Upcoming Events

The Connecticut Writing Project hosts the Scholastic Writing Awards for Connecticut students grades 7-12

Weekly colloquium with invited external speakers

Weekly colloquium with invited external speakers

Letters About Literature is a student writing contest for grades 4-12. Students are asked to read a book, poem, or speech and write a letter to that author (living or dead) about how the text affected them personally.

Dr. Caitlin Witt, Department of Physics and Astronomy, West Virginia University

Multimessenger Astrophysics in the NANOGrav Pulsar Timing Array

Nearly all galaxies contain supermassive black holes, and when these galaxies merge, they can form supermassive black hole binaries. As they progress towards merger, these binaries emit strong nanohertz gravitational waves (GWs). In the next few years, pulsar timing arrays will reach the sensitivities required to detect GWs from both individual supermassive black hole binaries, as well as the stochastic GW background formed by the entire population of these binaries. However, GWs are not the only method used to search for supermassive binaries; by combining GW searches with electromagnetic searches, we enter the regime of multimessenger astrophysics. In this talk, I’ll discuss multimessenger efforts within the NANOGrav pulsar timing array, including the recently published targeted multimessenger search for GWs that I led for the collaboration. We developed the first collaboration toolkit for analysis of multimessenger data, and applied it to the well-known binary candidate 3C 66B. We also demonstrated improvements to constraints that can be made by including electromagnetic data in this way. I’ll also present some of my ongoing work on the electromagnetic searches for supermassive black hole binaries, where we are exploring the capabilities of binary detection methods on AGN with periodic variability, for both existing and future time-domain surveys.

Webex link: https://uconn-cmr.webex.com/meet/cmf19005

Come to this information session to learn more about the Health Research Program (HRP). HRP is a program coordinated by the Office of Undergraduate Research that offers a pathway into undergraduate research for students with interests in health and/or the biomedical sciences. By facilitating connections between UConn Health researchers and UConn undergraduates, the program aims to involve more students in research at UConn Health.

Summer 2021 opportunities are now posted on the HRP website (https://ugradresearch.uconn.edu/hrp/). There are 34 opportunities that range from psychiatry to biological modeling, biomaterials to neuroscience, genetics to public health. The application deadline for these opportunities is 11:59pm on Monday, February 1, 2021.

All of these opportunities are slated to continue into the 2021-22 academic year. Continuation is contingent on satisfactory progress over the course of the summer and both student and faculty mentor interest in continuing the placement.

To be eligible for Summer 2021 HRP opportunities, students must plan to graduate no sooner than May 2022.

Further details are available on the HRP website and will be covered in this information session.

Follow link to join meeting:
https://uconn-cmr.webex.com/uconn-cmr/j.php?MTID=ma6f6d3e22f87cb44b1ce4145d71735ad

Please feel free to contact Rowena Grainger (rowena.grainger@uconn.edu) with any questions related to the Health Research Program.

Weekly colloquium with invited external speakers

With Anne McIntyre-Lahner, Evaluation and Impact Consultant, 35-plus years of experience in state and nonprofit leadership, and author of Stop Spinning Your Wheels: Using Results Based Accountability to Steer Your Agency to Success and Ron Schack, Managing Director, Charter Oak Group, LLC.

For more Info:
https://dpp.uconn.edu/collaborative/

Presenting: Seth John, University of Southern California

Seminar Title: Nickel is not the ocean's most boring element!

Host: Robert Mason

Abstract: https://marinesciences.uconn.edu/seminar/seminar1213/

Department of Public Policy Information Session for Political Science Students on the Master in Public Administration and the Master in Public Policy. Information is also available on the DPP Fast-Track program for undergraduates. RSVP at https://connect.grad.uconn.edu/register/?id=2b27cb44-7215-4f90-a303-892f3b51f8dc

Prof C. Trallero,
Department of Physics,
University of Connecticut

Quantum dynamics from solids to isolated atoms

We used coherent and intense laser pulses to image and study in dynamical systems such as electrons, molecules and solids. I will discuss the potential applications to quantum information and future studies.

Join us for an informational session to learn more about our Graduate Certificate in Intraoperative Neuromonitoring and Masters in Surgical Neurophysiology programs. Dr. Radmila Filipovic and Dr. Payam Andalib will be providing potential students with an overview of the program along with a discussion about working in the field of Neuromonitoring. Attendees will also have a chance to ask specific questions.

Register here: https://connect.grad.uconn.edu/portal/ionm_infosessions?id=87635753-7264-4fd5-b147-9aeecaf924e6

Physics Colloquium

Prof. Chiara Mingarelli, UConn

Title:
Pulsar Timing Arrays: The Next Window to Open on the Gravitational-Wave Universe

Abstract:
Galaxy mergers are a standard aspect of galaxy formation and evolution, and most (likely all) large galaxies contain supermassive black holes. As part of the merging process, the supermassive black holes should in-spiral together and eventually merge, generating a background of gravitational radiation in the nanohertz to microhertz regime. An array of precisely timed pulsars spread across the sky can form a galactic-scale gravitational wave detector in the nanohertz band. I describe the current efforts to develop and extend the pulsar timing array concept, together with recent limits which have emerged from the NANOGrav Collaboration, hinting at the beginning of a new way to study the Universe.

The Connecticut Writing Project (CWP) sponsors Connecticut Student Writers, a magazine established in 1987 by the CWP to honor excellence in writing by students from kindergarten through high school.

Come to this information session to learn more about the Health Research Program (HRP). HRP is a program coordinated by the Office of Undergraduate Research that offers a pathway into undergraduate research for students with interests in health and/or the biomedical sciences. By facilitating connections between UConn Health researchers and UConn undergraduates, the program aims to involve more students in research at UConn Health.

Summer 2021 opportunities are now posted on the HRP website (https://ugradresearch.uconn.edu/hrp/). There are 34 opportunities that range from psychiatry to biological modeling, biomaterials to neuroscience, genetics to public health. The application deadline for these opportunities is 11:59pm on Monday, February 1, 2021.

All of these opportunities are slated to continue into the 2021-22 academic year. Continuation is contingent on satisfactory progress over the course of the summer and both student and faculty mentor interest in continuing the placement.

To be eligible for Summer 2021 HRP opportunities, students must plan to graduate no sooner than May 2022.

Further details are available on the HRP website and will be covered in this information session.

To join, follow link below:
https://uconn-cmr.webex.com/uconn-cmr/j.php?MTID=me6357ce4f127ccdc66cfef2a9f341fb6

Electronic Structure and Conformations of Monolayer Protected Gold Clusters
Department of Chemistry


Meeting link: https://uconn-cmr.webex.com/uconn-cmr/j.php?MTID=m6da051db0bbedfd3a279f217a6feabd5

Meeting number: 120 812 1432

Meeting password: gold

or join by phone:

+1-415-655-0002 US Toll

Access code: 120 812 1432

Olga Zhaxybayeva, PhD ('04)
Associate Professor of Biological Sciences
Dartmouth College

Host: Peter Gogarten

"On a puzzling relationship between some bacteria and their viruses"

Summary: Virus-like regions are commonly found in bacterial genomes. But do all these regions encode bona fide viruses? In my talk, I will discuss virus-derived elements hypothesized to be devices that mediate survival of bacteria under conditions of nutrient limitation.
Abstract: https://mbio.asm.org/content/11/4/e01206-20

Dr. Zhaxybayeva's Lab website: http://www.dartmouth.edu/~ecglab/

Dr. Zhaxybayeva will be staying 30 minutes following her talk to speak with grad students and post-docs.

Seminar Link: https://uconnvtc.webex.com/webappng/sites/uconnvtc/meeting/download/73b0482edc2d4296b538911b3923d6f4?siteurl=uconnvtc&MTID=mf888e1957a812a5c6b3968a2580b5f42

The nef cone of projective varieties is an important invariant that captures geometric information. Computing it is already difficult on surfaces, as evidenced by the Nagata conjecture. We focus on a related example, the self-product of a curve (Riemann surface) with itself. We exhibit one nontrivial example of a nef class on the boundary of the nef cone. This is in joint work with Takumi Murayama.

This week: Mandy Long, "A New Work Ethic"
A series of informal talks by philosophy faculty and graduate students. For a description and how to sign up, see http://philosophy.uconn.edu/brown-bags/.

UConn Department of Geosciences Spring 2021 Professional Development Series

Applying for Internships

Wednesday, January 27
12:30-1:45 pm ET

Join us for a Q&A and panel discussion from recent GeoCorps and Scientists in the Parks alumni.

WebEx Meeting link: https://uconn-cmr.webex.com/uconn-cmr/j.php?MTID=mec8b8d10744337a3a4becd03a81d796f

Password: Earth

Gina M. Leinninger, Ph.D.,
Associate Professor,
Department of Physiology,
Michigan State University,
East Lansing, IL

Talk Title:

“To Eat, Drink and/or be Merry? Central Neurotensin Modulation of Ingestive Behavior”

Host: Dr. Alexander Jackson

A function's derivative is not more complex than the function itself and can be simpler: polynomials and trig functions have polynomial and trig derivatives, and logarithmic functions have rational function derivatives. But integrating can lead to functions that are far more complex than the original function. Why is that?

The goal of this talk is to explain why you "can't integrate" functions such as \(e^{-x^2}\) and arc length integrals on the graph of \(y = x^3\). We will start by explaining what such impossibility results are saying as well as what they are \(not\) saying, and then discuss theorems of Chebyshev and Liouville that impose strong restrictions on integrals that have a "nice" formula.


Note: Join the meeting at https://uconnvtc.webex.com/meet/mathclub

ECOM Spotlight Series will host Prof. Richard Moore from U of Warwick. He will be talking on 'The Communicative Foundations of Propositional Attitude Psychology.'

Please contact aliyar.ozercan@uconn.edu for the event link.

Speaker: Nike Sun (MIT)

Title: Phase transitions in random constraint satisfaction problems.
Abstract: I will survey recent progress in determination of asymptotic behavior for random constraint satisfaction problems, including phase transitions and some understanding of solution geometry, particularly in the setting of the random regular NAE-SAT problem. I will discuss (as time permits) two ideas that played important roles in results obtained so far: (1) combinatorial models for the solution geometry, and (2) contractivity of tree recursions as a tool for calculating expected partition functions on sparse random graphs. This lecture is based in part on joint works with Zsolt Bartha, Jian Ding, Allan Sly, and Yumeng Zhang.

Weekly colloquium with invited external speakers

Environmental drivers and evolutionary consequences of horizontal gene transfer in soil bacteria

Request URL from contact to participate.

Dissertation Proposal Defense

Title: By Any Means Necessary: Criminalization, Trauma and Resilience of Black Girls and Boys in an Inner-City Neighborhood

FRIDAY, January 29, 2021, 11 AM
Zoom – Details below

Committee Members
Dr. Nancy Naples (Chair)
Dr. Christin Munsch
Dr. Phoebe Godfrey

Abstract: While the U.S. accounts for nearly five percent of the world’s population, The U.S. is responsible for holding twenty-five percent of the world’s population in bondage. For many Black youth living in areas of concentrated disadvantage, having contact with the prison industrial complex- whether directly or vicariously, is nearly inevitable. Police brutality occurs in their communities and is an ever-present threat in their everyday lives. This crisis has generated scholarly interest pertaining to the criminalization of young individuals through policing and penalization in urban and under-resourced minority communities. I argue that a hyper-focus on criminalization tends to obscure the experiences of chronic urban trauma, trauma built up over the long term due to repeated damaged done to certain places and vulnerable people through state violence (Pain 2019). State violence in urban spaces may result in youth becoming spectators or victims themselves with little opportunity for positive systemic intervention as such violence has been normalized and legitimized and covertly operates through processes of penalization. Thus, this research emplaces the idea of criminalization in dialogue with chronic urban trauma (Pain 2019) to examine how repeated damage done to certain places through state violence (policing, penalization, and punishment) may become normalized and legitimated. In this research I seek to utilize an intersectional lens to discuss the place-based effects of policing. Thus, the goal of this research is twofold. Drawing on ethnographic data and semi-structured and unstructured interviews I utilize an intersectional approach to first, investigate how state violence, specifically processes of criminalization of Black boys and girls, constitute a key mechanism for which trauma is reproduced in Black inner-city youths’ lives. Secondly, I wish to examine the creative and adaptive strategies which Black youth enact in order to resist and recover from the place-based systemic physical and symbolic violence they experience.

Presenting: Joaquim Goes, LDEO - Columbia University

Seminar Title: Climate fueled ecosystem changes in the Arabian Sea

Host: George McManus

Abstract: https://marinesciences.uconn.edu/seminar/seminar1213/

Tap your powers of observation and investigate a single work of art through close looking and discussion with Amanda Douberley, Assistant Curator/Academic Liaison.

Through mid-March, we are featuring works of art in the exhibition, The Human Epoch: Living in the Anthropocene. This week’s subject is "Silueta Works in Mexico" (1977) by Ana Mendieta.

Offered via Zoom Meetings – registration is required and space is limited.

Registration Link: https://zoom.us/meeting/register/tJYsd-GorTIqEtUXVieD8YUUtmovwOv4ZlUl

Your registration will be approved if space is available. You will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting or put on a wait list.

Prof C. Battersby,
Department of Physics,
University of Connecticut

With the participation of Dr. Daniel Walker, and graduate student H Perry Hatchfield


The Milky Way Laboratory

Our own Milky Way Galaxy is a powerful and relatively nearby laboratory in which to study the physical processes that occur throughout the Universe. From the organization of gas on galactic scales to the life cycle of gas and stars under varied environmental conditions, studies of our Milky Way underpin many areas of modern astrophysics. I will present a brief tour of our Milky Way Laboratory, including 1) high-mass star formation from surveys of our Galaxy’s disk, and 2) how observing and simulating our extreme, turbulent Galactic Center (the Central Molecular Zone) can help us learn more about how gas is converted into stars during the peak epoch of cosmic star formation.

Prof. Stewart Prager

Princeton University.

Physicists Coalition for Nuclear Threat Reduction

Title: The Increasing Peril from Nuclear Arms: and how physicists can help reduce the threat

Infixes really are (underlyingly) prefixes/suffixes: Evidence from allomorphy on the fine timing of infixation

Both allomorphy and infixation introduce complexity into morphological systems, in different ways: allomorphy involves a many-to-one correspondence between form and meaning/function, and infixation disrupts the linear integrity of forms. Both are found across the world’s languages, and have been the subject of much empirical inquiry and theorizing—on infixation, see e.g. Ultan 1975, Moravcsik 1977, 2000, Halle 2001, Yu 2007, Samuels 2009; on allomorphy, see e.g. Carstairs 1987, Paster 2006, Veselinova 2006, Mascaró 2007, Bobaljik 2012. These studies present a plethora of ideas about how, when, and why infixation and allomorphy take place, and they make (unstated) predictions about how the two phenomena should interact.

This talk presents the results of the first cross-linguistic study of allomorphy involving infixation, considering 51 case studies from 42 languages (15 language families). The two phenomena interact in consistent, systematic ways, with distinct sets of behaviors characterizing suppletive and non-suppletive allomorphy involving infixes. The robustness of these findings supports a universal architecture of the morphosyntax-phonology interface, specifically, the type of serial architecture proposed by Distributed Morphology and related approaches (Halle and Marantz 1993, 1994, Embick 2010, Bye and Svenonius 2012). The findings run counter to the predictions of fully parallel models (e.g., McCarthy and Prince 1993a,b, Prince and Smolensky 1993), those that allow the phonology to regulate suppletive allomorph choice (e.g., Mascaró 2007, Wolf 2008, Bermudez-Otero 2012), and those that take infixation to be “direct” (e.g., Inkelas 1990, Yu 2007, Wolf 2008).