Physics (Internal)

Student Seminar Series

This event is part of the Graduate Student Council Events.

Student Seminars are talks to the physics graduate student body, typically given by graduate students or postdocs. The series is organized by the Graduate Student Council. If you would like further details or would like to give a talk or invite a speaker, please email gradcouncil@buphy.bu.edu.

Brian Dawes (BIOE) A physicist's introduction to bioinformatics

Before attending BU, I spent two years working as a bioinformatician. Broadly speaking, bioinformatics is the application of data science to biological problems. In this talk, I will give a brief overview of the field and describe my experiences working in a bio lab when my last bio class was in high school. I will end by following the analysis pipeline of a single cell RNA sequencing data set. Along the way, I'll cover a few machine learning techniques such as PCA and tSNE which have broad applicability.

Nick Russo (CME) Perspective on Engineering Transition Metal Oxides

Transition Metal Oxides are a class of materials that exhibit a wide range of fascinating and useful electronic properties. Understanding the molecular origins of these properties is crucial to controlling and engineering their behavior; and this can be done by understanding a few general concepts. In this talk, I will discuss a few of these concepts and illustrate how they can be applied to understand some interesting properties and behaviors of these compounds, notably Charge Density Waves and High Tc superconductivity. The three concepts discussed are: (1) orbital mixing and the roles of cation-d/O-2p covalent bonding as distinct from on-site cation−orbital hybridization; (2) cooperativity in ordering (a) localized orbitals to remove an orbital degeneracy, (b) ferroic atomic displacements, and (c) bond lengths in a charge-density wave; and (3) cation-site expansion at the crossover from itinerant to localized electron behavior.