Integrated Calendar

Dry intrusion (DI) air streams are fundamental to the global atmospheric circulation, typically comprising the cold sector of extratropical cyclones. These air parcels descend slantwise from the midlatitude upper troposphere towards the surface in lower latitudes, where the airstreams fan out behind the cyclone’s trailing cold front. In this talk I will review recent results based on a Lagrangian-based global climatology of DIs, allowing the quantification of the intrusions’ occurrence frequencies and key association with extreme weather for the first time.
Using representative case studies and longer-term climatologies we find that DIs are generated in the upper troposphere behind anomalies in the tropopause. When interacting with cyclones in the storm tracks, they are associated with strong cold fronts and with marked dry and cold anomalies in the lower troposphere, inducing unstable conditions that strongly influence heat and moisture exchange with the oceans.
The modification of the lower troposphere by DIs entails strong associations with a diverse set of weather extremes, from heavy precipitation ahead of the dry air, strong winds and extreme temperatures, to wildfires and dust storms. We further reveal that DI impact may extend beyond the midlatitudes, into the tropics, opening new directions in understanding tropical-extratropical interactions.

A plant’s roots serve as a major line of defense against environmental stress to protect the plant as a whole. Roots of diverse plant species have found ways to deal with stress by devising responses, often within individual cell types, to resist drought, flooding, mineral deficiencies and other insults that impair plant growth. I will present my lab’s research that uses systems, synthetic and developmental biology approaches to interrogate the transcriptional networks that function in response to many of these environmental stresses in tomato and sorghum.

Understanding and manipulating precise interactions between materials and biology – the biointerface – is key to ensure optimal performance of diagnostics and therapeutics. Functional materials for biological applications, e.g. vaccines or implants, work best when their interaction with cells is precise. If not, side effects and toxicity might occur. Interactions are labeled superselective, when they happen only in a very specific (cellular) context and as such, present a strategy to enhance the therapeutic effect of bioactive materials.
Selective multivalent interactions are traditionally engineered with a focus on the balance of valency and affinity, and often a good amount of structural flexibility is present. In my laboratory, we hypothesized that rigidity at the nanoscale could be a strong determinant of super-selectivity. We combine insights from biophysics and tools from DNA nanotechnology to engineer materials with a controlled flexibility/rigidity balance which allows to present molecules and organize interactions in precise spatial patterns. I will show how structural mechanical properties on the nanoscale determine the self-assembly mechanisms of supramolecular crystals, how they are critical for super-selective Multivalent Pattern Recognition (MPR) and how spatially controlled multivalent interactions are key in the fine-tuning of immune activation pathways. Exploiting programmable flexibility within the well-defined DNA molecule, our research presents a new engineering strategy to investigate the impact of nanorigidity in functional soft matter, surface order and communication with life.

While students and faculty are very aware of current state of the art experimental and computational technologies, there is less awareness of how these are used in practice by the pharma industry. I have been leading the AI / ML work for R&D at one of the largest pharma companies for almost two years and will share some of the methods we have been developing and using to address computational challenges across all stages of the drug discovery and development process. I Will also try to share some of the lessons I have learned over this period.