Physics Colloquia

Speaker: Justin A. Trujillo, PhD Candidate - UWM Physics Implementing Novel Data Analysis Methods to Enhance Biophysical Studies Studying the structure, motions, and interactions of proteins as they perform their functions is greatly important in biophysics research. Time-resolved serial femtosecond …

Early Warning of Gravitational Waves from Neutron Star Mergers
Amanda Baylor
Graduate Student
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

For the past decade, ground-based gravitational-wave observatories have been making detections of ripples in the fabric of spacetime from the mergers of black holes and neutron stars. Mergers involving at least one neutron star could also produce electromagnetic counterparts which may reveal new insights into the physics of these astrophysical phenomena. However, if electromagnetic observatories are not pointed at the location of the source prior to merger, we miss vital information about the physics of merger.

Detecting & Measuring Gravitational Waves in Current and Future Observatories

Pratyusava Baral
Graduate Student
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

Low-latency (near real-time) detection of gravitational waves (GW) is crucial for multimessenger astronomy. I contribute to maintaining and operating the GstLAL-based search pipeline, a flagship detection pipeline used by the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA collaboration, for the present observing run (May 2023 - ongoing).

Due to circumstances beyond our control, the Physics Colloquium for Friday, 11/7/2025 is cancelled.

Justin Goodrich, Brookhaven National Laboratory

Due to circumstances beyond our control, the Physics Colloquium for Friday, 11/14/2025 has been cancelled.

Jong-Woo Kim, Argonne National Lab

Physics Colloquium - Julian May Mann, Stanford University Presentation title and abstract will be announced when they are available.

Effect of Phosphorylation Barcodes on Arrestin Binding to a Chemokine Receptor
Dr. Qiuyan Chen
Assistant Professor of Biochemistry & Molecular Biology
Indiana University School of Medicine

Cells often fine-tune their responses to signals through chemical tags called phosphorylation 'barcodes' placed on receptors at the cell surface. Different G-protein coupled receptor (GPCR) kinases (GRKs) add these barcodes at different sites, but how these patterns influence arrestins — key proteins that control receptor signaling and trafficking — has been unclear.

AI Reasoning in Theoretical Physics with the TPBench Project
Assistant Professor Moritz Münchmeyer
UW-Madison Department of Physics

Large-language models are becoming powerful enough to assist physicists with mathematical reasoning at the research level. In this talk, I will first present our dataset TPBench (tpbench.org), which was constructed to benchmark and improve AI models specifically for theoretical physics.

What Are We Learning About Super-Eddington Accretion Disks From Simulations?
Professor Chris Fragile
Department of Physics & Astronomy, College of Charleston

Accretion of gas onto black holes is one of the most important processes shaping our Universe. Understanding extremely high rates of accretion (dubbed 'super-Eddington') is vital to explaining the challenging observation that supermassive black holes (SMBHs) are fully formed at redshifts >7. It is also important to understanding astrophysical objects such as tidal disruption events (TDEs) and ultra-luminous X-ray sources (ULXs).

Physics Colloquium - Lulu Agazie, UWM Physics Presentation title and abstract will be announced when they are available.