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DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20260203T110000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20260203T120000
DTSTAMP:20260814T200302
CREATED:20251210T125531Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20260126T144638Z
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SUMMARY:Photonics Initiative Seminar: Rainer Hillenbrand
DESCRIPTION:Dr. Rainer Hillenbrand\, CIC nanoGUNE\nPolaritonic Insights from Near-field Nanoscopy:\nFlat-Band Ultrastrong Coupling and Plasmons in Gold Monolayers\n\nAbstract – Scattering-type scanning near-field optical microscopy (s-SNOM) and nanoscale Fourier-transform infrared (nano-FTIR) spectroscopy probe light–matter interactions at the nanoscale using the sharp tip an atomic force microscope (AFM) as an optical antenna. The illuminated tip generates a strongly confined near field that couples to local excitations in the sample\, and the scattered light is recorded to reveal these interactions. These techniques enable the local excitation and detection of\, for example\, phonons\, plasmons\, and polaritons in both bulk and low-dimensional materials across a broad spectral range [1]. After a brief introduction to the technique\, I will present recent studies on polariton mapping. \nUsing pump–probe nano-FTIR\, we investigate the coupling between optical phonons in a thin SiC layer and surface plasmon polaritons (SPPs) in an InAs substrate. By tuning the SPP dispersion to align with the SiC phonon\, we observe ultrastrong coupling with a mode splitting exceeding 20%. Owing to the flat SPP dispersion\, this ultrastrong coupling extends over an unusual wide momentum range\, realizing a flat-band ultrastrong coupling regime [2]. \nWe further apply near-field nanoscopy to study a stable\, quasi-freestanding gold monolayer (ML-Au) formed by intercalating gold atoms between graphene and a SiC substrate [3]. Via polariton interferometry\, we obtain clear evidence of plasmon polaritons. From the experimental images\, we extract the plasmon dispersion and model it with a two-dimensional Drude conductivity. The Drude weight is found to be roughly twice that of bulk gold\, consistent with values obtained from DFT band-structure calculations\, highlighting ML-Au as a promising platform for low-dimensional plasmonics and optoelectronic applications [4]. \n\nHillenbrand et al.\, Nat. Rev. Matter. 10\, 285 (2025)\nVicentini et al.\, Nat. Mater. (2025) https://doi.org/10.1038/s41563-025-02412-6\nForti et al.\, Nat. Commun. 11\, 2236 (2020)\nBylinkin et al.\, in preparation\n\nBio – Rainer Hillenbrand is an Ikerbasque Research Professor and Nanooptics Group Leader at the nanoscience research center CIC nanoGUNE in San Sebastian (Basque Country\, Spain)\, and a Joint Professor at the University of the Basque Country. He is also co-founder of the company neaspec GmbH (Germany)\, now part of attocube systems AG (Germany)\, which develops and manufactures near-field optical microscopes. From 1998 to 2007 he worked at the Max Planck Institute of Biochemisty (Martinsried\, Germany)\, where he led the Nano-Photonics Research Group from 2003 to 2007. He obtained his PhD degree in physics from the Technical University of Munich in 2001. \nHillenbrand’s research activities include the development of scattering-type scanning near-field optical microscopy (s-SNOM)\, nanoscale Fourier transform infrared (nano-FTIR) spectroscopy and related techniques\, as well as their application in nanophotonics and materials sciences. He has published more than 190 peer-reviewed articles with over 30000 citations. In 2014 he received the Ludwig-Genzel-Price “for the design and development of infrared near-field spectroscopy and the application of the novel spectroscopy method in different fields of natural sciences”. \nZoom Meeting ID 815 5135 5607 Passcode 226190 \n2026 02 03 Photonics Seminar flier
URL:https://asrc.gc.cuny.edu/event/photonics-initiative-seminar-hillenbrand/
LOCATION:ASRC Auditorium\, 85 St. Nicholas Terrace\, New York\, NY\, 10031\, United States
CATEGORIES:Photonics
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20260205T120000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20260205T130000
DTSTAMP:20260814T200302
CREATED:20260203T024204Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20260205T033924Z
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SUMMARY:Neuroscience Spring 2026 Seminar Series - Patrizia Casaccia
DESCRIPTION:Patrizia Casaccia\, M.D.\, Ph.D.\, Einstein Professor of Biochemistry\, Biology and Neuroscience of the CUNY Graduate Center\, Founding Director of ASRC Neuroscience Initiative\, will give a talk titled “A multiscale approach to myelination and myelin-related disorders”. \nJoin in person at the ASRC Data Viz Room\, or via Zoom (Meeting ID 842 0580 1471\, Passcode 608719).
URL:https://asrc.gc.cuny.edu/event/neuroscience-spring-2026-seminar-series-patrizia-casaccia/
LOCATION:Advanced Science Research Center (ASRC)\, 85 St. Nicholas Terrace\, New York\, NY\, 10031\, United States
CATEGORIES:Neuroscience
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20260209T110000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20260209T120000
DTSTAMP:20260814T200302
CREATED:20250912T191047Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20260107T124855Z
UID:10001522-1770634800-1770638400@asrc.gc.cuny.edu
SUMMARY:Photonics Initiative Seminar: Itai Cohen
DESCRIPTION:Dr. Itai Cohen\, Cornell University\nElectronically Integrated Autonomous Microscopic Robots\nAbstract – What would we be able to do if we could build electronically integrated machines the at a scale of 100 microns? At this scale\, semiconductor devices are small enough that we could put the computational power of the spaceship Voyager onto a machine that could be injected into the body. Such robots could have on board detectors\, power sources\, and processors that enable them to sense\, interact\, and control their local environment. In this talk I will describe several cutting edge technologies we are developing to achieve this vision. \nBio – Itai Cohen received his BS in Physics from the University of California at Los Angeles\, and his PhD in Physics from the University of Chicago. Following his graduate studies\, he was a Post-doctoral fellow in Physics and the Division of Engineering and Applied Science at Harvard University. In 2005 he joined Cornell and is currently a professor of Physics. \nZoom Meeting ID 851 4410 9109 Password 759514
URL:https://asrc.gc.cuny.edu/event/photonics-initiative-seminar-itai-cohen/
LOCATION:ASRC Auditorium\, 85 St. Nicholas Terrace\, New York\, NY\, 10031\, United States
CATEGORIES:Photonics
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20260210T120000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20260210T130000
DTSTAMP:20260814T200302
CREATED:20260203T202214Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20260203T202921Z
UID:10001557-1770724800-1770728400@asrc.gc.cuny.edu
SUMMARY:Nanoscience Guest Speaker: Dr. Saptarashmi Bandyopadhyay\, "Distributed AI Agents for Scientific Discovery and Real-World Decision-Making"
DESCRIPTION:Talk Topic: \nDistributed AI Agents for Scientific Discovery and Real-World Decision-Making \nSpeaker Bio: \nSaptarashmi Bandyopadhyay is a Tenure-Track Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the City University of New York at the City College of New York and the Graduate Center. He graduated with his Ph.D. in Computer Science at the University of Maryland\, College Park (UMD) advised by Prof. John Dickerson and Prof. Tom Goldstein\, in Summer 2025. His research on Multi-Agent AI for Autonomous Decision Making in the Real World addresses the challenges and opportunities of building AI Agents to plan\, reason\, and navigate in AR/VR\, Supply Chains\, Recommender Systems\, Robotics\, Self-Driving Cars\, Climate Conservation\, and other domains. He works with Reinforcement Learning\, Imitation Learning\, Model Predictive Control\, LLMs\, VLMs\, and Game Theory algorithms to train AI Agents with Social Intelligence to take actions and provide insights at scale. He has been a Ph.D. Student Researcher at Google Augmented Reality and Google DeepMind in the Multimodal Conversational AI and Astra AR teams creating Multimodal (Audio\, Vision and Language) AI Agents to proactively assist users. At UMD\, he has been the Lead PhD RA of a DoD project on Explainable AI Agents. Saptarashmi has published twenty-six research papers in top AI venues including AAAI\, ACM AAMAS\, NeurIPS\, EMNLP\, ACL\, SPIE\, and others. He chaired the Multi-Agent AI in the Real World Workshop at AAAI-25 and created the MARL Seminar at UMD\, hosting prominent speakers from industry and academia including Turing Award Laureates. Previously\, Saptarashmi was an AI Resident at Google X\, and did research internships at CNRS LORIA and INRIA in France (as a Charpak Scholar)\, and DFKI and the University of Saarland in Germany. He is a Do-Good Fellow and Dean’s Summer Fellow at UMD. Further research details can be found on his websites https://sites.google.com/view/saptarashmi/about and https://www.gc.cuny.edu/people/saptarashmi-bandyopadhyay  \nTalk Abstract: \nArtificial Intelligence (AI) Agents are increasingly being deployed in Robotics\, Augmented Reality/Virtual Reality\, Self-Driving Cars\, Scientific Discovery\, Network Communications\, and other domains. Agents need to reliably cooperate with humans using algorithms such as Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) and Imitation Learning (IL). In this talk\, Saptarashmi will introduce an imitate-then-commit algorithm for AI Agents by unifying concepts from IL and Computational Game Theory to cooperate and align in settings where they have similar goals but different priorities. Guarantees on this approach are stronger than a naive reduction of the alignment problem to IL. Saptarashmi will then share a Multimodal Agentic Model Predictive Control framework to allow fine-grained tuning of Imitation Learning demonstrations\, using VLMs\, to train autonomous vehicles with better spatio-temporal reasoning and improved control dynamics. Next\, Saptarashmi will share real-world applications of AI Agents\, including YETI (YET-to-Intervene) Multimodal Agents which efficiently detect when to autonomously intervene while interacting with users in AR for planning\, guidance\, navigation\, fixing mistakes or other tasks. He will introduce his research on improving automated scientific discovery in protein structures\, neuroscientific modeling\, accelerated photonics and material design. His focus on improving on scalable and dynamic exploration and dynamic prediction of protein structures has led to domain-specific improvements over Alphafold. He will introduce solutions to the problem of energy and system efficiency for these intelligent agents with a Multi-Agent AI Designer to reliably assist and stabilize these challenges. He will also share his research on AI Agents for Climate Conservation\, Education\, Supply Chain Orchestration\, Building Engineering Automation and other areas. Saptarashmi will highlight the importance of training such AI Agents at scale efficiently and introduce JAXMARL\, the fastest open-source MARL library with up to 12\,500× speedup over alternatives. Together\, his talk shows the promise of efficient and generalizable Deep Learning algorithms\, guiding AI Agents and Multi-Agent Decision Making with human interaction to solve real-world problems which add new capabilities to AI Agents such as planning\, reasoning and navigation while optimizing system performance by distributed processing.
URL:https://asrc.gc.cuny.edu/event/nanoscience-guest-speaker-dr-saptarashmi-bandyopadhyay-distributed-ai-agents-for-scientific-discovery-and-real-world-decision-making/
LOCATION:ASRC 5th Floor Data Visualization Room\, 85 St. Nicholas Terrace\, New York\, NY\, 10031\, United States
CATEGORIES:Nanoscience
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20260218T120000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20260218T130000
DTSTAMP:20260814T200302
CREATED:20260122T195707Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20260209T142433Z
UID:10001550-1771416000-1771419600@asrc.gc.cuny.edu
SUMMARY:Spring '26 Biochem Seminar: Edward P. O'Brien\, Jr.
DESCRIPTION:How a novel class of protein misfolding is associated with changes in enzyme activity\, proteostasis\, aging\, and disease \nUtilizing simulations\, experimental data\, and data science\, my lab predicted the existence of a previously undiscovered\, widespread class of protein misfolding that can result in soluble\, loss-of-function states\, some of which evade the proteostasis network. This class of misfolding involves structural changes in geometric motifs called non-covalent lasso entanglements\, which are found in 70% of the native structures of globular proteins. In this talk\, I will synthesize six lines of evidence: (1) proteome-wide and atomistic simulations establish the prevalence and physical plausibility of self-entanglement; (2) translation-speed changes from synonymous mutations can re-partition folding trajectories into slowly interconverting\, near-native entangled ensembles with reduced catalytic efficiency; (3) native-like surfaces coupled to these topological barriers explain how some misfolded states bypass chaperones; that these misfolded states are associated with (4) increased nascent protein degradation through the ubiquitin-proteasome pathway in human fibroblast cells\, (5) with structural changes in proteins that occur during yeast mother cell aging\, and (6) with a higher likelihood of harboring pathogenic mutations in human diseases. Taken together\, simulations and experiments areconverging on a unified picture in which entanglement misfolding is common\, biologically consequential\, and measurable. \nPlease use this link to access Zoom. \nPlease contact Hyacinth Camillieri at hcamillieri@gc.cuny.edu if you have any questions.
URL:https://asrc.gc.cuny.edu/event/spring-26-biochem-seminar-edward-p-obrien-jr/
LOCATION:ASRC Auditorium\, 85 St. Nicholas Terrace\, New York\, NY\, 10031\, United States
CATEGORIES:Structural Biology
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20260219T110000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20260219T120000
DTSTAMP:20260814T200302
CREATED:20251202T190632Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20260217T133919Z
UID:10001541-1771498800-1771502400@asrc.gc.cuny.edu
SUMMARY:Photonics Initiative Seminar: Javier Garcia De Abajo
DESCRIPTION:Dr. Javier Garcia De Abajo (ICREA) \nTitle: When free electrons meet light: Quantum interactions at the nanoscale \nAbstract: At the intersection of electron microscopy and attosecond science\, ultrafast electron microscopy has emerged as a research frontier aiming to investigate material excitations with an unprecedented combination of spatiotemporal resolution\, while also granting us access to quantum phenomena involving photonic nanostructures. In this context\, we will discuss the fundamental principles governing the interactions between free electrons\, light\, and photonic media\, with an emphasis on exploring quantum aspects that include electron decoherence caused by coupling to radiative modes\, the generation of quantum states of light\, and new approaches for quantum sensing and metrology\, highlighting the unique characteristics of free electron–light interactions that enable access to previously unexplored physics. \nBio: Javier García de Abajo is an ICREA Research Professor and leader of the Nanophotonics Theory Group at ICFO–Institut de Ciencies Fotoniques in Barcelona. His interests include electron microscopy\, light-matter interactions\, quantum optics\, condensed matter physics\, ultrafast phenomena\, and nanophotonics. His group applies theoretical and computational techniques to investigate new phenomena and explore their potential application in microscopy\, sensing\, and information processing. He has co-authored 450+ papers cited 70\,000+ times with an h index of 128 (Google Scholar\, Feb. 2025). He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society\, the Optical Society of America\, and the Electromagnetic Academy. \nZoom Meeting ID894 3655 9130 Passcode 952358 \n2026 02 19 Photonics Seminar flier
URL:https://asrc.gc.cuny.edu/event/photonics-initiative-seminar-garcia-de-abajo/
LOCATION:ASRC Auditorium\, 85 St. Nicholas Terrace\, New York\, NY\, 10031\, United States
CATEGORIES:Photonics
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