Seminars

Extra Seminar
12:00 noon, Wednesday, 23rd May

Professor Juliet Gerrard,
IRL Industry and Outreach Fellow, Co-director of the Biomolecular Interaction Centre (BIC),
working in the School of Biological Sciences at the University of

Proteins as nanomaterials
In this talk I will give an overview of our amyloid fibrils programme.  This will include the manufacture and scale-up of the production of these nanofibrillar structures from waste materials and some of the many and varied applications we are exploring for these fascinating structures as: nanowires and biosensors, immobilised enzyme scaffolds and artificial spider silk.

Professor Richard Easther
Head of Physics, Auckland University

Darkness before Dawn:  Early Universe Cosmology and the Onset of Radiation Domination
Since the 1960s, the hot big bang -- in which a radiation dominated phase is naturally followed by matter domination and structure formation -- has been the standard paradigm for cosmology.  This scenario makes detailed, testable predictions and, with the exception of the "dark sector", is based on established physics.  Further, it now widely believed that many of the initial conditions for the hot big bang are set by inflation, a period of near exponential growth in the very early universe.  However, the period between the end of inflation and the onset of radiation domination is not well understood: a vast range of interesting (and usually nonlinear) physical processes can occur during this epoch, with potentially observable consequences. These include the generation of a cosmological gravitational wave background, primordial black hole formation, and exotic, nonlinear excitations of fundamental fields. I will discuss a selection of these processes, along with the opportunities they provide for probing models of the very early universe and testing theories of very high energy physics. 

Biography: Richard Easther was born and educated in New Zealand, and received his PhD from the University of Canterbury in 1994. He held post-doctoral appointments at Waseda (Japan), Brown and Columbia Universities. Richard worked at Yale for eight years before returning  to New Zealand in late 2011, and is currently a professor and Head of  Department of Physics at the University of Auckland.  Richard works at the intersection of cosmology and particle physics.

Dr Simon Murphy
The Australian National University

Revealing the Chamaeleon: Young, low-mass stars in the deep southern sky

The deep southern sky surrounding the Chamaeleon dark clouds is rich with young stars of various ages. Because of their youth (5-10 Myr) and proximity (d~100 pc), members of two such populations - the open cluster ɉ Cha and the nearby Ɉ Cha Association - are ideal laboratories in which to study the formation and evolution of stellar groups, circumstellar disks and protoplanetary systems. As some of the closest evidence of recent star formation, my work explores the formation, dynamical evolution, accretion and disk properties of both groups' low-mass members. In this talk I will describe some of the highlights of my Ph.D. research over the past 4 years, including the detection of the long-sought-after stellar halo around ɉ Cha, an 'old' pre-main sequence star caught accreting from its disk, and the discovery of a young, wide binary apparently born in isolation.

Biography: Simon is a graduate of UC (BSc 2003-05) and recently completed his Ph.D. at the Australian National University, working with Mike Bessell and fellow UC alum Warrick Lawson. He is currently a postdoc at ANU, working on the scientific commissioning of the SkyMapper telescope and its multi-colour, multi-epoch sky survey. When he's not debugging code or babysitting a recalcitrant telescope, his research explores the formation and dynamical evolution of young, low-mass stars and in the myriad of moving groups which populate the southern sky.