GT SMILE’s Faculty Student Connections Committee is hosting our Second Meet the Teach event for the College of Sciences, THIS WEDNESDAY, April 14th, at 7PM ET! This event aims to bridge the gap between students and faculty by facilitating a “speed dating” event where students and faculty can meet in a virtual environment. Here’s the RSVP form for the event: https://gatech.co1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_0TH2FXJkepprNhc

Please fill it out by Wednesday at 12pm EDT. You’ll receive a BlueJeans invite from Vivek Garimella (vgarimella8@gatech.edu) closer to the event date!

Thank you,
Mihir Kandarpa
Faculty - Student Connections Committee | SMILE

Last week, College of Sciences faculty, staff, graduate students, and postdocs received a calendar invitation for this Wednesday’s virtual CoS Spring Plenary. Check your inbox for the BlueJeans Events link (search "CoS Spring 2021 Plenary"). The virtual event's agenda includes announcements and updates on our councils, searches, Task Force on Racial Equity, new strategic plan, and finances — plus a recap of our first staff engagement day. An open Q&A will follow plenary presentations. Please join us!

Without leaving the comfort of your home, on November 19 you can enjoy an evening under the stars, guided by the Georgia Tech Observatory. This is the Observatory's fourth 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.

The observatory plans to use two telescopes this time, and that will allow different magnifications and we may be able to see a few additional objects. The main attractions will be the Moon, Jupiter, Saturn, and Mars. Jupiter and Saturn will soon be near the western horizon, so this will be the last chance to see these two worlds via our Public Nights until next Fall.

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 November 19 online public night.

Dragonfly: In Situ Exploration of Titan’s Organic Chemistry and Habitability

Georgia Tech's Center for Space Technology and Research (C-STAR) hosts Titan Week, featuring days of virtual fun on Saturn's spectacular, intriguing moon, and NASA's plans to explore it. 

At 6:30 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 19, CSTAR hosts Dr. Elizabeth Turtle, a planetary scientist at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, for its 2020 Distinguished Lecture. This year's virtual version will be via BlueJeans. 

Turtle is the principal investigator for NASA's Dragonfly mission, which proposes to use a rotorcraft lander to explore the environment of Titan.

NASA's Dragonfly New Frontiers mission is a rotorcraft lander designed to perform wide- ranging in situ investigation of the chemistry and habitability of this fascinating extraterrestrial environment. Taking advantage of Titan's dense atmosphere and low gravity, Dragonfly can fly from place to place, exploring diverse geological settings to measure the compositions of surface materials and observe Titan's geology and meteorology. Dragonfly will make multidisciplinary science measurements at dozens of sites, traveling 150 km during a three-year mission to characterize Titan's habitability and determine how far organic chemistry has progressed in environments that provide key ingredients for life.

Registration and other information for the 2020 Distinguished Lecture can be found here.

About Elizabeth Turtle

Dr. Elizabeth Turtle is a planetary scientist at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. Her research focus is using remote sensing observations and numerical geophysical models to study geological structures and their implications for the surfaces and interiors of the planets on which they formed. The processes of interest include impact cratering and tectonics on terrestrial planets and outer planet icy satellites, mountain formation on Io, creep of ice-rich permafrost on Mars, and dynamics of lakes on Titan. Turtle is the Principal investigator of the Dragonfly mission to Titan and the Europa Imaging System  for NASA's upcoming Europa mission, an associate on the Cassini Imaging Science Subsystem and RADAR teams, and a co-investigator on the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera.

A School of Physics public lecture by John Wise and Gongjie Li

Cosmology studies the universe at the largest scales, applying the laws of physics over billions of light years and all the way back to the universe's infancy. In dozens of groundbreaking publications, Jim Peebles laid the foundations for theoretical cosmology, painting a picture of how matter evolves from the moments after the Big Bang into a cosmic web of dark matter and galaxies. His work set the stage for current research that routinely uses supercomputer simulations to study the astrophysics of galaxies.

Closer to home, people have speculated the existence of planets outside of our own solar system for centuries. However, there was no way of knowing whether they exist and how common they are. In 1995, the first discovery of an extrasolar planet, or exoplanet, orbiting a Sun-like star was made by Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz, who detected the signatures of the planet 51 Pegasi b as it pulls its host star. This discovery marked a breakthrough in astrophysics and led to various fields of interests, including the formation and habitability of exoplanets.

About the Speakers

John Wise is an associate professor in the School of Physics. He uses numerical simulations to study the formation and evolution of galaxies and their black holes. He is one of the lead developers of the community-driven, open-source astrophysics code Enzo and has vast experience running state-of-the-art simulations on the world’s largest supercomputers.

He received his B.S. in Physics from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2001. He then studied at Stanford University, where he received his Ph.D. in Physics in 2007. He went on to work at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center just outside of Washington, D.C., as a NASA postdoctoral fellow. In 2009, he was awarded the prestigious Hubble Fellowship, which he took to Princeton University before joining Georgia Tech in 2011, coming back home after 10 years roaming the nation.

Gongjie Li is an assistant professor in the School of Physics and the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences. She studies the dynamics and formation mechanism of planetary systems, as well as stars around supermassive black holes.

She received her B.S. in Astrophysics from the California Institute of Technology in 2010 and her Ph.D. in Astronomy and Astrophysics from Harvard University in 2015. She stayed at Harvard as a Junior Fellow before joining Georgia Tech in 2018.

On Monday, Nov. 11, 2019, the planet Mercury will pass across the disk of the sun. The rare celestial event can be viewed with the eye-safe telescopes of the Georgia Tech Observatory. This planetary transit is rare, occurring only around 13 times each century. “This will be the last such event visible from Georgia Tech until 2049,” says James Sowell, director of the Georgia Tech Observatory.

The transit begins at 7:36 AM and ends at 1:04 PM. The observatory will have eye-safe telescopes available during the entirety of the transit.

Contact jim.sowell@physics.gatech.edu if you have questions.

The Institute for Data Engineering and Science presents the 2019 IDEaS Distinguished Lecture on Wednesday, November 6. Peter S. Dodds, the Flint Professor of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Vermont, will deliver “The Science of Stories: Measuring and Exploring the Ecology of Human Stories with Lexical Instruments.” The event will be held in the Marcus Nanotechnology Building, Rooms 1116-1118, from 3:00-4:00 p.m.

Abstract

I will survey our efforts at the Computational Story Lab to measure and study a wide array of social and cultural phenomena using “lexical meters” — online, interactive instruments that use social media and other texts to quantify population dynamics of human behavior. These include happiness, public health, obesity rates, and depression. I will explain how lexical meters work and how we have used them to uncover natural language encodings of positivity biases across cultures, universal emotional arcs of stories, links between social media posts and health, measures of fame and ultra-fame, and time compression for news. I will offer some thoughts on how fully developing a post-disciplinary, collaborative science of human stories is vital in our efforts to understand the evolution, stability, and fracturing of social systems. 

Bio

Peter S. Dodds is the Flint Professor of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Vermont. His research focuses on system-level big data problems in many areas, including language and stories, sociotechnical systems, contagion, and ecology. He is the director of UVM’s Complex Systems Center, co-director of UVM’s Computational Story Lab, and a visiting faculty fellow at the Vermont Advanced Computing Core. Dodds is the recipient of an NSF Career Award and has received funding from NSF, NASA, ONR, and the MITRE Corporation, among others. 

DUE TO ANTICIPATED BAD WEATHER, THIS EVENT IS RESCHEDULED FOR NOV. 1.

The Society of Physics Students and the Society of Women in Physics invite all to the 2019 Pumpkin Drop. The event aims to raise funds to support student travel to conferences.

Pumpkins can be carved or dropped from the top of the Howey Building. For the drop, pumpkins are first frozen in liquid nitrogen.

It's fun and messy, all for a good cause.

The School of Physics and the Society of Physics Students will host a public debate between faculty from the College of Science and the College of Computing to answer this question.  This event is free and open to the all.  There will be time at the conclusion of the debate for audience members to direct questions towards the faculty panel.

A School of Physics Public Lecture by David Hu, 2019 Ig Nobel Prize Winner

How does a wombat produce cube-shaped feces?  How long does it take an elephant to urinate? 

Answering these two questions have landed David Hu two Ig Nobel Prizes, awards given  at Harvard University for research that makes people laugh, and then think. Hu will talk about his lab's latest adventures catching elephant pee in trash cans, inflating wombat intestines with clown balloons, and dressing up as a gigantic piece of cubed poo at this year's Ig Nobel Ceremony.   

About the Speaker

David Hu is a mechanical engineer who studies the mysteries of animal movement.  His team has discovered how dogs shake dry, how insects walk on water, and how eyelashes protect the eyes from drying. 

Originally from Rockville, Maryland, Hu earned degrees in mathematics and mechanical engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Currently he is a professor in the Georgia Tech Schools of Mechanical Engineering and Biological Sciences and an adjunct professor in the School of Physics. 

Hu is a recipient of the National Science Foundation CAREER award for young scientists, two Ig Nobel Prizes in Physics, and the Pineapple Science Prize (the Ig Nobel of China).  He serves on the editorial board of Nature Scientific Reports, PLoS One, and The Journal of Experimental Biology.

His work has been featured in The Economist, The New York Times, Saturday Night Live, and Highlights for Children. He is the author of the book "How to Walk on Water and Climb Up Walls: Animal Motion and the Robots of the Future," published by Princeton University Press. 

He lives with his wife and two children in Atlanta, Georgia.  His profile is in the New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/05/science/hu-robotics.html.