects geometric stability to physical examples involving soap films, bubbles and vibrating membranes. He first describes his route through differential geometry and the development of a research group and graduate programme in Maceió, Brazil. The scientific discussion concerns shapes that are critical points of a functional. Its second variation defines stability, while the Morse index counts independent directions of improvement. Through examples and pictures, the talk explains why stable configurations tend to have simple geometry and topology. Two results make this principle precise: a genus-dependent lower bound on the Morse index of compact constant-mean-curvature surfaces in Euclidean space, and a rigidity theorem for stable extremal domains of the first Dirichlet eigenvalue on the round sphere.

Davide Germani discusses how established field-theory techniques help interpret precise ATLAS and CMS measurements of heavy-quark systems. The first case concerns top–antitop states near their production threshold, drawing on recent calculations by Paolo Nason and collaborators. Topics include threshold resummation, nonperturbative QCD corrections, and the way the top quark’s short lifetime controls the formation and decay of quasi-bound states at collider energies. The second case examines whether X(3872) is a compact exotic hadron or a weakly bound neutral D-meson molecule. A comparison of the conventional Flatté parametrization with an effective field theory containing a reversed-sign kinetic term clarifies the physical meaning of that term and its relationship to a negative effective range. The seminar shows how adapting established methods can address new anomalies and structures in hadron spectroscopy.

Ali Kheirandish reviews how high-energy neutrinos are reshaping multimessenger astronomy and searches for new particle physics. IceCube established the astrophysical neutrino signal in 2013; a decade of observations has since revealed directional structure, with emission identified from nearby active galaxies and a smaller contribution from the Milky Way. The seminar examines these measurements, the emerging account of where cosmic neutrinos originate, and opportunities to test physics beyond the Standard Model through the neutrino sector.

Scott J. Russo examines how chronic psychosocial stress alters communication between the immune system and the brain in depression and anxiety. Human observations and mouse experiments connect persistent increases in circulating monocytes and inflammatory signals with stress-related illness. The talk describes stress-responsive neurons that project to bone marrow and regulate monocyte production, release and trafficking. It also considers how stress disrupts the blood–brain barrier, allowing peripheral inflammatory proteins to affect reward regions such as the nucleus accumbens. Together, these findings examine how peripheral immune cells act at the neurovascular interface to change brain circuits and behaviour, providing potential mechanisms relevant to treatment-resistant mood disorders. Online via Rutgers Brain Health Institute Zoom. Thursday 1 October 2026, 12:00–13:00 EDT (America/New_York; UTC−4). Open the organizer’s event page and follow its Zoom link; the meeting ID and passcode are supplied there. Hosted by Yong Kim as part of the BHI Plenary Seminar Series. This listing advertises the verified remote option.

Sahand Tabatabaei presents SQUINT, a sensing platform that combines molecular electron spins, sensitive mechanical detection and control of spin interactions. Molecular sensors can be chemically adjusted and positioned near targets, offering flexibility that defects fixed inside a solid host cannot provide. The work uses a modified XYXY decoupling sequence to reduce dipolar interactions despite uneven control fields. In a sample containing roughly 100 trityl radicals, the reported coherence time reaches about 400 microseconds. These longer-lived spins enable frequency-selective measurements of weak alternating magnetic fields and spectroscopy of nearby nuclear-spin ensembles. The seminar explores how molecular control and mechanical readout can bring quantum sensing closer to complex chemical targets.

Picower Institute Colloquium on the Brain and Cognition featuring Christopher Harvey, PhD, of Harvard University, held in Singleton Auditorium (46-3002) at MIT Building 46, 43 Vassar Street.

Fault-tolerant quantum computation must overcome complex control requirements and substantial error-correction overhead. This talk describes reconfigurable neutral-atom arrays in which optical tweezers coherently transport atoms, enabling any-to-any connectivity, high-fidelity programmable operations and mid-circuit processing in a zoned architecture. Parallel control, transversal operations and long-range connections support experiments ranging from precise quantum-scrambling simulations to a universal fault-tolerant processing architecture. Theoretical methods exploiting reconfigurable connectivity reduce error-correction overhead and suggest that useful large-scale computation could require as few as 10,000 atomic qubits. The discussion considers the prospects for realizing this approach in the near term.

Davide Sgalaberna surveys scintillator detectors in current particle-physics experiments and research toward improved tracking and calorimetry. Achieving fine spatial resolution in a large active target traditionally requires segmentation and optical isolation, increasing fabrication complexity and readout-channel counts. The talk examines approaches that retain target mass while improving three-dimensional tracking: precision assemblies of small plastic scintillator cubes or fibres, additive manufacturing of optically isolated voxels inside monolithic blocks, optical separation in three dimensions, and tracking in opaque liquid scintillators. Developments in photosensors also make arrays of plenoptic cameras a prospect for imaging scintillator volumes with submillimetre tracking resolution, without segmentation or optical fibres. The discussion connects these concepts to the requirements of future detectors and experiments.

Antonio Ocello tests the idea that heavy-tailed noise improves diffusion and flow-based generative models by matching heavy-tailed data and encouraging diverse samples. Replacing Gaussian noise also changes the estimation task. A combined theoretical and experimental study derives sampling-error bounds for representative heavy- and light-tailed diffusion models, finding that heavy-tailed noise makes statistical estimation harder and produces less favourable bounds. Experiments with synthetic and real data recover the predicted trade-off. The results question whether heavy-tailed initialization reliably improves exploration of rare regions. This is joint work with Hamza Cherkaoui and Hélène Halconruy. Online via Microsoft Teams. Friday 2 October 2026 at 15:30 CEST / 13:30 UTC / 14:30 BST (Europe/Paris). Follow the Microsoft Teams link beneath this occurrence on the seminar page; the public route offers browser or app access. Ocello is affiliated with ENSAE Paris. Organized by GAMEX — Generative AI Modeling for Extreme Events, with GLE²N and CIRCE support; the series welcomes scientific exchange beyond the network.

Richard Huang investigates how DNA nanostructures deform under uneven hydrodynamic forces, a question relevant to drug delivery, vaccines and biosensors. Coarse-grained molecular dynamics and mechanical models first examine linear and circular DNA in extensional flow. Drag concentrates tension near the middle of linear duplexes, disrupting base pairs and causing overstretching. Deforming minicircles straighten along their sides while concentrating bending into opposing tips and localized kinks. Models based on DNA elasticity and hydrodynamic-force distributions explain these responses, then extend to wireframe DNA origami to study force transmission and how local structural transitions produce whole-particle deformation. The results inform structures designed for stability or controlled deformation in flow. Online via Zoom. Friday 2 October 2026, 12:00–13:00 EDT (America/New_York; UTC−4). Open the Zoom link on the official event page; the audience explicitly includes the public. Richard Huang is affiliated with MIT. Organized by MIT Department of Mathematics — Computational Research in Boston and Beyond Seminar.

Beth Gardner introduces spatial capture-recapture models for estimating wildlife population dynamics and movement. The seminar considers observations from camera traps and genetic identification using hair or scat, showing how the modeling framework can accommodate different sampling methods, time scales and movement processes. Gardner develops the Bayesian formulation through worked examples in R with NIMBLE, then discusses extensions and audience questions. The methods support estimates of demographic rates, spatial distributions and habitat relationships for conservation and management. The organizer explicitly schedules this occurrence at 15:00 Eastern time, rather than the series’ usual time.

Anthony Letai discusses how understanding programmed cell death can guide the selection of cancer treatments. The seminar explains how apoptotic signalling can be measured and how these measurements can identify drugs capable of killing cancer cells. Hybrid: New Research Building Auditorium, Georgetown University Medical Center, Washington, DC, and Zoom. Monday 5 October 2026, 16:30–17:30 EDT (America/New_York; UTC−4). Use the attendance registration form or the event’s Zoom link on the organizer page. Organized by Georgetown’s Distinguished Scientist Seminar Series. Letai is Director of the National Cancer Institute. An in-person reception follows the seminar.

Seminar by Morten Kjaergaard (Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen) on rapid FPGA-based feedback for superconducting qubits, including sparse-sampling techniques and on-FPGA inference enabling millisecond-timescale T1 estimation, ~100 ms readout optimization, and over 74,000 consecutive recalibrations in closed-loop operation.