Current and Upcoming Visitors

Miguel B. Araújo is a biogeographer dedicated to understanding how Life distributes in space and time, and why. He employs a wide range of modelling approaches to explore how climate influences the distributions of species and controls complex properties and dynamics of communities. He is a Research Professor of the Spanish Research Council (CSIC) and Chair of Biodiversity at the University of Évora. In the past, he also held faculty or research positions at the Imperial college London, Oxford University, University of Copenhagen, French National Research Council (CNRS), and the Natural History Museum in London. Personal Website

Cintia Pacchiano has a PIMS Post-doctoral Fellowship at the University of Calgary. Her research area is mathematical analysis, more precisely, theoretical aspects of nonlinear partial differential equations (PDEs). Her primary focus is on regularity theory of elliptic and parabolic PDEs, in connection with the calculus of variation and potential theory. Most recently, analysis on metric measure spaces forms a central aspect of her work, as it provides an integrating structure for ideas and questions from many different areas of mathematics.

Erich Bornberg-Bauer is currently a full professor of bioinformatics and molecular evolution at the University of Münster (Germany) and a guest scientist at the Max-Planck Institute in Tübingen. He has always been interested in how molecular structures arise during evolution and what the biophysical principles are which allow RNAs and proteins to adopt new structures to adapt to new fitness requirements. His group is currently working on many related aspects, both computationally and experimentally with a focus on trying to understand how "de novo" proteins, proteins which are newly encoded by previously non-coding pieces of DNA come into existence, why some prevail while most perish and how they assume different structure over time.

Dr. Joshua A. Goldberg is an associate professor of medical neurobiology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel. His research focuses on the pathophysiology of movement disorders, most prominently Parkinson’s disease (PD). He combines advanced electrophysiology and imaging techniques both in vivo and in vitro with computational approaches to study how the physiology of neurons leads to their vulnerability in early statges of PD and how brain networks dynamics adapt to PD. He is a past recepient of a European Research Council (ERC) Consolidator grant and a Human Frontier Science Program (HFSP) grant with Dr. Jeff Wickens, OIST. Personal Website

Pedro Lopes is an Associate Professor in Computer Science at the University of Chicago. Pedro focuses on integrating interfaces with the human body—exploring the interface paradigm that supersedes wearables. These include: muscle stimulation wearables that allow users to manipulate tools they have never seen before or that accelerate reaction time, or a device that leverages the smell to create an illusion of temperature. All these examples leverage computers to augment the user’s body, not just cognitively, but also physically (e.g., our wearable that accelerates one’s reaction time made it to the Guinness Book of World Records). Pedro’s work has received several academic awards, such as seven CHI/UIST Best Papers, the Sloan Fellowship and the NSF CAREER award, and captured the interest of the public (e.g., New York Times, exhibited at Ars Electronica, etc.; more: https://lab.plopes.org).

Hirokazu Shirado is an Assistant Professor of the Human-Computer Interaction Institute in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, USA. His research focuses on the role of social interactions and technology in the emergence of social order and in the collective confrontation of social dilemmas. He is particularly interested in studying hybrid systems of humans and machines, particularly how artificial intelligence can help people address the challenges of collective action. He has received the NSF CAREER Award and the ASA Outstanding Paper Award for his work.

Han Zhao is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). He is also an Amazon Visiting Academic at Amazon Stores Foundational AI. He earned his Ph.D. degree from Carnegie Mellon University. His research interest is centered around trustworthy machine learning, with a focus on algorithmic fairness, robust generalization under distribution shifts and multi-task learning. His long-term goal is to build trustworthy ML systems that are efficient, robust, fair, private, and interpretable. Personal website, Google scholar

Florian Yger is an associate professor at Université Paris-Dauphine since 2015, teaching Data Analysis and Machine Learning in the department MIDO. Within the LAMSADE, he is part of the team MILES which focuses on trustworthy Machine Learning and Explainable AI. From 2014 to 2015, he was a JSPS postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Prof. Sugiyama at Tokyo University. He received his PhD in Computer science from LITIS, Université de Rouen under the supervision of Alain Rakotomamonjy in 2013. He contributes to the problem of representation learning with a particular interest in the representation of structured data (graphs, covariance matrices,…) and the development of learning algorithm for non-Euclidean spaces. This work has many applications ranging from signal processing (EEG signals and Brain Computer Interface) and to image processing (Paintings for art style recognition). More recently, within MILES teams, he addresses the questions of trust, explainability and interpretability in machine learning models with a focus counterfactual reasoning on data. He recently started studying the interplay between computational social choice and machine learning in the context of voter’s opinion aggregation. He is a visiting researcher at RIKEN AIP, Japan since 2017, is a member of the Prairie (PaRis Artificial Intelligence Research InstitutE) where he holds a junior chair, and an Affiliate of the Theoretical Sciences Visiting Program (TSVP) at OIST.

Louise Hespel is an associate professor in the PBS laboratory (Polymers, Biopolymers, Surfaces Laboratory) at University of Rouen since 2017, more specifically teaching general chemistry, polymer chemistry and modification post-polymerization in the chemistry department. She is part of the team MPBM (Materials polymers Barrier and Membranes) which focuses on the elaboration of various polymeric membranes and the study of the diffusion mechanisms of molecules through membranes.
She received her PhD in macromolecular chemistry from INSA (National Institute of Applied Sciences) of Rouen, under the supervision of Pr. Laurence Lecamp in 2013. During her PhD, she synthesized new amphiphilic stimuli-sensitive copolymers from linseed oil and studied the copolymers capacity to form micelles in aqueous media at different conditions of pH and temperature. This work has many applications in drug delivery.
From 2014 to 2015, she was a JSPS postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Prof. Kataoka in University of Tokyo where she developed new micelles with pH-detachable PEG-corona. In 2016, she joined ENS (Paris, Ulm) to work with Dr. Emmanuelle Marie and Dr. Christophe Tribet to synthesize a polymer adlayer able to trigger the adhesion and the deadhesion of cells. In PBS laboratory, her research focuses on the modification of polymeric membranes in order to bring specific properties like stimuli-sensitive properties. 

Dr. Srikanth Ramaswamy, is a Marie Curie Fellow, a Lister Prize Fellow and an Assistant Professor in computational neuroscience at Newcastle University. He is also a Fulbright Scholar at MIT and a Theoretical Sciences Visiting Scholar at OIST. He directs the Neural Circuits Laboratory at Newcastle University. His research focuses on the role of neuromodulators in shaping cognition in biological neural networks and building biologically-informed neural network models. He is a founding scientist of the Blue Brain Project at Ecole Polytechnique Federale De Lausanne (EPFL). He earned his PhD at the EPFL in computational neuroscience, where he developed data-driven modelling frameworks for biologically detailed digital models of neural networks. As a scientist of colour, Dr. Ramaswamy is passionately committed to promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion and is a founding member of the ALBA network, where he leads efforts to advance DEI in neuroscience, including launching the ALBA diversity podcast series in late 2020, highlighting the stories of emerging neuroscientists from underrepresented backgrounds.

Keiko Aoki is an independent researcher based in Tokyo. Her main research field is condensed matter physics, and her main tool for research is molecular/particle dynamics simulation.
Since anisotropically fluctuating systems, such as liquid crystals and soft matter could not be properly treated by conventional molecular dynamics (MD) methods, we have developed a set of simulation methods which are called stress control methods. Stress control MD methods guarantee the system to be under hydrostatic pressure (or other condition) even in non-equilibrium processes. Time evolution under constant surface tension can be investigated by one of the stress control methods as well. This is in contrast to conventional MD methods, where only ensemble average can be controlled. The method is effective to investigate self-organization of soft matter, as well as glassy metastable states. ORCID ID

[Tutorial] Stress control molecular dynamics simulation methods designed for simulating soft matter by Keiko Aoki