Jefferson 250, 17 Oxford St., Cambridge, MA , and via Zoom
It is now possible to create angstrom-scale channels that can be viewed as if one or a few individual atomic planes are pulled out of a bulk crystal leaving behind a 2D space. I shall overview my work on this subject over the last few years, which covers studies of gases, liquids and ions under the extreme angstrom-scale confinement. Sir Andre Geim is Regius Professor at the University of Manchester. He was awarded the 2010 Nobel Prize for his groundbreaking work on graphene, a one-atom-thick material made of carbon. He also received numerous international awards and distinctions,...
Graphene, a single layer of carbon atoms, is not only the thinnest but also probably the simplest material one can imagine. Nonetheless, graphene has acquired so many superlatives to its name and revealed such a cornucopia of new phenomena that it is often called a wonder material. Following its advent, many other one-atom or one-molecule thick crystals have been isolated and investigated. These so-called two-dimensional materials have become one of the hottest topics in materials science and condensed matter physics. Aiming at an audience unfamiliar with 2D materials, he will briefly...
Judith Lok is a tenured associate professor of mathematics and statistics at Boston University. Her research focuses on causal inference methods and their applications, including HIV/AIDS, bacterial infections, and maternal-and-child health. At Radcliffe, Lok is writing “Causal Inference: A Statistics Playground,” a textbook designed for students and statisticians within and outside academia who work or intend to work in causal inference. Causal inference methods seek to address questions like “what would happen if” through data analysis.
Phillips Auditorium, Center for Astrophysics, 60 Garden St., Cambridge
Jupiter, the colossal gas giant, captivates with its iconic Great Red Spot and dynamic storms. As a cosmic guardian, its gravity protects inner planets, fostering life on Earth. Beyond its awe-inspiring features, Jupiter hosts a diverse family of moons, each with its own mysteries, adding to the planet's celestial allure.
Embark on an evening with two captivating talks centered around Jupiter, followed by the opportunity to observe the gas giant and other cosmic wonders through high-powered telescopes (weather permitting). This event is sponsored by the Harvard College...
A lecture with Leah C. Stokes, the Anton Vonk Associate Professor of Environmental Politics in the Department of Political Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She has been published in top scholarly journals as well as in the Atlantic, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and elsewhere. Stokes was named to the 2022 TIME100 Next list. She is a senior policy consultant at Rewiring America and cohost of the popular climate podcast A Matter of Degrees.
Robert Verchick is a legal scholar in climate change and disaster policy who designed climate-resilience programs in the Obama administration. In this lecture, Verchick will explore how we can harness the power of government, science, and local wisdom to rescue the oceans from climate breakdown. Verchick has written more than 60 articles and four books, including the award-winning Facing Catastrophe: Environmental Action for a Post-Katrina World. His podcast, Connect the Dots, is in its seventh season. Contact events@radcliffe....
Online or at Arnold Arboretum, 125 Arborway, Boston
The birds that populate the Arnold Arboretum rarely have to go far to find water. In the deserts of Botswana, Namibia, and South Africa, it's a different story, and the sandgrouse that lives in these arid environments has developed a fascinating adaptation to stay hydrated: these birds have a unique ability to absorb and hold water inside of their feathers. The chicks can't yet fly the long distance from their nests to the watering hole, so adult males make the long journey with the lifesaving water secreted away in their feathers. But how do their feathers hold water so efficiently? Dr...
Join curator Jen Thum for an exploration of works in the exhibition Seeing in Art and Medicine. Thum will share insights about the museums’ medical humanities program for radiologists—on which the exhibition is based—and what can be gleaned through close looking.
At Radcliffe, Mahyar is investigating innovative techniques to integrate situated visualization, augmented reality, and civic technology to design and build a mobile platform that simulates the localized impact of climate change, thereby providing Boston residents with an immersive experience of climate change visualizations and empowering them to contribute comments and ideas on climate change issues.
The platform will benefit the movement towards more equitable resilience by creating new opportunities for the public, especially the underserved communities, to raise their...
Talking more than turkey: This lecture will celebrate the plants that bring Thanksgiving to life. From stuffing, to cranberry sauce, to potatoes, cloves, carrots, celery, lettuce and sage. Come and explore the biology of this annual feast with Dr. Pamela Diggle, professor in the Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology at the University of Connecticut.
Lecturer Jean Dalibard (Professor, Collège de France): "At zero temperature, a Galilean-invariant Bose fluid is anticipated to be completely superfluid. When translational (and thus Galilean) invariance is broken, A.J. Leggett demonstrated in the 1970s that the superfluid fraction must be strictly less than one. Here, we examine both theoretically and experimentally how the presence of an external 1D periodic potential quenches the superfluid fraction of a dilute Bose-Einstein condensate and compare it to Leggett's bound. We show that the anisotropy of sound velocity...
A presentation from 2023–2024 Radcliffe fellow Donna L. Maney
Much of Maney's current work focuses on how sex differences are discovered and reported in biomedical research and how these differences influence public policy. At Radcliffe, she is collaborating with scientists at Harvard University and the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health to develop resources to help make biomedical research more sex/gender inclusive.
Lecturer Jean Dalibard (Professor, Collège de France): Solitons are nonlinear wave packets that maintain their shape during free propagation. In quantum gases, bright and dark solitons are observed for attractive and repulsive interactions, exhibiting relatively simple behavior. However, mixtures of gases result in a much more complex physics, with the emergence of dark-bright and magnetic solitons. Here, we examine some non-intuitive phenomena in this context, including the following experimental observation: a magnetic soliton exposed to a constant force...
Lecturer Jean Dalibard (Professor, Collège de France): "Scale invariance, a concept initially introduced in high-energy physics, has gained numerous applications in the physics of quantum fluid. It is applicable to strongly interacting Fermi gases, two-dimensional Bose gases, as well as few-body systems that exhibit the 'Efimov effect.' In the presentation, I will illustrate how scale and conformal invariance emerge in cold atomic gases. I will use various examples ranging from thermodynamics to soliton physics to specific structures with periodic time evolution...
A presentation from 2023–2024 Sally Starling Seaver Professor Fernanda Viégas
During her fellowship, Viégas is excited to explore new modes of human/AI interaction that draw from her roots in data visualization and human-computer interaction. She is interested in the possibility of leveraging advances in AI interpretability (usually aimed at experts) to help drive improvements in lay user agency and control of AI systems. She looks forward to working with colleagues from various departments at Harvard to uncover creative and useful ways of empowering a wide range of...
Harvard Museums of Science & Culture—Online or at Haller Hall, 24 Oxford St., Cambridge
In Soil to Foil (Columbia University Press, 2023), Saleem Ali tells the extraordinary story of aluminum. He reveals its pivotal role in the histories of scientific inquiry and technological innovation as well as its importance to sustainability. He highlights scientists and innovators who discovered new uses for this remarkable element, ranging from chemistry and geoscience to engineering and industrial design. Ali argues that aluminum use exemplifies broader lessons about stewardship of nonrenewable resources: its seeming abundance has given rise to wasteful and destructive...
Klarman Hall, Harvard Business School, Kresge Way, Boston
This talk features astonishing aerial images of Earth from Colonel Terry Virts' book and takes of life from the edge of the atmosphere.
Colonel (USAF retired) Terry Virts has spent over seven months in space during his two spaceflights, piloting the Space Shuttle Endeavour in 2010 and commanding the International Space Station in 2014/2015. He served in the US Air Force as a fighter pilot, test pilot, NASA astronaut, and is a graduate of the US Air Force Academy, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, and Harvard Business School General Management Program.
A presentation from 2023–2024 Radcliffe-Salata Climate Justice Fellow Jennie C. Stephens.
At Radcliffe, Stephens is completing her book manuscript, provisionally titled Climate Justice University: Another Education Is Possible (Johns Hopkins University Press, forthcoming), which reimagines how higher education could accelerate transformative social innovation toward a more just, healthy, and stable fossil fuel–free future. The book proposes a paradigm shift to leverage the untapped potential of institutions of higher education to advance systemic social change to reduce...
Join curator Laura Muir for a closer look at portraits from Timm Rautert’s photographic series Germans in Uniform (1974), which are included in the exhibition Seeing in Art and Medicine, on view from September 2 to December 30, 2023. Muir will share insights about the series and encourage participants to reflect on the role uniforms play in constructing our professional identities and the way we relate to others.