Kavli Foundation Special Symposium

Denis Bartolo is a professor at the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon, where he combines experiments and theory to study the physics of soft matter. Over the past ten years, he has particularly specialized in the study of active matter. With his team, he has introduced a predictive description of human crowd flows and created the first synthetic active fluids whose basic units propel themselves obeying the same symmetries as animal flocks (flocking).

Beyond active matter, he has made pioneering and essential contributions in a broad spectrum of fields, ranging from the physics of wetting to that of frustrated phases. The originality of his work positions him at the forefront of international research in the physics of soft matter. He was appointed a Member of the Institut Universitaire de France in 2012, he is a laureate of the Ancel Prize for condensed matter physics, is a fellow of the American Physical Society, and was awarded an ERC Advanced Grant in 2021. He also serves as the Lead Editor of the prestigious journal Physical Review X.

Nikta Fakhri is an associate Professor in the Department of Physics at MIT and Physics of Living Systems Group. ​She completed her undergraduate degree at Sharif University of Technology and her PhD at Rice University. She was a Human Frontier Science Program postdoctoral fellow at Georg-August-Universität in Göttingen, Germany before joining MIT.​Nikta is an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow in Physics. She is the recipient of the 2018 IUPAP Young Scientist Prize in Biological Physics, the 2019 NSF CAREER Award, and the 2022 APS Early Career Award in Soft Matter Research.

Mikhail Lukin received his Ph.D. degree from Texas A&M University in 1998. He has been a Professor of Physics at Harvard since 2004, where he is currently the Joshua and Beth Friedman University Professor and a co-Director of the Harvard Quantum Initiative in Science and Engineering. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society (APS), a fellow of the Optical Society of America (OSA), a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. His research is in the areas of quantum optics and quantum information science, aimed at controlling strongly interacting atomic, optical and solid-state systems, studying quantum dynamics of many-body systems and exploring novel applications in quantum computing, simulations, quantum communication and metrology. He has co-authored over 400 technical papers. His awards include the Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, David and Lucile Packard Fellowship for Science and Engineering, NSF Career Award, Adolph Lomb Medal of the OSA, AAAS Newcomb Cleveland Prize, APS I.I.Rabi Prize, Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellowship, Julius Springer Prize for Applied Physics,  Willis E. Lamb Award for Laser Science and Quantum Optics, Charles Hard Towns Medal of the OSA and Norman F. Ramsey Prize of APS.

​Chiara M. F. Mingarelli is a gravitational-wave astrophysicist, and Assistant Professor of Physics at Yale University. Her research focuses on predicting the nanohertz gravitational-wave signatures of supermassive black hole binaries, which there is now evidence for in pulsar timing array experiments. With pulsar timing data, she searches for both individual supermassive black holes in binary systems, and for the gravitational-wave background which should be generated by their cosmic merger history.

Mingarelli received her Ph.D from the University of Birmingham (UK) in 2014, and won a Marie Curie Fellowship which she took at the California Institute of Technology, and at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy from 2014-2017. In 2017 she moved to New York to take up a position as a Flatiron Fellow, which she held for 2 years, before accepting a joint position between the Flatiron Institute as an Associate Research Scientist and an Assistant Professor of Physics at the University of Connecticut. ​

Mingarelli has received funding from the NSF, NASA, the European Research Council, the Simons Foundation, and Amazon. Her honors and awards include the American Astronomical Society’s  2023 High Energy Astrophysics Division (HEAD) Early Career Prize, the 2022 Springer-Nature "Inspiring Women in Science" (runner-up), APS "Woman Physicist of the Month" for November 2016, and her thesis was published in the Springer Thesis Series (2015).

Pia M. Sörensen leads Harvard’s Science and Cooking Program, which includes research, teaching, and outreach efforts at the intersection of science, education, and food.

She teaches the popular general education course Science and Cooking: From Haute Cuisine to Soft Matter Science and led its development to an online course which has close to a million subscribers from around the world. She also teaches a course on the chemistry of food fermentations, also available as an online course.

She is author and editor of several books, including the best-seller “Science and Cooking: Physics meets Food, from Homemade to Haute Cuisine” (Norton, 2020).

She leads a group studying science education, fermentation technology, and the science and engineering of food. She received a BS in Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry from Yale University, and a PhD in Chemical Biology from Harvard University.

David Weitz received his Ph.D in physics from Harvard University and then joined Exxon Research and Engineering Company, where he worked for nearly 18 years. He then became a professor of physics at the University of Pennsylvania and moved to Harvard at the end of the last millennium as professor of physics and applied physics. Weitz leads a group studying soft matter science with a focus on materials science, biophysics and microfluidics. Several startup companies have come from his lab to commercialize research concepts. He developed a very popular physics course at Harvard: “Science and Cooking: From Haute Cuisine to the Science of Soft Matter."