UNC-CH Physics and Astronomy Colloquium John Thompson, University of Maine "Investigating student understanding at the physics-mathematics interface" Because learning physics concepts often requires the ability to construct, interpret, and manipulate mathematical representations and formalism (e.g., equations, graphs, and diagrams), researchers … Read more

UNC-CH Physics and Astronomy Colloquium Stephon Alexander, Brown University "The Jazz of Physics: The Link Between Music and The Structure of the Universe" In this talk Alexander revisits the ancient interconnection between music and the evolution of astrophysics and the … Read more

UNC-CH Physics and Astronomy CoSMS Colloquium Clifford Johnson, University of Southern California "Holographic Heat Engines for Fun and Profit" New work has shown how to complete the correspondence between the physics of black holes and the laws of thermodynamics by … Read more

UNC-CH Physics and Astronomy Colloquium Marcel Agüeros, Columbia University "Setting Stellar Chronometers: The PTF(+) Open Cluster Survey" While we have known for 40 years of the existence of a relation between a solar-mass star's age, rotation, and magnetic activity, observational … Read more

UNC-CH Physics and Astronomy Colloquium Richard Scalettar, UC Davis "The Hubbard Model: From solids to cold atoms and back again" Over the last half-century, the Hubbard Hamiltonian has been extensively studied and applied to some of the most fundamental problems … Read more

UNC-CH Physics and Astronomy Colloquium Adam Kelleher, Columbia University, Buzzfeed (recently) "Physics, Data Science, and Causal Inference" I'll describe my career path into data science from the Physics PhD program at UNC. I'll discuss a few projects from throughout my … Read more

UNC-CH Physics and Astronomy Colloquium Raul Briceño, Old Dominion University "Sketches from the exotic world of quarks and gluons" At the core of everyday matter is a complex inner world of subatomic particles. In particular, the nuclei of atoms are … Read more

UNC-CH Physics and Astronomy Colloquium Jessica Thomas, American Physical Society "How to Tell a Great Story about your Research" I’m a former condensed matter physicist who left research to work in science publishing and communication. Today, I run Physics (physics.aps.org), … Read more

UNC-CH Physics and Astronomy Colloquium Kevin Eliceiri, University of Wisconsin-Madison "Multiscale Imaging of Cellular Microenvironments" Over the last thirty years the field of Biophotonics, the study of the interaction between light and biological material, has exploded with the advent of … Read more

UNC-CH Physics and Astronomy Colloquium Norman Margolus, Massachusetts Institute of Technology "Counting distinct states in physical dynamics" Since counting distinct states is so fundamental in statistical mechanics, why isn't it a basic quantity in all of physics? It turns out … Read more