Sievert Prize Lecture Series Archive
Lectures: "Networks: From Brains and Quantum Internet to Climate Change"
Every Saturday at 11:00 AM from January 6-February 24 at Norris University Center at Northwestern University.
Join us each week for an exciting and educational lecture by Arthur Montanari, a researcher working at the Center for Network Dynamics at Northwestern.
- January 6, "Network Theory: A Theory of Almost Everything" Wildcat Room 1-101 View recording
- Networks are everywhere. In nature, they regulate food webs, brain activity, and cellular processes. In engineering, they deliver energy and water, mediate traffic, and disseminate information. In society, they govern financial, social, and environmental dynamics. We explore the theory describing the science of interactions and its power to address disparate systems
- January 13, "Emergence: Syncing Waves" Wildcat Room 1-101 View recording
- Fireflies flashing together, waves formed in the brain, power-grid generators operating in coordination, and the way your body responds to day-night cycles. These systems are described by the phenomenon of synchronization. We break down and model the main actors responsible for this phenomenon in one equation. What the agents are, how they interact, and who they interact with.
- January 20, "Anyone's Perspective is Wrong" Wildcat Room 1-101 View recording
- Networks are more than the sum of the parts. Observing only the individual pieces of a network cannot give us the big picture. How intelligence emerges from neural networks? Who to test for the early detection of an epidemic outbreak? Why do your friends have more friends than you do? We discuss how reductionism is a powerful tool for the analysis of networks that must be used carefully.
- January 27, "Why We Get Stuck and It is So Hard to Change" Northwestern Room 2-160 View recording
- A new road that slows traffic, a top basketball player that lowers the team’s performance, or a new transmission line that reduces the grid efficiency. Additional resources are expected to improve performance, but lack of network cooperativity can lead to adverse outcomes. We examine such network paradoxes, when they appear, and why they cannot be avoided through unilateral changes.
- February 3, "Cascades: The Achilles' Heel of Networks" Wildcat Room 1-101 View recording
- Networks are known to be fairly resilient. However, when networks are hit the right way, damage can spread through a cascade and lead to the collapse of an entire system. We see this in blackouts, extinction events, and financial crashes. We show how simple models can describe network cascades and the obstacles to controlling them.
- February 10, "Irreversibility: No Return Beyond the Tipping Point" Wildcat Room 1-101 View recording
- Every system has an “equilibrium” state. Disturbances can alter this state and sometimes lead to irreversible changes. Reversible and irreversible changes are separated by tipping points, which are hard to predict but govern transitions from ecosystem shift to neurodegeneration. We show how theory can provide early warnings and control approaches to prevent and mitigate irreversible transitions
- February 17, "Birds of Different Feathers" Wildcat Room 1-101 View Recording
- Flocking, synchronization, and consensus are rhythmic dynamics. Do these behaviors require the agents to be identical or similar? Strikingly, coherent behavior often occurs not despite but because of the different inherent rhythms of the agents. We investigate the effects of diversity, heterogeneity, and disorder in a wide range of systems, from flocks to chaos.
- February 24, "Outlook: The Advent of Network Technologies" Northwestern Room 2-160 View Recording
- Network phenomena are not only recurring in physics but also used to develop new technologies. From social networks, self-driving vehicles, and smart grids to internet-of-things and quantum networks, we discuss the network foundation of many emerging technologies and related challenges.
2023 ANNUAL SIEVERT PRIZE LECTURES
Lectures: "The Rise of Quantum Machines"
Every Saturday at 11:00 AM from January 7-February 25 at Norris University Center at Northwestern University.
Join us each week for an exciting and educational lecture by a Northwestern Researcher. This eight-week series is on The Rise of Quantum Machines.
- January 7- Lecture I: Discovery of the quantum nature of reality, Location- 101B Wildcat Room
- January 14- Lecture II: Early development of technologies based on quantum phenomena with Sandeep Joshi, Location- 203 Lake Room- View the recording here, View the slides here
- January 21- Lecture III: Creation of quantum systems by design with Xinyuan You, Location- 101 Wildcat Room- View the recording here, View the slides here
- January 28- Lecture IV: Quantum Computing vs. Classical Computing with Ziwen Huang, Location- 203 Lake Room- View the recording here, View the slides here
- February 4- Lecture V: Quantum Computing Hardware and Operation with Tanay Roy, Location- 202 Northwestern Room- View the recording here, View the slides here
- February 11- Lecture VI: Quantum computing in practice: the daunting task of constructing a quantum computer with Dr. Daniel Weiss, Location- 206 Arch Room- View the recording here, View the slides here
- February 18- Lecture VII: The power of quantum computers with Dr. Ziwen Huang, Location- 202 Northwestern Room- View the recording here
- February 25-Lecture VIII: Outlook: the quantum ecosystem, impact on society and future quantum revolutions with Xinyuan You, Location- 203 Lake Room- View the recording here, View the slides here
2022 Inaugural Sievert Prize Lectures

SAPTAPARNA BHATTACHARYA
PH.D., BROWN UNIVERSITY
DISTINGUISHED RESEARCHER,
LHC PHYSICS CENTER, FERMILAB
Lectures: "Particle Physics After the Discovery of the Higgs Boson"
Every Saturday at 11:00 AM from June 18-August 6 at The Hive at McCormick Ford Motor Vehicle Engineering Design Center at Northwestern University.
Join us each week for an exciting and educational lecture by distinguished researcher, Dr. Sapta Bhattacharya!
- June 18, 2022- The Quest: Introduction to Particle Physics
- June 25th, 2022- The Giant Experiment
- July 2nd, 2022- The Compact Instrument
- July 9th, 2022- The Discovery
- July 16th, 2022- Battle-Testing Our Theoretical Model
- July 23rd, 2022- What Could Be Out There?
- July 30th, 2022- Machine Learning Makes Everything Better
- August 6th, 2022- What's Next?
These lectures are free and open to the public. Free parking available in the Noyes/Haven/Sheridan Lot or the Northwestern Place/Garrett Lot. Click here for directions
The Department of Physics and Astronomy thanks Paul R. Sievert for his generous support of the Sievert Prize at Northwestern University. Paul Sievert created this endowment in memory of his wife, Ilene B. Sievert in 2020 in order to strengthen the Physics and Astronomy program at Northwestern for the benefit of the Northwestern community and the general public. This prize is awarded to one or more postdoctoral researchers in the department.
About our Speaker: Saptaparna Bhattacharya is a post-doctoral research associate at Northwestern University, working on the CMS Experiment. She received her Ph.D. physics from Brown University in 2016. She has been the recipient of the prestigious Distinguished Researcher award from the LHC Physics Center at Fermilab two years in a row from 2019-2020. She currently serves as the leader of the generator studies group in CMS, overseeing the activities of more than hundred physicists with an aim to deliver state-of-the-art simulations to the CMS Collaboration. Since 2020, she has held a leadership position in the upgrade studies performance group in preparation for Snowmass 2022, a community planning exercise undertaken by the High Energy Physics community approximately every ten years. She was an elected member of the Fermilab Users Executive committee from 2018, serving as the chair of the committee in 2019-2020. In this role, she has traveled to Washington D.C. on several occasions to talk about the importance of funding research in fundamental science.