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Aklant Bhowmick, University of Virginia Unraveling the Origins of Supermassive Black HOles and their Cosmic Significance usi The past decade has featured major advances in supermassive black hole (SMBH) astrophysics: from the first evidence of the gravitational wave background, to our first glimpses into the seeding epoch, to the first… Read More

Cliff Burgess, McMaster University The gravity of tinkering with einstein We live at a time of contradictory messages about how successfully we understand gravity. General Relativity seems to work well in the Earth’s immediate neighbourhood, but arguements abound that it needs modification at very small and/or very large distances. This… Read More

Zhi-Hao Cui, Columbia University Unraveling the Mysteries of Quantum Materials: Cuprate Superconductivity and Charge Density Waves in CrSBr Strong electron correlations can transform simple chemical building blocks into quantum materials with striking macroscopic signatures, such as high-Tc superconductivity and charge density waves. Yet a central challenge remains: how do we… Read More

Hong-Ye Hu, Harvard University Scalable Quantum Applications: Synergies in Control, Learning, and Co-design The rapid advancement of quantum science and technology has ushered in a new era where analog simulators can now control thousands of qubits and digital processors are approaching break-even points for error correction. However, bridging the gap… Read More

Aklant Bhowmick, University of Virginia Unraveling the Origins of Supermassive Black Holes and their Cosmic Significance using Cosmological simulations Supermassive black holes, typically ranging from a million to a billion solar masses, are now known to inhabit the centers of most massive galaxies. Unraveling their cosmic origins remains a central… Read More

Colin Burke, Yale University Probing the Invisible Universe with Variability The Vera C. Rubin Observatory will imminently transform time-domain astrophysics by enabling precision, long-baseline optical variability measurements for billions of sources. Time-domain variability provides a uniquely powerful window into the otherwise invisible components of the Universe, from the physics of… Read More

Eric Anschuetz, California Institute of Technology When to Go QuantUM Quantum computers use the principles of quantum mechanics to perform computation in a way fundamentally different from traditional (“classical”) methods. This new computing paradigm exhibits great promise in–among other things–revolutionizing our ability to understand and solve complex problems in physics,… Read More

Christopher Tiede, Niels Bohr International Academy How to Feed a Super-Massive Black Hole Binary Following recent evidence for a stochastic background of gravitational waves from pulsar timing experiments, a cornerstone of the upcoming decade in astrophysics will be the detection of low-frequency gravitational waves from individual mergers of the Universe’s… Read More

Rhine Samajdar, Princeton University Architectures, algorithms, and opportunities for quantum computation Quantum computers promise transformative advances in science and technology, yet their practical performance is fundamentally limited by noise, errors, and decoherence. In this talk, I will explore how the co-design of quantum hardware and algorithms can unlock new capabilities… Read More

Thankful Cromartie, U.S. Naval Research Laboratory Constraining the Dense Matter Equation of State with Next-Generation Pulsar Timing Arrays Radio-frequency observations of millisecond pulsars play a key role in determining the equation of state (EoS) of supranuclear-density matter in neutron star interiors. High-precision timing of massive pulsars provides direct constraints on… Read More

Zane Rossi, University of Tokyo The art of (quantum) computer programming As quantum computing hardware rapidly improves, we need more quantum algorithms. Quantum algorithms appear to offer huge speedups for specific tasks, but examples are narrow, disparate, and often abstrusely presented. Our intuition for when (and why) a quantum algorithm… Read More

Angelo Ricarte, Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory Weaving the Multi-messenger Tapestry of Supermassive Black Hole Evolution — from the Event Horizon to Cosmological Scales The past decade has featured major advances in supermassive black hole (SMBH) astrophysics: from the first evidence of the gravitational wave background, to our first glimpses into the… Read More

Friederike Boch, Oak Ridge National Laboratory A New Era of Electron-Ion Collider Physics- The ePIC detector and its forward hadronic calorimeter This talk introduces the Electron-ion Collider (EIC) project, embodied by the ePIC detector, which will provide unprecedented high-luminosity collisions of polarized electrons with polarized protons/ions to address fundamental questions… Read More

The Wendland-Cook Program in Religion and Justice and Vanderbilt Divinity School will host a showing of THE MUD followed by a discussion with the director and Vanderbilt faculty. THE MUD is an art film made in Kuttanad, Kerala, India that follows the life of a school-age protagonist, Joseph,… Read More

On the evening of Nov. 6, the gallery rooms and halls of the Curb Center at Vanderbilt will resound with a global melody. There will be the pluck and ring of a setar and the charm of a santoor as the Nashville Immigrant and Refugee Music and Art Projec... Read More

Pedro Ferreira, Oxford University The Perfect theory: A century of Geniuses and the Battle over General Relativity Physicists have been exploring, debating, and questioning the general theory of relativity ever since Albert Einstein first presented it in 1915. Einstein’s theory, which explains the relationships among gravity, space, and time, is possibly… Read More

ALICE CLAIR KIMBLER HANKLA ENDOWED LECTURE Natalie Klco, Duke University Quantum Simulating (with) Nature’s Quantum Correlations: Guidance from Field Vacuum EntaNglement Entanglement is a resource that allows quantum systems to contain exponentially more information than the sum of their parts.  We will discuss and quantify the ability of simple… Read More

WENDELL G. HOLLADAY LECTURE Venkat Venkatasubramanian, Columbia University Statistical Mechanics and Game Theory in the Self-Organizing Dynamics of people, Birds, and Networks The physics of active matter, such as ant colonies and bird flocks, exhibiting interesting self-organizing dynamical behavior, has gained considerable importance in recent years. Recent theoretical advances… Read More

Collaboration, community and love for the written word were celebrated at the 2025 Southern Festival of Books, presented by Vanderbilt University in partnership with Humanities Tennessee Oct. 18–19 in downtown Nashville. The free event, the 37th in fes... Read More

Jennifer and Marc Lipschultz have committed a landmark collection of nearly 5,000 photographs, featuring work from hundreds of photographers including Bill Owens, Danny Lyon, Berenice Abbott, Lalla Essaydi and Dorothy Norman, to the Vanderbilt Universi... Read More