The Millennium Café runs 10-11am in the 3rd floor Café Commons of the MSC Bldg. Join researchers from across campus for a stellar cup of coffee and two <10 min interdisciplinary talks. All Millennium Café events are free and open to the Penn State community, include coffee and breakfast pastries, and are held in the third floor Café Commons of the Millennium Science Complex at University Park.
Atmospheric Particulates: Complex Chemistry & Physics
Miriam Freedman | Chemistry
Aerosol particles are ubiquitous in the environment, have complex physicochemical properties, and impact human health and climate. This talk will give a wide overview of research in the area of aerosol chemistry with particular focus on the dynamics of liquid-liquid phase separation in submicron aerosol particles with application to disease transmission, ice nucleation of microplastics and biological particles, and measurement of aerosol acidity through the use of carbon quantum dots.
New Discoveries Enabled by Combining Experimental and Deep Learning Methods
Chaopeng Shen | Civil & Environmental Engineering
Physics-based models and purely data-driven machine learning models each have significant benefits and limitations. A new pathway, differentiable modelling, combines the two methods and pushes the boundary of physics-informed machine learning. I will use some examples from water resource research to demonstrate advantages of this combined approach where we have mitigated the limitations of each method, more reliably predicted geohazards like floods, and discovered previously unrecognized physical relationships.
*** After Café: “Improving Device Quality and Reproducibility: Thin Film Adhesion Failures” immediately following the Café on Tuesday will be a 30 minute multi-technique talk highlighting some of the methods available within the Nanofab and MCL to characterize adhesion failures and thus help identify the necessary process modifications required to increase device quality and/or reproducibility. We will use an example of a failure that occurred at a metal contact layer on a passivation oxide to walk through the testing decisions that lead to an understanding of the root cause.