Integrated Calendar

The aging process represents one of biology's most complex system-level phenomena. A major challenge is moving from observing its correlates to identifying its fundamental, targetable bottlenecks. In this talk, I will explore a reverse-engineering approach, using pharmacological interventions in model organisms to deconstruct the mechanisms of aging and pinpoint promising avenues for intervention.  I will discuss how we can leverage existing biological data and what new, targeted measurements are required to fill critical gaps. A key question is the selection of appropriate model organisms that offer the right balance of physiological complexity, experimental tractability, and translational relevance for aging research. Furthermore, I will examine the role of artificial intelligence in this endeavor: while AI excels at finding generalizable patterns, its success is critically dependent on the quality and nature of the underlying data—an area where significant improvements are needed.  I will present examples from my work across multiple species, including the development of a scalable high-throughput platform for pharmaco-biology in Daphnia. This system allows us to characterize drug-induced perturbations and link them to lifespan and healthspan outcomes. We will discuss a computational framework to regress macro-phenotypes to the molecular pathways. Finally, I will outline central challenges in the field and propose concrete directions for researchers interested in joining the effort to reverse engineer aging.

Direct detection searches for dark matter have advanced remarkably over the past decades, with experimental sensitivities improving by an order of magnitude every few years. This rapid progress has not only expanded the explored dark matter parameter space but also enabled measurements and observations of "standard" physics that were considered out of reach until recently.In this talk, I will present an overview of the XENONnT experiment, highlighting its latest results on dark matter and more, and will take a glance at the future of large-scale WIMP detectors. I will then discuss several new directions in the search for light dark matter and other emerging detector concepts that are now moving from ideas to experimental design.

In 2005, Britto, Cachazo, Feng and Witten (BCFW) gave a recursion relation for computing scattering amplitudes in N = 4 super Yang–Mills theory. In 2013, Golden, Goncharov, Spradlin, Vergu and Volovich discovered in the scattering amplitudes of this theory a cluster algebraic structure. The amplituhedron A(n,k,m) is a geometric object, introduced by Arkani-Hamed and Trnka in 2013, conjectured to encode scattering amplitudes in planar N = 4 super Yang–Mills. In this talk, I will discuss the amplituhedron and how both the aforementioned BCFW recursion and cluster algebra structures originate in its geometry.

Based on joint works with Even-Zohar, Parisi, Sherman-Bennett, Tessler and Williams.

Despite covering over a third of Earth’s land surface, arid regions remain among the least understood hydrological environments. Practically every component of the desert water cycle is more poorly constrained than its counterpart in wetter regions. Yet deserts are home to over 20% of the global population and are disproportionately vulnerable to hydrometeorological hazards such as droughts, floods, and the accelerating impacts of climate change. A better understanding of the desert water cycle is therefore not only a scientific challenge, but a critical need for sustainable water resource and risk management in drylands.In this talk, I will present three studies that illuminate different aspects of the desert water cycle:(a)  how satellite observations can be used to infer the (underwater) topography — and thus the water volume — of remote desert lakes;(b) what atmospheric ingredients link moisture, rain, and floods in the hyperarid Sahara, and how these relate to the desert's paleo- (and future?) climate; and(c)  how misjudged flood risk management on the desert margin contributed to the deadliest hydrometeorological disaster of the 21st century in Derna, Libya.Together, these studies illustrate how unconventional combinations of satellite data and modelling can overcome the challenges of limited in situ observations to reconstruct, quantify, and ultimately understand hydrological processes in deserts. They also challenge longstanding assumptions about runoff generation and risk mitigation in arid regions, pushing the boundaries of what we thought we could know in some of the world's most water-scarce landscapes.

I will describe two biologically inspired systems that can be analyzed using the same hydrodynamic Hamiltonian formalism. The first is ATP synthase proteins, which rotate in a biological membrane. The second is swimming micro-organisms such as bacteria or algae confined to a two-dimensional film. I will show that in both cases, the active systems self-assemble into distinct structural states --- the rotating proteins rearrange into a hexagonal lattice, whereas the micro-swimmers evolve into a zig-zag configuration with a particular tilt. While the two systems differ both on the microscopic, local interaction, as well as the emerging, global structure, their dynamics originate from similar geometrical conservation laws applicable to a broad class of fluid flows. I will present experiments and simulations in which the Hamiltonian is perturbed, leading to different and surprising steady-state configurations. Time permitting, I will show that higher-order force distributions lead to the aggregation of an ensemble of particles.

My talk is based on joint work with Azat Gainutdinov and Vassily Gorbounov, in which we generalize in several ways the electrical Lie algebras originally introduced by Lam and Pylyavskyy. To each semisimple or Kac-Moody Lie algebra g we associate a family of flat deformations of its nilpotent part parametrized by the points of the Cartan subalgebra of g. If g=sl_n, then the generic electrical Lie algebra is sp_{n-1}, which is simple if n is odd. Similar situation is with other classical lie algebras, for instance if g=sp_{2n}, then its generic electrical Lie algebra is sp_n\oplus sp_{n-1}, which is never semisimple. 

If time permits, I will explain the ``edge models" of electrical Lie algebras in semisimple and affine case, where the deformation parameters can be viewed as edge weights of the Dynkin diagram of g.