Patton Distinguished Professors Joshua S. Weitz and Greg Gibson will join JulieAnne Williamson, Executive Director of Sustainability and Building Operations at Georgia Tech and Team Lead for Campus Surveillance Testing Operations, to discuss campus cases and tracking, actions taken to date, and next steps. Brielle Lonsberry, Student Body President for Georgia Tech Undergraduate SGA will moderate our townhall Q&A.

Everyone is welcome! Join via BlueJeans Events. Open Q&A will follow the team's presentations. A video recap of this talk will be posted to cos.gatech.edu and @gtsciences social channels.

This talk is hosted by the School of Biological Sciences at Georgia Tech.

The 3rd SCMB Annual Symposium is a free online event that will elevate and amplify the ongoing dialogue at the interface of mathematics and biology. The Symposium will host curated panels to highlight and dissect impactful interdisciplinary work from the math/bio community. Invited talks from all four National Science Foundation-Simons MathBioSys Research Centers will share compelling success stories of mathematical theory meeting biosystems data. In addition to these curated events, the Symposium will offer spatial conferencing to facilitate organic conversation and an informal poster session in a digital setting

With effective communication an ever-important skill in a virtual world, the SCMB has decided to make Interactional Expertise (IE) the theme of its 3rd annual Symposium. In this context, you don't need to be an expert in both math and biology in order to work productively at the math/bio interface. You just need to be able to communicate effectively with someone whose research expertise complements your own.

Symposium attendees will hear about:

* The impact of IE in shaping the careers of senior math-bio researchers

* The value of developing IE from SCMB's junior researchers

* The importance of IE in early career math/bio employment opportunities

Each of the first three days will spotlight one of these conversations, followed by a pair of short talks. The talks will highlight math/bio research frontiers and will be given by junior researchers at SCMB and the other three NSF-Simons MathBioSys research centers.

Support Junior Researchers and Build Math/Bio Community

The final day will feature a plentary talk on Algebraic Systems Biology by Heather Harrington, professor at the University of Oxford, and an interactive poster session with spatial conferencing. All poster session presenters will be entered into a drawing for complementary registration at the SCMB's 4th Symposium (expected to be in-person in Feb. 2022). 

Learn more and register for the 3rd Annual Symposium here.

About the SCMB

The Southeast Center for Mathematics and Biology at Georgia Tech is one of four such centers in the U.S. examining the intersection of mathematics and biology. The National Science Foundation teamed up with the Simons Foundation in 2017 to award grants establishing the centers. The other Centers are at Harvard University, Northwestern University, and the University of California, Irvine. The SCMB has six partner institutions across the Southeast, including  Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Oak Ridge, TN; Tulane University in New Orleans, LA; the University of South Florida in Tampa, FL; the University of Florida in Gainesville, FL; Clemson University in Clemson, SC; and Duke University in Durham, NC.

Join us virtually on BlueJeans as Georgia Tech School of Physics professor and Glen P. Robinson Chair in Nonlinear Sciences Chair Predrag Cvitanović and Emory University Senior Lecturer and Director of the Planetarium Erin Wells Bonning explain the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics. After the presentation, the speakers will answer questions from the audience, so come curious! This talk is open to the public and all are welcome to join.

About the Prize

Half of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Roger Penrose for the discovery that black hole formation is a robust prediction of the general theory of relativity.

In 1957 Penrose, then a graduate student, met Georgia Tech’s late David Ritz Finkelstein in a fateful meeting that changed both men’s lives forever after. It was Finkelstein’s extension of the Schwarzschild metric which provided Penrose with an opening into general relativity and set him on the path to his 1965 discovery celebrated by this year’s prize.

The other half of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded jointly to Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez for the discovery of — in Ghez’s words — "The Monster at the heart of the Milky Way," a black hole whose existence had been hypothesized since the early 1970s.

In order to visually observe an object that famously does not emit any light, precise measurements of stars moving in the black hole’s gravitational field had to be carried out. The independent work of Genzel and Ghez mapping the positions of these stars over many years has led to the clearest evidence yet that the center of our Milky Way galaxy contains “The Monster”, that possibly every galaxy contains a black hole, and that the environment near it looks nothing like what was expected.

Learn more: 2020 Nobel Prizes in Chemistry and Physics, Explained

Mait Metspalu, Ph.D.
Institute of Genomics
University of Tartu

Join the BlueJeans Meeting

ABSTRACT
While the language map of Europe is dominated by Indo-European languages we see the spread of Uralic (Finno Ugric) languages in northeast Europe (and Hungary). Is there anything in the genetic diversity of these populations that connects them specifically with each other and with their linguistic relatives in western Russia and Siberia? What do aDNA studies reveal about the population demographic history in NE Europe and in Estonia in particular. And finally i’m going to talk about our recent efforts in filling the aDNA gap in East European Plain.

Host: Joe Lachance, Ph.D.

It gives new meaning to "smashing pumpkins," and is quickly becoming a Halloween tradition at Georgia Tech. Society of Physics students will join School of Physics' Ed Greco in flash-freezing pumpkins in nitrogen and dropping them off from the roof of the Howey Building — one our of our tallest buildings in the heart of campus.

Tune into the livestream of this year's pumpkin drop on Friday October 30 at 3 PM ET on Twitch: twitch.tv/gatechsps

Join President Ángel Cabrera in conversation with conservationist Enric Sala, current National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence and author of The Nature of Nature: Why We Need the Wild, which makes a clear case for why protecting nature is our best health insurance, and why it makes economic sense.

The event includes an opportunity for the audience to ask questions.

Unscripted and informal — unearthing leadership’s thinking behind the big ideas taking shape across the Institute and trends likely to define our future — this video series is meant to capture candid conversations between President Ángel Cabrera and thought leaders across Georgia Tech and beyond.

Discussions will revolve around various topics related to academics and research, as well as campus life and culture.

I'm very much looking forward to exploring the multitude of voices and backgrounds that contribute to making Georgia Tech what it is and shaping the world we live in,” said President Cabrera. “Every day I am inspired by the talent I get to work with, and I’m excited to share it with our entire community.”

JOIN: https://primetime.bluejeans.com/a2m/live-event/pryjtgck

About Enric Sala:
Sala, a former university professor who saw himself writing the obituary of ocean life, quit academia to become a full-time conservationist. He founded and leads Pristine Seas, a project that combines exploration, research, and media to support and empower local communities and inspire country leaders to protect the last wild places in the ocean. Pristine Seas has helped to create 22 of the largest marine reserves on the planet, covering an area of 5.8 million square kilometers.

Luca Pagani, Ph.D.
Department of Biology
University of Padova

Join the BlueJeans Meeting

ABSTRACT
A growing body of human ancient DNA evidence is being used to build increasingly more realistic models of demographic changes in the last few thousand years. However, due to low coverage and low sample size, in most cases ancient DNA is inherently limited in providing phased haplotypes and accurate population-level allele frequency estimates.

Here we propose to consider modern genomes as being arranged together from pieces of a jigsaw of ancient haplotypes that recombined and admixed in the last few thousand years. Following what has already been attempted for recently admixed populations, one can use local ancestry methods to extract these genomic regions and study them separately. The benefit of this approach stems from our ability to make use of existing high-quality whole genomes, which can be deconvoluted to identify the genetic makeup of the ancient populations that admixed to form contemporary human groups.

Host: Joe Lachance, Ph.D.

Without leaving the comfort of your home, on October 22 you can enjoy an evening under the stars, guided by the Georgia Tech Observatory. This is the Observatory's third online public night, preceded by many years of in-person public nights on the roof of Howey Physics Building. Tune in here at 8 PM ET to watch the live stream.

Viewers will be treated to a live tour of the Moon, Jupiter, Saturn, and Mars by Observatory Director James Sowell, as shown through the lense of a Georgia Tech telescope to a live stream on YouTube. The stream is dependent on clear weather to happen.

Read more about the Observatory's inaugural online public night, which took place on May 7, and save the YouTube channel to your calendar for the October 22 online public night.

Attend Event

Join us for an interactive session where we will explore ways in which racial microaggressions manifest themselves in science. We will discuss what microaggressions are and how they effect underrepresented individuals in an academic setting. We will present several examples of microaggressions and discuss general strategies for confronting them. Participants will brainstorm ideas for ways in which they would approach different microaggression scenarios followed by group discussion.

An initiative sponsored by the Society for the Advancement in Biology Education Research (SABER) focused on promoting awareness, understanding and commitment to change academic biology environments to be more inclusive and strive for racial justice in STEM education. We are excited that speakers will be compensated for their time and this event is co-sponsored by Arizona State University’s HHMI Inclusive Excellence Project, SEISMIC Collaboration, and University of California Santa Barbara

The second-annual Global Climate Action Symposium will bring together a wide range of experts to showcase climate change engagement by local student activists, scientists and engineers, business and policy experts, and artists. Jointly sponsored by Georgia Tech and #European consulates during European Climate Diplomacy Week, the event will be held virtually, in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

More Information

Register to Attend