Seminars

January 6, 2026: (4PM)- Deepak Krishnamurthy, University of California, Berkeley
Microscale Biophysics of the Ocean: A Single-Cell Perspective on the Biological Carbon Pump.
Host: Avi Flamholz
Our oceans make up 90% of the planet’s biosphere. Yet, paradoxically, this vast ecosystem is built from the bottom up, with single cells driving its most critical processes. Microbial phytoplankton alone generate 50% of Earth’s oxygen and fix half of all carbon, matching the impact of terrestrial life. In the sunlit upper ocean, single-cell biomass and planktonic products aggregate and sink as “marine snow,” powering the “biological carbon pump,” one of Earth’s largest carbon fluxes estimated at 5–12 GtC per year. Mechanistically unraveling this pump demands connecting microscale cellular processes to ecological-scale phenomena—a challenge requiring new biophysical approaches.
In the first part of my talk, I’ll present our development of scale-free vertical tracking microscopy—a new system for measuring single cells, marine larvae, and sinking aggregates with microscopic resolution across ecologically relevant depths of tens to hundreds of meters. I’ll share vignettes of discoveries enabled by this tool, including novel cell motility in diatoms, behavioral repertoires of key marine larvae in “virtual-reality” environments, and the impact of single-cell processes on flow and mass transport to sinking aggregates.
In the second part, I’ll discuss ongoing work using choanoflagellates as a model for the biophysics of cell adhesion and behavior in the ocean. Protists—a remarkably diverse class of unicellular eukaryotes, including choanoflagellates—constitute 2 GtC of marine biomass, equal to all marine animals. Yet their ecosystem roles are just starting to be uncovered. I focus on loricate choanoflagellates: single cells that rapidly (in minutes) build intricate, silicaceous “lorica” baskets from hundreds of rod-like costal strips (2–3 µm long, 100 nm wide). I’ll explore how these cells modulate surface adhesion interactions in space and time, emphasizing the role of glycans, charge, and biophysical surface properties. Loricate choanoflagellates offer a powerful model to probe the limits of single cell behavior, microscale biological self-assembly, and modulation of adhesive interactions in the marine environment.
I’ll close with future directions: developing high-throughput assays at both molecular and cellular scales to measure adhesion interactions between cells and between cells and surfaces, with applications to marine snow formation and its emergent biophysical properties. These approaches are critical for biophysically constraining carbon flux models, elucidating the nonlinear microscale interactions that cause flux attenuation with depth, and predicting how the biological carbon pump will respond to anthropogenic stressors.
January 20, 2026: (4PM)- Elad Schneidman, Weizmann Institute of Science
Uncovering The Design Principles Of The Architecture Of Neural Connectomes And The Computations They Carry.
Host: Merav Stern
Not Available.
January 27, 2026: (4PM)- Enrique Rojas, New York University
Adaptive Bacterial Material.
Host: Avi Flamholz
One of the most common cellular morphologies across nature is the cylinder, rod, or bacillus. To achieve this shape, cells usually reinforce the circumference of the cell to avoid cell widening while allowing elongation. However, it is not known – in any system – how cells homeostatically specify cell width. I will show, first, how the cell wall of Gram-positive bacteria like Bacillus subtilis exhibit extraordinary non-linear mechanical properties, including both stress-stiffening and stress-softening in different regimes of intracellular pressure. I will next explain how the cell exploits these properties to adaptively execute cell width homeostasis. Our preliminary studies in plant roots reveal that this generic strategy may appear convergently across many systems.
February 3, 2026: (4PM)- Ashok Litwin-Kumar, Columbia University
Identifying Structure And Modeling Dynamics With Connectome Data.
Host: Nikolas Schonsheck
There is excitement about the use of synaptic wiring diagrams, or connectomes, for modeling neural computation, but there is also concern that the information a connectome provides is not sufficient to meaningfully constrain a model. My group has made efforts to understand the capabilities and limitations of this kind of data. I will describe a new method for identifying symmetries in connectome data that are suggestive of computations involving representations of variables of interest to an animal, such as ring or toroidal attractors. I will also describe a theory we have developed that characterizes the solution spaces of connectome-constrained recurrent networks and predicts when such networks exhibit degeneracies or unique solutions.
February 17, 2026: (4PM)- Noah Mitchell, University of Chicago
How Mechanical Canalization Shapes The Gut Tube.
Host: Jialong Jiang/Dillon Cislo
In the development of inner organs such as the gut, laminar sheets of cells fold and coil into intricate 3D tubular structures that are essential for organ function. While the genes that regulate these processes are increasingly well catalogued, the mechanical forces that channel molecular activity into stereotyped 3D geometries remain poorly understood. The Drosophila embryonic midgut provides a genetically tractable and optically accessible system to interrogate the sequence of dynamic motifs of inner organ morphogenesis. Two planar sheets–each composed of endoderm (epithelial) and mesodermal (muscle) layers–wrap into a tube, which subsequently folds into chambers, then breaks left-right symmetry to form a chiral coil. I will present our work on each of these three steps, highlighting the mechanisms for robustness that canalize gut development into discrete developmental pathways, as well as the control knobs that switch the developmental program into alternative developmental trajectories. In each case, we find muscle cells are central drivers of tissue mechanics, programming tissue shape changes and driving transitions in the behavior of the underlying endoderm.
February 24, 2026: (4PM)- Daniel Needleman, Harvard University (Location: Smith Hall Annex, A-Level, Physics Seminar Room)
Cellular Energetics, Metabolic Flux Control, And Human Infertility.
Host: Avi Flamholz
Life is a nonequilibrium phenomenon. Metabolism provides a continuous flux of energy that dictates the form and function of many subcellular structures. However, it remains poorly understood how cell biological process impact energy metabolism (i.e. their “energetic costs”) or how defects in energy metabolism can lead to defects in cell biological processes (which have been proposed to be the cause of many afflictions, such as infertility). In this talk, I will describe my lab’s efforts to address these issues, including our work on quantitative measurements of metabolic fluxes and our attempts to use such measurements to aid in the treatment of human infertility.
March 10, 2026: (4PM)- Mo Ebrahimkhani, University of Pittsburgh
Modeling Human Embryogenesis Ex Utero.
Host: Alan Rodrigues
I will present recent work from my team describing a self-organizing human embryo model, termed the heX-embryoid, and its applications in regenerative medicine. Implantation represents a profound transition marked by symmetry breaking, cavity formation, body axis establishment, and germ layer specification, while multilineage extra-embryonic yolk sac morphogenesis drives temporally ordered waves of blood emergence. In humans, these post-implantation stages remain largely inaccessible and poorly understood. I show how heX-embryoids enable ex utero reconstruction of early programs of human embryogenesis, allowing development to be studied as an emergent, multiscale collective process. I will discuss new strategies to build in programmability and enable exploration of developmental morphospace in heX-embryoids, and present examples showing how access to youthful tissue states can be leveraged for regenerative and rejuvenative applications.
Wednesday, March 25, 2026: (4PM)- Andreas Tolias, Stanford University (Location: Smith Hall Annex, A-Level, Physics Seminar Room)
To Be Announced.
Host: Nikolas Schonsheck
To come.
March 31, 2026: (4PM)- Ori Katz, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
To Be Announced.
Host: Alipasha Vaziri
To come.
April 7, 2026: (4PM)- Jonathan Pillow, Princeton University
To Be Announced.
Host: Nikolas Schonsheck
To come.
April 14, 2026: (4PM)- Eric Shea-Brown, University of Washington
To Be Announced.
Host: Merav Stern
To come.
April 21, 2026: (4PM)- Jennifer Schwarz, Syracuse University
To Be Announced.
Host: Nikolas Schonsheck
To come.
April 28, 2026: (4PM)- Johnatan (Yonatan) Aljadeff, University of California, San Diego
Multimodal Predictive Computations In Mice And Fish.
Host: Merav Stern
The brain constructs internal predictive models of the world to guide behavior. We have recently proposed a neural network model that performs predictive processing in scenarios where multimodal sensorimotor associations are high-dimensional. In the first part of the talk I will discuss insights into the neural mechanisms mediating these computations; and efforts to test predictions of our model based on recordings in the mouse auditory cortex. In the second part I will discuss our modeling of interaction rules between fish underlying schooling behaviors. Our findings suggest that those interactions rely on learned predictive computations similar to those we studied in mice, thereby generating hypotheses for the circuit reorganization that supports the emergence of schooling. The two projects were led by my former students Dr. Bin Wang and Dr. Palka Puri, in collaboration with David Schneider and Matthew Lovett-Barron.
May 5, 2026: (4PM)- Yun S. Song, University of California, Berkeley
To Be Announced.
Host: Jialong Jiang
To come.
May 12, 2026: (4PM)- Arseny Finkelstein, Tel Aviv University
To Be Announced.
Host: Merav Stern
To come.
September 15, 2026: (4PM)-
To Be Announced.
Host: To Be Announced
To come.
September 22, 2026: (4PM)-
To Be Announced.
Host: To Be Announced
To come.
September 29, 2026: (4PM)- Hao Li, University of California, San Francisco
To Be Announced.
Host: Jialong Jiang
To come.
Thursday, October 8, 2026: (4PM)- Mackenzie Mathis, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne (EPFL)
To Be Announced.
Host: Nikolas Schonsheck
To come.
October 20, 2026: (4PM)- Seppe Keuhn, The University of Chicago
To Be Announced.
Host: Avi Flamholz
To come.
October 27, 2026: (4PM)- Sangjin Kim, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
To Be Announced.
Host: Shixin Liu
To come.
November 3, 2026: (4PM)- Nikta Fakhri, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
To Be Announced.
Host: Jialong Jiang
To come.
November 10, 2026: (4PM)- Dipti Nayak, University of California, Berkeley
To Be Announced.
Host: Jeremy Rock
To come.
November 17, 2026: (4PM)- Jerome Gros, Pasteur Institute
To Be Announced.
Host: Alan Rodrigues
To come.
December 1, 2026: (4PM)-
To Be Announced.
Host: To Be Announced
To come.
December 8, 2026: (4PM)-
To Be Announced.
Host: To Be Announced
To come.
December 15, 2026: (4PM)-
To Be Announced.
Host: To Be Announced
To come.