Math Hires 1st Berger-Leighton Professor of Mathematics

This spring, the Brandeis Department of Mathematics completed their search for the first Berger-Leighton Professor of Mathematics with the hiring of Dr. Daniel Álvarez-Gavela, currently an Assistant Professor at MIT. Dr. Álvarez-Gavela will be joining Brandeis in July 2024, after staying for one more year at MIT.

This new tenure-track faculty position is the result of the generous gift by Bonnie Berger ’83, a former Brandeis trustee and the Simons Professor of Mathematics at MIT, and her husband, Dr. Tom Leighton, Professor of Applied Mathematics at MIT and CEO and cofounder of Akamai Technologies. Brandeis Mathematics Chair Olivier Bernardi had this to say about the hire: “Dr. Álvarez-Gavela is a superb scholar, and an individual who embodies all the qualities that Brandeis ought to represent. Dr. Álvarez-Gavela is already collaborating with Brandeis Professor Kiyoshi Igusa on an ambitious research project aimed at importing sophisticated algebraic results (first developed by Prof. Igusa and his collaborators), to bear fruition in the context of symplectic geometry. The Math Department was unanimously enthusiastic about Dr. Álvarez-Gavela and excited to see him come and develop at Brandeis, and contribute to the renewal of the Department.”

Piasta Receives the Louis Dembitz Brandeis Prize for Excellence in Teaching

Kene Piasta, Assistant Professor of Biology, has been presented the 2023 Louis Dembitz Brandeis Prize for Excellence in Teaching. This prestigious award is given each year to a faculty member of any rank that exhibits outstanding teaching skills. Piasta was selected by Dorothy Hodgson, the Dean of Arts and Sciences based upon recommendations from a faculty committee (including previous prize recipients) and input from the Associate Dean for Academic Affairs. Decisions are based on student nominations, teaching evaluations, Faculty Activity Reports and CVs.

Liz Hedstrom, Professor of Biology and Chemistry and Biology Department Chair, said “Kene is a remarkable educator and an exceptionally worthy recipient of the LDB Prize for Excellence in Teaching. Kene has a gift for making dry subjects like statistics engaging without losing rigor and he somehow manages to create personal interactions in the largest introductory courses.  We are very lucky to have him at Brandeis.”

Piasta received his PhD in Biochemistry from Brandeis University in 2011.

Congratulations, Kene!

Pre-Applications to Sprout Program Due 4/17

The Sprout Program is back!

Funded by the Provost’s Office and the Office of Technology Licensing (OTL), Sprout is designed to encourage and support translational research activity within the Brandeis community for faculty, postdocs, and student researchers (graduate and undergraduate) in the Division of Science. The awards (up to $25,000 – no overhead!) are intended to help to advance early-stage technologies to industry adoption thereby bringing your research and entrepreneurial ambitions to life.

Successful pre-applicants will be invited to submit a final application due in late May and to pitch to a panel of industry judges in early June. Pre-apply by April 17.

Physics Participates in the GSAS 70th Anniversary Celebration

On February 15, around 40 Physics faculty, current graduate students, and graduate alumni zoomed in for a celebration of the Physics graduate program. The celebration included fascinating presentations by Bennett Sessa and Bibi Najma, current students in Guillaume Duclos’ lab, about their work on active matter and biomimetics, as well as the benefits of being Brandeis students. There were also happy reunions between faculty and old students, and reminiscences about various periods of the department’s history, from the 1960s all the way to today. The positive impact that Brandeis had on the students’ careers, both inside and outside academia was clear from their many stories.

One interesting theme was how some of the department’s research areas have shifted over the generations, starting with a heavy focus on atomic beams and hard condensed matter (or solid state physics as it was called then) to today’s focus on soft matter and biological physics, while in other areas, such as high-energy experiment and theory, the department has maintained its tradition of strength.

Herzfeld paper named “2023 Hot PCCP article”

In a new paper (DOI: 10.1039/d2cp05648h), selected as a “2023 Hot PCCP article”, the Herzfeld group has shown that the “Lewis dot” representation of electrons can predict states that have otherwise been predicted only by the most advanced implementations of quantum mechanics.

Basically, the structures and reactions of molecules are controlled by the interactions of electrons with each other and with atomic nuclei. However, the process is complicated by the fact that wave properties are important for particles as light as electrons. The gold standard is to explicitly model these properties using wave mechanics. But it is convenient to have an implicit description that is more accessible and intuitive. These are the “Lewis dots” that are generally used to represent bonds and reaction mechanisms in chemistry courses and journal articles. Lewis dots are semi-classical particles: classical in the sense of being associated with a location in space, but non-classical in that they don’t stick to the oppositely charged nuclei and can have two different spin states.

In recent years, the Herzfeld group has sought to quantify this picture. A subtlety is that the interactions between electrons is spin dependent due to the antisymmetry of electron wave functions. This explains why electrons of unlike spin often form pairs. However, the charges of electrons should always repel one another and Linnett suggested already in 1961 that two electrons should only co-localize if they are both sufficiently attracted to the same inter-nuclear region. In their new paper, the Herzfeld group shows that, a careful representation of the effects of wave function anti-symmetry, leads to Linnett-like structures when there are not enough internuclear basins to induce all the electrons to form simple pairs. A striking example is given by benzene. The traditional semi-classical representation of benzene, as a resonance between two structures with alternating single and double bonds, is obviated by a structure with three electrons in each carbon-carbon bond (shown here with the six carbon kernels in teal, six hydrogen kernels in white, and 15 valence electrons of each spin in pink and magenta).

Publication: Emergence of Linnett’s “double quartets” from a model of “Lewis dots.” Judith Herzfeld. Physical Chemistry Chemical Physics, Issue 7, 2023.

Brandeis students ranked well at the Putnam Math Competition

The Brandeis team did very well at the Putnam Mathematics Competition this year. The Brandeis team ranked 39 out of 456 institutions! This is a great result, especially given that small institutions are naturally at a disadvantage in such rankings.

The William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition is hosted by the Mathematics Association of American (MAA). It is an annual competition that began in 1938 for undergraduate college students from the US and Canada. The event consists of two 3-hour sessions where students work individually to solve six mathematical problems. It is famous for the intricate mathematical puzzles it proposes, whose solutions require imagination and inventiveness.

Eight Brandeis students participated in the weekly competitions at Brandeis, with Ben Kamen, Issac Berger and Phong Pham going on to compose the Brandeis Team at the national competition. Student Ben Kamen received an honorable mention since he scored 58th out of 3415 participants. The other Brandeis students also did very well.

Congratulations to the Brandeis team and all participants, and a great thank you to the Putnam coaches Kiyoshi Igusa, Professor of Mathematics and PhD student Tudor Popescu!

Albion Lawrence receives 3-year funding from NASA’s Physical Oceanography program

The ocean is a highly complex, multiscale system, with many types of motions occurring simultaneously. Ocean turbulence between 1km and hundreds of kilometers (the *submesoscale* and *mesoscale*) contains about 90% of the kinetic energy of the ocean, and is crucial for understanding the vertical and horizontal transport of heat, salt, carbon, and microorgamisms; and for understanding the coupling between the ocean and atmosphere. At these scales, internal waves driven by tides and wind also propagate through the ocean and play an important role in mixing such quantities. Characterizing and disentangling these different classes dynamics, and understanding how they interact, is a central problem in physical oceanography. This has become particularly salient with the December 2022 launch of the Surface Water and OceanTopography (SWOT) satellite, which will observe the ocean from space with unprecedented resolution.

Typical studies focus on the kinetic energy as a function of physical scale, (the “power spectrum”), to characterize ocean turbulence. However, this is a fairly blunt instrument and requires more precision than is available. Thus, Joern Callies, Assistant Professor for Environmental Science and Engineering at Caltech and Albion Lawrence, Professor of Physics, intend to use high-order statistical tests, inspired by tools used by observational cosmologists, quantum field theorists, and statistical physicists, to study mesoscale and submesoscale ocean dynamics using satellite observations, direct measurements made in the ocean, and numerical modeling. Their proposal, “Higher-order statistics of geostrophic turbulence and internal waves”, for which Professor Lawrence is the PI and Professor Callies is the Co-PI, was just selected for funding by the Physical Oceanography program at NASA. It was one of nine proposals selected out of 40 in 2022.

Professor Lawrence has been a theoretical high energy physicist for over thirty years, and has only recently begun working in climate-related physics problems. He just co-wrote two papers (arxiv.org, arxiv.org) on black holes and quantum gravity. To further help his move into this new field, he was also awarded a Simons Foundation Pivot Fellowship to spend the 2023-24 academic year embedded in Professor Callies’ group at Caltech. Brandeis’ collegial and interdisciplinary environment had a lot to do with the success and fun Professor Lawrence has had to date. This direction of his research was spurred by his involvement in a large multi-department NSF IGERT grant in “Geometry and Dynamics” that ran from 2011-2018; and got a very important boost from a Provost’s Innovation on “Nonequilbrium Statistical Mechanics of the Ocean and Atmosphere” that Lawrence received in 2019.

Brain rhythms coordinate neural networks to mediate memory-guided decision making

Significance of findings: The authors report coordination mechanisms between oscillations recorded in the CA1 subfield of the hippocampus, prefrontal cortex, and olfactory bulb and cell ensemble activity in CA1 and prefrontal cortex during odor-cued decision-making. The important findings support the hypothesis that the β rhythm plays a role in coordinating CA1-prefrontal cortex ensembles during decision-making. Sensory-guided decision-making is of broad significance to many readers who are studying executive functions and decision-making behaviors, and the observations reported in this manuscript provide convincing evidence of mechanisms that may support these functions and behaviors.

“Rhythmic coordination and ensemble dynamics in the hippocampal-prefrontal network during odor-place associative memory and decision making”. Claire A Symanski, John H Bladon, Emi T Kullberg, Paul Miller, Shantanu P Jadhav. eLife 2022, 11:e79545. DOI: 10.7554/eLife.79545

Simons Foundation: Jané Kondev discusses the Mathematics of Biology

As part of their 4 Minutes With series, the Simons Foundation recently presented a video of Jané Kondev, William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Physics, discussing the Mathematics of Biology. Kondev is a 2020 Simons Investigator in Theoretical Physics in Life Sciences.

Image: Simons Foundation

Kondev is a theoretical physicist who works primarily on problems in molecular and cell biology (Kondev Group).

 

 

Han receives DoD award to purchase X-ray diffraction instrument

Congratulations to Grace Han, Assistant Professor of Chemistry and Landsman Career Development Chair in the Sciences. She has been awarded funds from the Department of Defense to purchase a bench-top X-ray diffraction instrument. This award is part of the DoD’s Defense University Research Instrumentation Program (DURIP) that will provide $59 million in FY 2023 to purchase research equipment at 77 institutions across 30 states.

Changes in the properties of organic materials undergoing transition between solid and liquid phases are employed in a variety of applications, including thermal energy storage, cooling, and actuation. The ability to regulate such phase transitions by light opens up new opportunities to achieve functions with a high spatial precision, triggered by the rapid, remotely applied, and non-invasive stimulus. This capability enables novel applications including photo-controlled heat storage, adhesion, actuation, and catalyst recovery, which the Han group investigates.

The DURIP award from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) and the Department of Defense (DoD) will enable the Han team to build a new research capability on campus. A non-ambient, benchtop X-ray diffractometer, equipped with light sources and a heating/cooling stage, will allow the group to study how molecules change their geometry and intermolecular interaction in response to irradiation and temperature change. This will yield a deep understanding of photoswitch designs that undergo facile structural changes in solid phase, assisting the discovery and development of light-responsive functional materials.