Plenary speakers
Jennifer Dionne is the Vice Provost of Research Platforms and a professor of Materials Science and Engineering at Stanford. As a pioneer of nanophotonics, she is passionate about developing methods to observe and control chemical and biological processes as they unfold with nanometer scale resolution, emphasizing critical challenges in global health and sustainability. Her research has developed culture-free methods to detect pathogens and their antibiotic susceptibility, amplification-free methods to detect nucleic acids and proteins, and new methods to image light-driven chemical reactions with atomic-scale resolution.
Title
Emerging nanophotonic platforms for personal and population health
Abstract
Jennifer Dionne will present the efforts of her research group to develop photonic sensors suitable for field-deployment that enable early disease onset, help inform optimal treatment, and uncover new biological pathways associated with personal, population, and ecosystem-level health. First, she will go into combining Raman spectroscopy and deep learning to accurately classify bacteria by both species and drug susceptibility in a single step. With a convolutional neural network (CNN), species identification and antibiotic susceptibility accuracies similar to leading mass spectrometry techniques can be achieved. Jennifer will show how this technique can be applied to rapid tuberculosis detection, as well as to waste-water monitoring of bacterial pathogens. Next, she will describe resonant nanophotonic surfaces that enable detection of genes, proteins, and metabolites with femtomolar sensitivity. These metasurfaces produce a large amplification of the electromagnetic field intensity, increasing the response to minute refractive index changes from target binding; simultaneously, the light is beam-steered to particular detector pixels. By combining metasurface design with acoustic bioprinting for functionalization, chips that detect gene fragments, proteins, and metabolites on the same platform are developed. Jennifer will also discuss integration of these sensors with workflows in Stanford’s Clinical Virology Laboratory, as well as with autonomous underwater robots from Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) for real-time phytoplankton detection.
Pauline Gagnon is a widely experienced researcher and author who amongst others participated to the Higgs boson discovery and searched for dark matter with ATLAS, amongst others. After her retirement at CERN, she wrote the book: Who cares about particle physics? Making sense of the Higgs boson, the Large Hadron Collider and CERN.
Title
The tragic destiny of Mileva Marić Einstein
Abstract
What were Albert Einstein’s first wife’s contributions to his extraordinary productivity in the first years of his career? In 1969, a first biography of Mileva Marić Einstein was published in Serbian. It remained largely unknown, despite it being translated in German and French in the 1990’s. The publication of Mileva and Albert’s love letters in 1987 revealed how they lived together, while two recent publications shed more light on Mileva Marić her life and work. Pauline Gagnon will review this evidence in its social and historical context to give a better idea of Mileva Marić her contributions. Pauline will avoid all types of speculation and will not attack Albert Einstein personally, but rather strictly stick to facts. In the end, the audience hopefully will be able to appreciate why such a talented physicist has been so unkindly treated by history.
Yasunobu Nakamura started his research career at NEC Fundamental Research Laboratories in 1992, where he demonstrated the first coherent manipulation of a superconducting qubit in 1999 and was introduced to quantum information science. He spent a fruitful year as a Visiting Researcher in Prof. Hans Mooij’s group at TU Delft from 2001 to 2002. He has been a Professor at the University of Tokyo since 2012 and a Team Leader at RIKEN since 2014. He is currently the director of RIKEN Center for Quantum Computing.
Title
Superconducting circuits for quantum technologies
Abstract
Superconductivity has been a major research topic in condensed matter physics since Heike Kamerlingh Onnes’s discovery in 1911. Nowadays, superconducting circuits are also playing a major role in the development of modern quantum technologies based on quantum information science. Collective excitation modes in the circuits are used as highly coherent superconducting qubits and resonators. With strong nonlinearity due to the Josephson effect and large dipole moments that allow fast control and readout of the quantum states, they are considered one of the most promising platforms for implementing quantum information processors. In addition, qubits are coupled to resonators and waveguides to exploit the properties of those bosonic modes, either localized or propagating, as a versatile tool in microwave quantum optics. The auxiliary modes can also be replaced with other collective modes, e.g., acoustic and magnetic ones, to form hybrid quantum systems, expanding the realm of quantum technologies. In his talk, Yasunobu Nakamura will go deeper into these superconducting circuits.