Speaker: Michela Negro (NASA Goddard Space Flight Center/UMBC) Title: High Energy Transient Repeaters: The Case of Gamma-ray Bursts From Magnetar Abstract: Started in the ’60s with the detection of the first cosmological gamma-ray burst by the Vela satellites the astrophysics of high-energy transients has fascinated the community for more than half a century. Gamma-ray burst

Speaker: Shobita Satyapal (NASA Goddard Space Flight Center/UMBC) Title: In Search of Elusive AGNs in Low Mass Galaxies and Mergers Abstract: Supermassive black holes (SMBHs) at the centers of galaxies, which manifest as active galactic nuclei (AGNs) when accreting, are now known to be a fundamental component of galaxies and play an important role in their evolution. Detecting complete samples of AGNs and

Speaker: Arindam Das (Hokkaido University) Title: Neutrinos: a Bridge Among the Energy, Intensity and Cosmic Frontiers Abstract: Neutrino oscillation and flavor mixings have proved the existence of tiny neutrino mass. It strongly suggests scenarios involving the physics beyond the Standard Model (SM). To explain the origin of the tiny neutrino mass a plethora of models have been

Speaker: David Cruz-Uribe (OFS, Math Department chair, University of Alabama) Title: Swipe Right for Mathematics:  an Overview of Research in the UA Math Department Mathematicians and physicists have had a long and productive relationship, with real world problems being at the foundation of whole fields of mathematics, and with mathematicians providing the tools needed to

Speaker: Yanou Cui (UC, Riverside) Title: Probing the Dark Side of the Universe with Gravitational Waves Deep questions remain about our Universe: What is dark matter? What is the origin of matter antimatter asymmetry? What happened during the first second after the Big Bang? In this talk I will discuss the prospect of using the

Speaker: Igor Fedin (University of Alabama, Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry) Title: Enhanced Emission from the Bright Exciton and Locating the Dark Exciton in Asymmetrically Strained CdSe/CdxZn1–xSe Quantum Dots Colloidal CdSe/CdxZn1-xSe quantum dots (QDs) designed with a high degree of asymmetric internal strain have recently been shown to host a number of desirable optical properties