Simons Society of Fellows Retreat 2025

James Bartusek
New York University

Quantum Information and Cryptography: A Symbiotic Relationship

Quantum information behaves in a fundamentally different manner than its classical counterpart, with consequences that are still being explored to this day. This talk will discuss the rich interplay between the field of quantum information science and the field of cryptography, i.e. the study of information privacy and authenticity. We will see that foundational properties of quantum information, such as the uncertainty principle and the no-cloning principle, can be utilized to push the frontiers of cryptography, both by improving the security of existing cryptographic applications and by enabling new applications that are impossible to achieve with classical information alone. In the other direction, we will see ways in which cryptography pushes the frontiers of quantum information science, serving as an insightful lens through which to study the unique properties of quantum information, motivating new applications, and securing information in a quantum world.
 

Paul Chaikin
New York University

Some small steps toward artificial Life

Self-replication and evolution under selective pressure are inherent phenomena in life, but few artificial systems exhibit these phenomena. We have designed a process and a system of DNA origami tiles that exponentially replicate a seed pattern, doubling (or more) the copies in each diurnal-like cycle of temperature and UV illumination, producing more than 6 million copies in 12 cycles with no enzymes or polymerases. We demonstrate environmental selection and competition. We also use DNA origami to self-assemble nano-micro machines., that use oligonucleotides for fuel.
 

Gily Ginosar
New York University

Towards naturalistic neuroscience: From spatial perception to social communication

Naturalistic neuroscience explores how brains support natural behaviors. In this talk, I will describe past and current work in which I incorporate the animal’s natural behavior to study brain function. In my PhD work, I investigated how the brain represents three-dimensional (3D) space by conducting wireless neural recordings in freely flying bats. When an animal travels over a surface, the spatially-tuned ‘grid cells’ become activated in multiple locations across that surface. The areas of activation form a symmetric hexagonal grid thought to provide the brain with a metric for space. By recording from flying bats we found that 3D grid cells lose their global lattice structure, displaying only locally ordered firing fields, challenging established paradigms of spatial coding. The bats’ natural flight led also to the discovery of spatially tuned cells that encode space in an action-specific manner, becoming active at a specific location only when the bat takes-off or lands, but not in random flight at the same location. In my current work, I am recording families of Mongolian gerbils – highly social and vocal mammals – as they naturally communicate undisturbed over long periods of time. By collecting a large dataset and incorporating machine learning tools, I aim to decipher what information is encoded in their vocalizations, and what is the neural basis of their complex social communication.
 

Jane Hubbard
New York University

Stem cells and their niche

We investigate mechanisms by which organismal physiology impacts stem cells. To gain mechanistic molecular and cellular resolution, our studies leverage the experimentally accessible nematode worm C. elegans. Several features facilitate our work: C. elegans feeds on bacteria, has a short lifespan, is transparent, and is amenable to large-scale genetic screens and genetic manipulation. Importantly, C. elegans bears a germline stem cell pool that shares many features with mammalian stem cells. We have identified evolutionarily conserved cellular and neuroendocrine signaling pathways that regulate the stem cell responses to organismal physiology, some of which are implicated in human cancer. Certain manipulations of these pathways allow the pool of stem cells to grow even when nutrients are scarce, underscoring the importance of inter-organ signaling for resource allocation. Looking at the development and aging of the stem cell niche – that cellular environment that signals stem cells to remain undifferentiated – our recent studies reveal inter-organ dependencies and various mechanisms regulating niche morphology.
 

Samra Husremovic
Columbia University

Two-Dimensional Materials: A Frontier for Tunable Electronics

Energy-efficient electronics are needed to meet the growing demands of modern computing. Achieving this efficiency requires precise control over material properties. Two-dimensional materials—crystals only one or a few atoms thick—offer a promising platform for this pursuit. Their ultrathin structure makes them highly responsive to low-energy stimuli, and their small size makes them well-suited for miniaturized electronics. Moreover, their high surface-to-volume ratio allows for effective surface engineering, enabling property tuning beyond what is possible in bulk materials. In this talk, I will introduce the field of 2D materials, the key tuning mechanisms for controlling their properties, and the emergent physics that could drive future electronic technologies.
 

Tomas Kay
Rockefeller University

Social evolution in the clonal raider ant

Evolutionary theory is well developed but abstract. In recent decades, to understand which traits are evolutionarily important and how evolutionary dynamics play out, experimentalists have mixed together independently evolving strains of conspecific microorganisms. This approach has revealed an array of phenotypes that would not otherwise be observable, including green beard-type self-recognition mechanisms in amoebae and suicidal explosions in bacteria. My research applies this approach to a multicellular social animal, mixing together divergent strains of a clonal ant species, tracking the evolutionary outcomes of the chimeric populations and exploring the behavioural and molecular underpinnings of these dynamics.
 

Megan Kirchgessner
New York University

Longitudinal monitoring of developmental plasticity in the mouse auditory cortex

The developing postnatal brain undergoes substantial structural and functional changes to represent features of the sensory world. While some changes are genetically prescribed, others are sculpted by environmental statistics during specific ‘critical periods’. Developmental plasticity in sensory processing has been difficult to study in small, growing brains, thus limiting our understanding of its cellular dynamics and mechanisms.

During my postdoc, I have developed and refined methods for longitudinal two-photon calcium imaging of hundreds of neurons in the auditory cortex of young mice, following individual cells from hearing onset into adulthood. I observed a stark transition from highly synchronized, sound-independent to decorrelated, sound-evoked activity by postnatal day [P]13-14. Over the next few days, individual neurons’ frequency tuning drifts towards progressively higher frequencies. This coincides with the emergence of responses to mouse pup ultrasonic vocalizations, which I found transiently peak around the fourth postnatal week but then diminish whereas responses to other, lower-frequency stimuli remain stable. While excitatory and inhibitory neurons show similar overall developmental trajectories, they exhibit differences in auditory tuning and are distinctly modulated by repeated tone exposure during the auditory critical period. Altogether, my work reveals the cellular and circuit dynamics underlying functional maturation and experience-dependent plasticity in the developing auditory cortex.
 

Zhanat Koshenov
Weill Cornell Medicine

Unique ways of fueling our thoughts

The brain, arguably the most important organ in our bodies, is also the most energetically expensive one. Our brains consume about 20% of the body’s energy resources, while comprising only 2% of its weight. Most of this energy is spent by neurons on processes associated with neurotransmission, or passage of a signal from one neuron to the next that happens at specialized compartments called synapses. Synapses are also the primary sites of neuronal vulnerability, as they are the first to degrade with age and neurodegenerative diseases, often as a result of bioenergetic failures. Despite the importance of neuronal bioenergetics, our understanding of cellular energy metabolism comes from studies done in cells other than neurons. Given the morphological and functional differences between neurons and most cell types, it is safe to assume that neurons, especially at synaptic compartments, could have evolved unique bioenergetic mechanisms to satisfy their specialized needs. My work has uncovered one such mechanism by which neurons can upregulate their metabolism to fuel local energy demands associated with passage of electrical signals at synaptic terminals. This is achieved through clearance of presynaptic citrate by a Na+/citrate transporter, SLC13A5, which results in a transient upregulation of glycolysis. The importance of this pathway is emphasized by severe neurological defects associated with mutations in SLC13A5 gene. The current work sheds light on new aspects of the transporter function and proposes a metabolic manipulation that can have a therapeutic potential to alleviate bioenergetic phenotypes associated with the transporter mutation.
 

Ziga Krajnik
New York University

Exact solutions in statistical physics

Statistical physics provides a bridge between microscopic and emergent macroscopic descriptions of phenomena. Exact solutions serve as the basic theoretical cornerstones of this program and provide the starting point for analyzing the stability of associated universality classes. Current fluctuations in one-dimensional systems are a minimal theoretical framework for the study of out-of-equilibrium dynamics. We discuss the appearance of dynamical universality classes in classical kinetically constrained particle models and unexpected connections to quantum spin chains where traces of Kardar-Parisi-Zhang physics have been observed, including in recent quantum experiments.
 

Luke Olsen
Rockefeller University

Harnessing heat: the role of brown fat in small-bodied hibernators

The dynamic control of body temperature, termed thermoregulation, is a critical adaptation enabling mammals to thrive in diverse climates. Central to thermoregulation is brown fat, a specialized adipose tissue capable of rapidly converting energy into heat through the action of the uncoupling protein UCP1. Beyond thermogenesis, brown fat also plays a vital role in systemic energy homeostasis, offering protection against chronic diseases such as obesity and cardiovascular disease. However, the molecular and physiological mechanisms regulating brown fat metabolism remain poorly understood, largely due to a historical reliance on murine models, which fail to capture the extremes of thermogenic adaptation. In contrast, hibernating mammals inhabit ecological niches regularly exposed to extreme cold, heavily relying on brown fat for survival. In fact, hibernators represent master thermoregulators, dynamically adjusting their body temperatures from euthermic (37C) to sub-zero (-1.9C) conditions – a physiological feat only possible by precise brown fat regulation. Leveraging these natural extremes, this research aims to identify and characterize novel regulatory pathways governing brown fat metabolism by employing comparative physiological and molecular approaches in hibernating species. Findings from this work promise fundamental new insights into metabolic flexibility, potentially informing therapeutic strategies against metabolic disease in humans.
 

Benjamin Pineau
New York University

Free boundary problems in fluid mechanics

Free boundary problems are equations in fluid mechanics where the evolution of the fluid boundary is strongly coupled to that of the flow. Classical examples include the dynamics of water waves, gaseous stars or fluid droplets. Due to the highly nonlinear character of these problems, it is often very difficult to find a satisfactory framework for rigorously treating even basic questions. For instance, the first question one typically asks about any evolution problem is whether it is locally well-posed. Very broadly speaking, an evolution equation is locally well-posed if for some suitable set of initial conditions, the equation admits unique solutions on some small time interval, and moreover that the solutions are stable under small perturbations of the initial data. Beyond this, one might ask if the constructed solutions can be extended to exist for all time (in which case the problem is globally well-posed), or if they can develop singularities in finite time.

In this talk, I will try to broadly describe the new framework we have implemented to treat the question of local well-posedness in the incompressible setting. This framework applies to fundamental models such as the free boundary Euler and MHD equations. I will also describe (in broad terms) some necessary conditions under which the resulting solutions may develop singularities (often called blowup criteria). In a certain sense, these are the first optimal results, in that they fruitfully generalize many of the well-known classical local well-posedness theorems for the corresponding fixed boundary evolutions.
 

Wenzer Qin
New York University

Looking for dark matter: The world is your calorimeter

Despite the progress of the last 50 years in cosmology, the fundamental nature of about 85% of matter in our universe is still unknown—we call this missing mass “dark matter”. In this talk, I will review the existing evidence for dark matter as well as the methods by which we’ve been making progress on understanding its’ properties. I will then explain some of the ways in which I have been leveraging data from astrophysics and cosmology to study dark matter.
 

Hamed Rahimi
Rockefeller University

A neural window into the recognition and generation of pre-linguistic expressions

Social interactions among humans encompass a diverse range of expressions that carry information and propagate through speech and facial motion. In recent decades, functional investigations of the human brain have unveiled a network in frontal, temporal, and parietal lobes that supports social communication including language. One of these areas is Broca’s area in the human frontal lobe, which modern accounts suggest its involvement in language/action recognition and generation. It is well known that other human language areas such as Wernicke’s area in human temporo-parietal cortex are highly connected to Broca’s area. However, studies on the functional specializations and interactions within these regions at the single-cell level are limited. Yet, anatomical similarities have been identified between Broca’s and Wernicke’s regions and their homologs in non-human primates, ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (vlPFC) and temporo-parietal cortex. Although, the function of these homolog areas remains largely unknown in shaping primate’s social behavior and cognition. Using high-density recordings, I provide evidence that vlPFC not only contributes to social audio-visual processing but also participates in signaling stimulus novelty and reward. By analyzing subject’s own face and eye movements, we found that the same population can be discharged before the start of movement actions, supporting the multi-purpose view of vlPFC in recognition and motor generation. I next investigate how other homolog language areas are specialized in mediating social communication by recording from a highly connected upstream brain area to vlPFC, the Middle Dorsal face area (MD). Located in the temporal lobe, MD has been put forward mainly by our laboratory as a facial motion recognition area of the brain. MD is well-connected to both vlFPC and the temporo-parietal cortex, a predecessor to Wernicke’s area in humans. We observed that majority of MD neurons contribute to visual recognition and do not signal self-motion related events as in vlPFC. Together the pilot results may point to ancient pre-linguistic motifs of neural organization that may be responsible for the development of human language and social cognition. Future recordings from vlPFC and MD simultaneously can give us valuable insights into the synthesis (multi-domain dialogue) that is occurring in the brain when tasked for social communication.
 

Magdalena Siwek
Columbia University

The gas-driven orbital evolution of Massive Black Hole Binaries

Pulsar Timing Arrays (PTAs) have found compelling evidence for the existence of a Gravitational Wave Background (GWB): a ‘hum’ of low-frequency gravitational waves that permeates the Universe, emitted by the loudest gravitational wave (GW) sources in the Universe: Massive Black Hole Binaries (MBHBs). The interaction of MBHBs with their gas-rich environment in galactic nuclei is expected to lead to the formation of circumbinary accretion disks (CBDs). Accretion from CBDs leaves imprints in the GWB (Siwek+20) and the population of MBHBs (Siwek+20,24), allowing us to chart their evolutionary history.

It further enables the detection of these systems through electromagnetic follow-up. In this talk I will discuss state-of-the-art models of CBD-driven binary evolution, and simulations of electromagnetic signatures emitted by MBHBs in CBDs, that will enable their detection in upcoming transient surveys.
 

Max Wenqiang Xu
New York University

Primes meet Randomness

Counting primes is a very easy and also a very difficult task in number theory. Assuming primes are randomly distributed is usually a very good first attempt but can also be very wrong! I will tell you some interesting stories and mathematics behind these that have inspired my research.
 

Anastasia-Maria Zavitsanou
Columbia University

Investigating how cancer alters our behavior via regulating our internal sensations

The brain plays a vital role in sensing and regulating the body’s physiological state by receiving crucial sensory information from internal organs. Sensory neurons innervate every organ, transmitting data about physiological changes, including immune responses, metabolism, and pathogens, to the brain. This enables the brain to monitor and regulate essential bodily functions and behaviors. In cancer patients, a variety of behavioral alterations occur, with pain being the most common one. This talk will examine how lung cancer disrupts the body’s internal sensory system, leading to changes in brain activity and the experience of internal pain.

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