Physical Chemistry Seminar: Professor Martin Gruebele, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
About the Seminar
"Three Tales of Quantum Scrambling, Transition States, and Fishy Machine Learning"
I will introduce three recent topics in my research going up in length scale from atoms to organisms. I'll start with our work on quantum scrambling and measurement applied to molecular examples, a topic of interest to quantum information processing and information loss. From there, I'll move up to macromolecules, and discuss transition state passage experiments and simulations on proteins and homopolymers such as PNIPAM. We use sonification to assist visualization in that work, as the ears have somewhat orthogonal capabilities to the eyes when it comes to pattern analysis. Finally, I'll discuss our application of physics-constrained machine learning to fish swimming dynamics. Zebrafish have something surprising in common with soccer players.
About the Speaker
Martin Gruebele was born in Stuttgart, Germany in 1964. He obtained his BS in 1984 and his PhD in 1988 at UC Berkeley with Richard Saykally, did a postdoc with Ahmed Zewail at Caltech, and then joined the faculty at the University of Illinois. There, he is currently the James R. Eiszner Chair in Chemistry emeritus, as well as Professor of Physics, of Biophysics and Quantitative Biology, in the Center for Advanced Studies, and in the Carle-Illinois College of Medicine. His research interests include sonification in education and biophysics research; biomolecule dynamics in live cells; vibrational energy flow in molecules; quantum scrambling, computing, and control; imaging excited states of nanomaterials; glassy dynamics; and locomotion behavior in bacteria and animals. He is a Fellow of the American Physical, Chemical, and Biophysical Societies, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences, and the German National Academy of Sciences. He has edited for the Journal of Physical Chemistry, the Journal of the American Chemical Society, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Martin Gruebele is married to Nancy Makri, with two children, Alexander, and Valerie. In his free time, he swims, bikes, runs, plays pipe organ, and builds miniatures.