Past Visitors

Jamie M. Kass is tenure-track Associate Professor and PI of the Macroecology Lab at the Graduate School of Life Sciences at Tohoku University. He is an ecologist who researches large-scale patterns and processes in biodiversity, focusing on the development and application of models that make predictions of species' ranges and biodiversity indices over space and time. The Macroecology Lab is a fully bilingual environment (Japanese and English) and currently has 16 members, including undergraduates, graduate students, and professors that together represent 7 countries. Dr. Kass spent 4 years at OIST as a postdoctoral researcher (2019-2023) working with Prof. Evan Economo in the Biodiversity and Biocomplexity Unit. He is originally from New York City, USA and has lived in Japan for ~6 years.

Prof Sarah Butcher has over 30 years’ experience in cryoEM, structural biology and antiviral drug discovery, primarily in academia. Currently, she is Professor of Microbiology, in a joint position between the Faculty of Biological and Environmental Sciences and the HiLIFE Institute of Biotechnology, University of Helsinki, Finland where she focuses on the structure and function of neglected and emerging viruses. She gained her PhD for work done in EMBL, Heidelberg, Germany on the cryoEM structures of lipid-containing bacteriophage, carried out a postdoctoral fellowship in the MRC Virology Unit in Glasgow, UK establishing cryoEM, and then moved to Finland where she started the country’s first cryoEM unit in the late 1990s. She is an elected fellow of EMBO and the Finnish Society of Sciences and Letters. Currently, she leads the Finnish Instruct Centre and is Chair of the Instruct-ERIC Council, which coordinates access to structural cell biology infrastructure across Europe.

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

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.

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. 

Jana Björn is a Professor of Mathematics at Linköping University, Sweden, where she also received her PhD in 1996. She was a postdoc at University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and then at Lund University. She has also spent longer research periods at Charles University in Prague, University of Cincinnati and the Mittag-Leffler Institute in Stockholm. Her research is in analysis on metric spaces, mainly in collaboration with Anders Björn. In particular, she is interested in p-harmonic functions, partial differential equations and various minimization problems. She studies various solving methods and properties of the solutions, such as their interior and boundary regularity and growth estimates. This is research in pure mathematics and its aim is to provide rigorous fundamentals for and a better understanding of some problems, which could come from natural sciences and other fields. Analysis on metric spaces makes it possible to study such questions simultaneously in many different settings, for example on very rough sets and for highly nonhomogeneous media. It also brings new insight into which properties and assumptions are really essential for the theory and which are the main obstructions. A popular-scientific description of Jana's research is at this website.

Anders Björn is a Professor of Mathematics at Linköping University, Sweden, where he also received his PhD in 1995. He was a postdoc at University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and has later spent longer research periods at Charles University in Prague, University of Cincinnati and the Mittag-Leffler Institute in Stockholm. His research is in analysis on metric spaces, mainly in collaboration with Jana Björn. In particular, he is interested in p-harmonic functions, partial differential equations and various minimization problems. He studies various solving methods and properties of the solutions, such as their interior and boundary regularity and growth estimates. This is research in pure mathematics and its aim is to provide rigorous fundamentals for and a better understanding of some problems, which could come from natural sciences and other fields. Analysis on metric spaces makes it possible to study such questions simultaneously in many different settings, for example on very rough sets and for highly nonhomogeneous media. It also brings new insight into which properties and assumptions are really essential for the theory and which are the main obstructions. A popular-scientific description of Anders's research is at this website.

Daniel Chourrout has established the Sars International Centre for Marine Molecular Biology in 1997 and been its director until 2020. This institute is a Partner of EMBL, the European Molecular Biology Laboratory since 2023. His own research is focused on the evolution of chordate development, using tunicates as model systems. Before moving to Norway, Daniel Chourrout was heading the Laboratory of Fish Genetics at INRA (French Institute of Research for Agriculture). His training is in Genetics from the University Pierre et Marie Curie in Paris.

EVSP Talk: "Life Is Like a Box of Chocolates: our experience with an alternative model organism" by Daniel Chourrout

Nick Dorey received his PhD from Edinburgh University in 1991 and then held postdoctoral and junior faculty positions at Los Alamos National Laboratory, University of Washington and Swansea University. He has been a Professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Cambridge since 2007.  He is currently visiting OIST as a TSVP Visiting Scholar.

TSVP Talk: "What Can Quantum Field Theory Teach Us About Black Holes (And Vice Versa)?" by Nick Dorey

Izaak is a Senior Lecturer in Disordered Systems within the Mathematics Department at King’s College London. Izaak engages in two research domains. Firstly, he develops mathematical techniques for analysing complex systems, such as, neural networks, ecosystems, and complex fluids, with a specific focus on understanding the role of network structure and heterogeneity in their dynamics. In this context, he extends methods used for studying systems with all-to-all interactions to those within networked systems. Secondly, Izaak uses stochastic processes to explore nonequilibrium fluctuations in small systems, such as molecular motors, or decision-making processes in noisy environments.

I am primarily interested in geometric problems which arise in the context of "rough" spaces: embedding problems of metric spaces, the structure of boundaries of hyperbolic groups, the geometry of fractal spaces arising from dynamics, or fractal properties of sub-Riemannian geometries. Since many of these concepts are related to "quasisymmetric mappings", I would describe these questions as being part of the "quasiworld". Especially embedding questions are not only of theoretical interest. They arise naturally in data analysis and the analysis of certain relaxation methods to solve optimization problems. Further, these questions have profound connections to the analysis on such rough spaces and concepts that come from first order analysis of metric spaces. Indeed, these notions can obstruct embeddings, prevent certain geometries from existing, or reveal subtle geometric facts about dynamical systems. Their study also leads to natural invariants that can be used to classify and distinguish spaces from each other. Especially recently, I have come to see that the study of Analysis on Metric spaces can lead to answering some difficult open problems related to geometric group theory. However, an obstacle to making progress in this direction is that many fundamental notions in Analysis on metric spaces remain poorly understood. It is there, that I strive to develop new techniques, concepts and results, that help us answer these open problems. Personal Website

Shinichi Aizawa is Professor Emeritus at the Prefectural University of Hiroshima currently visiting OIST through the Visiting Program (TSVP). He is considered one of the world’s foremost experts in the structure and function of bacterial flagella. His contributions to solving flagellar polymorphism are very highly regarded, and his book “The Flagellar World” has become a standard textbook in the field. After studying at Tohoku and Nagoya Universities in Japan, he spent several years as a Postdoc at Yale University. His long career in academia included positions at Research & Development Corporation of Japan (now JST) in Tsukuba, Teikyo University, University of Hawaii, Flinders University in Australia, and Martin-Luther University Halle in Germany.

[Seminar] "Two Mysteries of the Bacterial Flagellum" by Shinichi Aizawa, in L5D23

Bianca Dittrich is a senior research faculty at Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Canada.  Her research focusses on quantum gravity, here in particular on non-perturbative approaches.  Her research intersects with a number of other topics in theoretical and mathematical physics, e.g. topological quantum field theories, tensor networks, real time path integrals.
Bianca Dittrich completed her PhD at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics in 2005 and  postdocs at Perimeter Institute  (2005-08) and  Utrecht University (2008/09). She then became a Max Planck research group leader at the MPI for Gravitational Physics and joined Perimeter Institute as faculty researcher in 2012. Personal Website

Robert Joynt received his Ph.D. from the University of Maryland in 1982 and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Cavendish Laboratory of the University of Cambridge and the Institute for Theoretical Physics at ETH-Zurich. He was Professor of Physics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison from 1986 to 2023 and is now Emeritus Professor. He served as Department Chair and was the Founding Director of the MSc in Physics-Quantum Computing. He is Senior Fellow at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Sciences in Beijing. His research has ranged from the quantum Hall effect to high-Tc superconductivity to neutron stars to quantum computing.

Lucy Lai is a final-year neuroscience Ph.D. student at Harvard, advised by Sam Gershman. Her research applies information theory and reinforcement learning towards understanding how humans learn and make decisions under cognitive resource constraints. In particular, she has developed a resource-rational model of action selection to characterize decision-making in healthy and clinical populations. A restless researcher at heart, she has spent time at Baylor College of Medicine, MIT, Janelia Research Campus, and UCL. At OIST, she will be collaborating with the Tripp and Doya Units to develop computational models of reward learning in children with ADHD. In addition to research, Lucy is also passionate about education and mentoring: she has developed and taught many courses, including Math Tools for Neuroscience and How Music Plays the Brain, and served as a Resident Tutor at Quincy House, where she lived with and advised Harvard undergraduate students. Personal Website

Travis Scrimshaw is an assistant professor at Hokkaido University whose research focuses on combinatorial aspects of representation theory, integrable systems, and stochastic processes. He is an active developer of the open-source mathematical software SageMath. He received his PhD in 2015 at the University of California, Davis under the supervision of Anne Schilling. Afterwards, he did postdocs at the University of Minnesota, the University of Queensland, and Osaka Metropolitan University (JSPS postdoc). Personal Website

Rachel is an evolutionary microbiologist interested in antimicrobial resistance evolution, interactions in the microbiome, pathogen evolution during infections, and bacterial defence systems such as CRISPR-Cas. Rachel is a Fellow in Biology at the University of Oxford (Magdalen College), and taking up a tenure-track position at Queen's University Belfast in 2024. She is particularly interested in the interface between antibiotic resistance evolution and success in the microbiome. Prior to her current position, she spent time at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (Institute for Advanced Study) and as a postdoc in the lab of Professor Craig MacLean. Outside of science, she enjoys judo, boxing, and running! Personal Website

TSVP Talk "Ecology and Evolution of Antibiotic Resistance in Bacterial Pathogens" by Rachel Wheatley

Raquel Fernández is Professor of Computational Linguistics and Dialogue Systems at the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation, University of Amsterdam. She received her PhD from King's College London and before moving to Amsterdam held research positions at Stanford University and the University of Potsdam. She is currently the recipient of a European Research Council (ERC) Consolidator Grant. Raquel’s interests revolve around language use in interaction, conversational AI, language variability and change, and visually grounded language. Her research lab carries out work on these topics at the interface of cognitive science and artificial intelligence. Personal Website

TSVP Talk "Language Use in Humans and Machines" by Raquel Fernandez

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

Deep into the micro-world, I've been captivated by the complexity of microbial communities. My scientific journey is rooted in the exploration of collective evolution within living systems. Biochemistry, Microbiology and Cybernetics are my focal points, and I'm eager to share the marvels of this field with a broader audience. My approach is decidedly interdisciplinary, with a global footprint spanning diverse subjects. From unraveling the geometric symphony of embryo organization to delving into the fabrication of nanorobots for information processing, my pursuits have been wide-ranging. I've navigated through startups and ventured into the realm of art, guided by a persistent curiosity about constraints and compartments in biological systems. Philosophical contemplation is woven into my scientific exploration, yet I maintain a practical mindset as I am an Engineer with an eye on real-world applications.

[Seminar] "Microbe-Machine cybernetic coupling: A feedback loop for ethology and proto intelligences study " by Charles Fosseprez

Stefan Baeuml obtained his Ph.D. at the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom, under the supervision of Andreas Winter. His Ph.D. thesis focused on quantum repeaters and bound entanglement. He then moved to the group of Bill Munro at NTT Basic Research Labs in Japan as a postdoc, focusing on upper bounds on key rates achievable in general quantum network scenarios. After continuing his work on quantum networks in the group of Stephanie Wehner and David Elkouss at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, he moved to the group of Antonio Acin at the Institute of Photonic Sciences (ICFO) in Barcelona, Spain. His current research is focused on security proofs for discrete modulated continuous variable quantum key distribution.

[Seminar] Security of Discrete-Modulated Continuous-Variable Quantum Key Distribution

Daniel Grumiller is professor at the Institute for Theoretical Physics at TU Wien in Vienna, Austria. He is head of the black holes research group since 2009, after returning to his alma mater from postdoc positions with Roman Jackiw at MIT and Dmitri Vassilevich at Leipzig University. His research focus is on black holes and the holographic principle. For details of his research, see his home page.

Mahir Bilen Can is a Professor of Mathematics at Tulane University in New Orleans. His research interests include algebraic (semi)group theory, real algebraic geometry, representation theory as well as information theory. He has a particular interest in the application of algebraic geometry to the theory of error-correcting codes. In his recent work, he has developed a theory of quantum error-correcting codes that can handle biased information channels. Personal Website

David Meyer is Professor of Mathematics at the University of California, San Diego, having arrived there as a postdoc with Brosl Hasslacher in the Physics Department, after postdoctoral positions with Gerard ‘t Hooft at Duke University and in the Relativity Group at Syracuse University. His research interests include quantum gravity (specifically the causal set program), quantum information and computation (quantum lattice gas automata, algorithms, quantum games, topological error correcting codes, measures of entanglement), knot theory, discrete models for fluid dynamics, and data analysis problems from the social sciences (voting, networks, time series, spatial data, rankings). He completed his PhD in Mathematics at MIT, supervised by Rafael Sorkin and Daniel Freedman. Prior to that he spent a year at Cambridge University as a Churchill Scholar after completing his undergraduate and master’s degrees at the Johns Hopkins University. Personal Website

Christophe Claramunt is a professor of computer science at the Arts et Métiers Institute of Technology and deputy director of the Interdisciplinary Graduate School in Marine Science and Engineering (ISBlue) in Northwest France. His interests are in theoretical and multidisciplinary aspects of geographical information science, and their application to urban, environmental, and maritime contexts. He is currently working on the development of spatio-temporal conceptual models and their logical and computational implementations. Personal Website

Anatole Lécuyer is Research Director and Head of Hybrid Team at Inria, the French National Institute for Research in Digital Science and Technology, in Rennes, France. He has been leading a research activity on "Virtual Reality" for the past 25 years. He initiated and still leads the OpenViBE open-source software for brain-computer interfaces. His research interests are in virtual/augmented reality, haptic interaction, 3D user interfaces, and brain-computer interfaces. Anatole Lécuyer obtained the IEEE VGTC Technical Achievement Award in Virtual/Augmented Reality in 2019, and was inducted in the IEEE Virtual Reality Academy in 2022.

Artur Tsobanjan is a theoretical physicist who explores foundational issues in quantum theory raised by attempts to quantize gravity. He is particularly interested in finding ways to consistently incorporate the dynamical nature of time in general relativity within a quantum mechanical framework. Artur Tsobanjan received his PhD from the Pennsylvania State University in 2011. He is currently an associate professor at King’s College, Pennsylvania, USA. Google Scholar