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Fall Research Briefings from the GSAS Faculty

December 13, 2016

Chemistry’s Yan Kung published an article, “Structural elements of an NRPS cyclization domain and its intermodule docking domain,” which appeared in the November issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. In mid-November, the Kung research group travelled to the Advanced Photon Source (APS), a synchrotron at Argonne National Laboratory in Lemont, IL, to collect X-ray diffraction data on protein crystals. The Kung lab focuses on macromolecular X-ray crystallography and collects data at synchrotron X-ray sources like APS in order to determine the three-dimensional structures of certain proteins.

Chemists working in the Argonne National Laboratory
Kung research group: Professor Yan Kung, Brad Miller (postdoctoral fellow), Nanding Chen ’17, and…

This summer, Professor of Chemistry Jason Schmink and his research group completed a project and published their findings in the journal Organic Letters.

Classics Professor Annette Baertschi was elected as Second Vice President of the Classical Association of the Atlantic States (CAAS) in October. She presented a talk, " 'Oedipus was a Colombian': Jorge Alí Triana's Edipo Alcalde (1996)," at the annual CAAS Meeting in New Brunswick in October and presided over a paper session on Augustan Latin Literature.

In September, fellow Classicist Catherine Conybeare spoke at the fifth "Reconsiderations" conference at Villanova University; her paper, "ut tecum tamquam mecum audeam conloqui: the politics of return," will be published in the journal Augustinian Studies. In October, Professor Conybeare gave the paper "An Eccentric Approach to Augustine of Hippo" at the Classics Colloquium at the University of Pennsylvania and the 2016 Augustine and Culture Seminar lecture on "Augustine's Confessions and Language" to students at Villanova. This November, she gave a paper entitled "remoto facundiae robore: plain speaking in Africa" at a conference entitled "Augustine of Hippo and his thought in its local and universal dimensions" at Université Badji Mokhtar in Annaba, Algeria, which will be published in the conference proceedings.

This summer, the Institut d’Avignon invited two prominent professors of French Literature: Prof. François Cornilliat (Rutgers University) gave a graduate course on 16th French Literature (Marguerite de Navarre) and Prof. Christophe Martin (Paris-Sorbonne) taught a seminar on 18th Century French Literature (on fictions of origins). In November, Rudy Le Menthéour gave a talk on Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the Polish uprising of 1771, “Restaurer l’âme antique : Rousseau et le mirage polonaise.” The one-day conference took place in Paris at the Polish Library. Professor Le Menthéour also gave a talk at Rutgers University, New Brunswick on Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Daniel Defoe: “Seul en son royaume: la jouissance souveraine selon Rousseau Crusoé.” The talk will be translated into Italian and will be published in Sognare la politica. Rousseau e la filosofia del “promeneur solitaire, eds. M. Menin and L. Rustighi, Bologna, Il Mulino.

The Mathematics department, which hosts the weekly Philadelphia Area Number Theory Seminar gathering number theorists from nearby colleges and universities, received funding from the Tri-College Faculty Forum Seed Grant program, enabling a distinguished guest speaker series this fall that included faculty from the Institute for Advanced Study, CUNY, University of Wisconsin, University of Texas, Penn, and Rutgers. In June, Professor Djordje Milicevic gave invited talks on his research at the University of Heidelberg, the University of Gottingen, and the University of Bristol; in November, he was invited to speak at the University of Michigan.

Mathematics’ Lisa Traynor has had two papers accepted for publication: "The minimal length of a Lagrangian cobordism between Legendrians," jointly written with J. Sabloff, appeared in Selecta Mathematica; "Non-Orientable Lagrangian cobordisms between Legendrian knots," written with O. Capovilla-Searle, appeared in the Pacific Journal of Mathematics. Professor Traynor also presented her research at several conferences, including the Hamiltonian Workshop on Low-Dimensional and Symplectic Topology in Dublin, Ireland in August, and the Tech Topology Conference at Georgia Tech in December.

Professor of Physics Xuemei Cheng published an article in the October issue of NANO LETTERS, Quantitatively in Situ Imaging Silver Nanowire Hollowing Kinetics; she also published an article in the October issue of Advanced Electronic Materials, “Spin Orbit Coupling Controlled Spin Pumping and Spin Hall Magnetoresistance Effects.”