Breakthrough Minds: Exploring Frontiers in Math, Chemistry, and Physics
Fall 2024
Dec 4, 2024 — 9 a.m. to 11 a.m.
Join us on December 4, 2024, for the Faculty of Science's annual lecture series, spotlighting groundbreaking research by our newest professors.
This year's event delves into transformative insights across mathematics, chemistry, and physics, celebrating the pioneering work of Antonio Lei, Francesco Gentile, and Stefanie Czischek.
Engage with cutting-edge discoveries and innovative perspectives that push the boundaries of scientific knowledge. Mark your calendars for an inspiring evening where intellect meets curiosity.
Description
Celebrate three distinguished new professors' most recent research pursuits. Presenting our esteemed speakers for this occasion:
- Antonio Lei, Full Professor, Department of Mathematics and Statistics
- Francesco Gentile, Assistant Professor, Department of Chemistry and Biomolecular Sciences
- Stefanie Czischek, Assistant Professor, Department of Physics
Antonio Lei
Full Professor, Department of Mathematics and Statistics
Iwasawa Theory: The Mathematical Art of Building Towers and Bridges
Summary
Iwasawa theory is a field of mathematics that studies asymptotic behaviours of arithmetic properties in "towers" of mathematical structures that exhibit uniform behaviour. By drawing on techniques from algebra, analysis, and geometry, Iwasawa's theory allows mathematicians to establish “bridges” between objects in different mathematical domains. This presentation will explore recent advances in understanding the structure of certain towers of graphs, which hold significant relevance in number theory and cryptography.
Biography
Antonio Lei earned his PhD in pure mathematics from the University of Cambridge in 2010. Following his PhD, he held an Australian Research Council postdoctoral research fellowship at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, from 2010 to 2011.
He moved to Canada in 2011, taking up a CRM-ISM (Centre de recherches mathématiques - Institut des sciences mathématiques) postdoctoral fellowship at McGill University in Montreal. He was a faculty member at Université Laval from 2014 to 2022.
He joined the University of Ottawa in 2022. Currently, he serves as one of the two editors-in-chief of the Canadian Mathematical Bulletin.
Francesco Gentile
Assistant Professor, Department of Chemistry and Biomolecular Sciences
Computational Chemistry Meets Machine Learning to Support Chemical Space Exploration
Summary
The chemical space of small molecules and biological drugs is enormous. For example, it has been estimated that the drug-like chemical space of small molecules contains more than 1060 molecules. In our group, we develop and apply computational methods at the interface of chemistry and AI to efficiently navigate such regions and accelerate the discovery of novel starting points for therapeutic development.
In this talk, we will illustrate how these emerging methods can be leveraged to investigate pressing challenges in drug discovery, such as the pharmacological targeting of ‘undruggable’ proteins and the design of complex biologics as cancer therapeutics.
Biography
Francesco Gentile is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biomolecular Sciences at the University of Ottawa and a Principal Investigator at the Ottawa Institute of Systems Biology. He holds a PhD in Biophysics from the University of Alberta and was a postdoc at the University of British Columbia before joining the University of Ottawa in 2022.
His current research focuses on the combination of physics-based and AI methods for the discovery and design of small molecules and biotherapeutics.
Stefanie Czischek
Assistant Professor, Department of Physics
Artificial Intelligence in Quantum Science
Summary
Rapid developments in quantum computing algorithms during the last few years have uncovered the great potential of overcoming conventional von-Neumann computing architectures. Theoretical studies suggest promising applications of quantum computation and quantum simulation hardware in everyday life and in the discovery of new physical phenomena.
Driven by these forecasts, experimental realizations of quantum computers are advancing swiftly, albeit state-of-the-art hardware is still limited to noisy implementations of quantum states on small numbers of qubits. The power of artificial neural networks in promoting the overcoming of these limitations has recently been demonstrated at various stages.
In this talk, I will discuss the role of artificial neural networks in modelling quantum systems. I will consider the representation of quantum states as an example to introduce the focus of my research team on how artificial intelligence can advance the broad field of quantum computation.
Biography
Before joining the University of Ottawa in 2022, Dr. Stefanie Czischek was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Waterloo, working with Dr. Roger Melko. Her research interest focuses on the intersection of artificial neural networks and quantum technologies with a specific focus on the realizations of neural networks on biologically inspired neuromorphic devices or general physical systems.
During her Ph.D. at Heidelberg University (Germany) in the group of Dr. Thomas Gasenzer, Dr. Czischek performed pioneering works leading the path toward a representation of strongly entangled quantum states on the BrainScaleS spiking neuromorphic hardware.
In 2020, Dr. Czischek received the Springer Thesis Award, which recognizes outstanding Ph.D. research.
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