Tag: Colloquium

Abstract: Protein-protein interactions (PPI) are ubiquitous in biological processes. Their study has significant implications for drug discovery as PPIs are important pharmacological targets for small molecules and important in various therapeutic modalities, such as targeted protein degradation and antibodies. Therefore, understanding the stability and dissociation of protein-protein complexes is of great fundamental and practical interest.…

Abstract: Active matter consists of particles that do work on their environment, for example by propelling themselves through a solvent. Fluids made from many interacting self-propelled particles have become popular as models of non-equilibrium matter: they are challenging for theory and computation because heir steady states cannot be derived by minimizing a free energy, nor…

Abstract: Data-driven reduced-order models often struggle with high-dimensional nonlinear systems sensitive to low-variance coordinates, which are typically truncated. To address this, we use ideas from balanced truncation and active subspaces to identify low-dimensional coordinate systems that balance adjoint-based sensitivity information with state variance along trajectories. Our method, analogous to balanced truncation, replaces system Gramians with…

This speaker event is virtual, but will be screened in PICS 534 with refreshments. Abstract: Equilibrium thermodynamics emerges from equilibrium statistical mechanics as the most likely behavior of a system in the macroscopic limit. Over the last two decades, significant progress has been made in formulating statistical mechanics for small systems operating far-from-equilibrium. The resulting…

Abstract: Understanding the physical processes modulating the transport of scalars, such as heat, over very rough surfaces is essential for understanding the thermal environment of cities, how wind and solar farms modify heat and water exchanges between the atmosphere and Earth surface, and parameterizing surface physics in coarser Earth systems models. This talk examines this…

Abstract: The volume fraction phi for random close packed (RCP) spheres is approximately 0.64. It is well known that higher RCP volume fractions are achieved by using collections of particles with a variety of sizes. The variety of sizes is often quantified by the polydispersity of the particle size distribution: the standard deviation of the…

Abstract: Flow predictions in the stratified atmospheric boundary layer (ABL) are critical to a range of applications including energy meteorology, sustainability and resilience of the built environment, and wildfire management. Physical ABL processes such as boundary layer turbulence and surface-atmosphere interactions are parameterized in the weather and climate models that drive predictions used for decision-making…

Abstract: Polymers are essential to a wide range of technologies, yet designing them with targeted structural and functional properties remains a grand challenge. A major opportunity lies in applying machine learning to help navigate the vast combinatorial design space—spanning sequence, composition, architecture, morphology, processing, and more—to discover new formulations or replace existing ones with more…