Early in my career, I was incredibly fortunate to be awarded a David and Lucille Packard Foundation fellowship, and this week I attended the meeting in honor of the 35th anniversary of the fellowship program. Packard fellowships are amazing, with awardees spanning the sciences (including math) and engineering, providing resources for a sustained period (5 years) with enormous flexibility. The meetings have been some of the most fun ones I've ever attended, with talks by incoming and outgoing fellows that are short (20 min) and specifically designed to be accessible by scientifically literate non-experts. My highlights from the meeting ten years ago (the last one I attended) are here. Highlights from meetings back when I was a fellow are here, here, here, here.
Here are some cool things that I learned at the meeting (some of which I'm sure I should've known), from a few of the talks + posters. (Unfortunately I cannot stay for the last day, so apologies for missing some great presentations.) I will further update this post later in the day and tomorrow.
- By the 2040s, with the oncoming LISA and Cosmic Explorer/Einstein Telescope instruments, it's possible that we will be able to detect every blackhole merger in the entire visible universe.
- It's very challenging to have models of galaxy evolution that handle how supernovae regulate mass outflow and star formation to end up with what we see statistically in the sky
- Machine learning can be really good at disentangling overlapping seismic events.
- In self-propelled/active matter, it's possible to start with particles that just have a hard-shell repulsion and still act like there is an effective attractive interaction that leads to clumping.
- There are about \(10^{14}\) bacteria in each person, with about 360\(\times\) the genetic material of the person. Also, the gut has lots of neurons, five times as many as the spinal cord (!). The gut microbiome can seemingly influence concentrations of neurotransmitters.
- Bees can deliberately damage leaves of plants to stress the flora and encourage earlier and more prolific flowering.
- For some bio-produced materials that are nominally dry, their elastic properties and the dependence of those properties on humidity is seemingly controlled almost entirely by the water they contain.
- It is now possible to spatially resolve gene expression (via mRNA) at the single cell level across whole slices of, e.g., mouse brain tissue. Mind-blowing links here and here.
- I knew that ordinary human red blood cells have no organelles, and therefore they can't really respond much to stimuli. What I did not know is that maturing red blood cells (erythrocyte precurors) in bone marrow start with nuclei and can participate in immune response, and that red blood cells in fetuses (and then at trace level in pregnant mothers) circulate all the different progenitor cells, potentially playing an important role in immune response.
- 45% of all deaths in the US can be attributed in part to fibrosis (scarring) issues (including cardiac problems), but somehow the uterus can massively regenerate monthly without scarring. Also, zero common lab animals menstruate, which is a major obstacle for research; transgenic mice can now be made so that there are good animal models for study.
- Engineered cellulose materials can be useful for radiative cooling to the sky and can be adapted for many purposes, like water harvesting from the atmosphere with porous fabrics.
3 comments:
I worked as a postdoc for three years on the statistical mechanics and systems biology of multi species microbial communication. One of the cool things we found was that there are surprising and unexpected connections between the equations describing intercellular signaling networks and the equations describing neuronal networks in the brain. We found that eco-evolutionary dynamics of microbial communities, mediated by these signaling networks, could be interpreted as a sort of ‘collective learning’ process. We were even able to experimentally validate features of the models with collaborators using in vitro synthetic microbial consortia platform.
I didn’t stay in the field after my postdoc, but I wondered even back then if some of these ideas could be applied to understand the nature of the ‘gut-brain’ connection on a deeper level…
I heard from a colleague who attended the meeting that there were hardly any talks (or recent Packard fellows) in the fields of condensed matter physics or atomic physics and that the word "quantum" was on nobody's lips. The beginning of the end? A bit worrisome for early-career folks in those fields (especially condensed matter that is not getting so much quantum windfall after all).
Anon, that is true, though it’s hard to interpret this. The talks are given by incoming and outgoing fellows, and there is a lot of heterogeneity. I didn’t see any pure math talks this year, for example, but there are current fellows who are mathematicians, and there are current fellows who are CMP and AMO. I do think that there was a lot of astro this time relative to previous meetings I’ve attended. It’s good to keep an eye on these things, but so much of the selection process comes down to who universities put up as their internal candidates and how the 2-page candidate statements are written that it’s hard to draw conclusions from a single year’s meeting.
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