Discovery Lectures Series

Renowned scientists, engineers and mathematicians will host lectures on a plethora of research topics during the four weeks COSMOS operates. The lecturers usually focus on their current research, as the presentations are designed to introduce students to the wide variety of STEM subjects and research taking place at University of California campuses, expanding their learning outside of their cluster topics. Discovery Lectures are required by all COSMOS students to attend and are also open to the entire campus community.

The list of speakers and topics is updated every year.

COSMOS 2023 Discovery Lectures:

Date Day Speaker Title
7/10 Monday Raja Guhathakurta The Universe of Galaxies and the James Webb Space Telescope
7/11 Tuesday Abraham Wolcott (C12) Tuning a Quantum Nanoprobe: Advancements in diamond chemistry using halogens, low-Z precursors and metal oxides
7/12 Wednesday Rebecca DuBois TBD
7/13 Thursday Yihsu Chen (C6) Retail electricity retail tariff design in the presence of roof-top solar households: balancing energy equality and economic efficiencies
7/14 Friday Priya Crosby Circadian rhythms: How do we measure time and use it to control our biology?
7/17 Monday Tamara Duplantis (C5) Designing Spatialized Audio in Games
7/18 Tuesday Eric Martin Bringing the Lab Into the Ocean: Designing Scientific Robotic Vehicles
7/19 Wednesday Peter Weiss/Nettie Calvin (C7) Microbes and Mercury - how anerobic bacteria make mercury super toxic
7/20 Thursday Xin Eric Wang (C11) Building Generalizable, Scalable, and Trustworthy Embodied Agents
7/21 Friday Zhu Wang (C9) How to maintain an organ: stem cells and cancer
7/24 Monday Holger Schmidt Single molecule detection on a chip with integrated nanopores
7/25 Tuesday Burcak Artun (C8) Understanding Bioluminescence: Ecology to Biotechnology
7/26 Wednesday Mike Oye (C10) Semiconductor Processing and Device Engineering
7/27 Thursday Steve Haddock Who glows there? Biodiversity, bioluminescence, and biotechnology of deep-sea organisms
7/28 Friday Jairo Velasco, Jr. (C4) Imaging and Probing Atomically Thin Quantum Devices at the Nanoscale
7/31 Monday Richard Gottesman (C1) Discovering Infinity
8/1 Tuesday Gizelle Hurtado and Andy Kulikowsk (C3) From Natural History to Scientific Research
8/2 Wednesday Alex Ayzner TBD
8/3 Thursday Shaowei Chen (C2) Chiral Molecules and Nanostructures
8/4 Friday