Join us for the Annual BioEngineering Day, the flagship event of the EPFL Institute of BioEngineering.
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\r\nBioEngineering Day brings together researchers, students, alumni, and partners for a day of scientific exchange featuring keynote lectures, poster presentations, award finalist talks, and networking opportunities.
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\r\nPreliminary Program
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\r\n11:30 – Registration
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\r\n12:00 – Lunch and Poster Session
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\r\n13:50 – Welcome and Introductory Remarks
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\r\n14:00 – Keynote Lecture: Smita Krishnaswamy, Yale University
\r\nLearning Data-Driven Geometry and Dynamics for Lab-in-the-Loop AI Scientists
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\r\n15:00 – 2026 Jeffrey Hubbell and Melody Swartz Young Bioengineer Award: Presentations by the 4 Finalists
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\r\n16:00 – Coffee Break
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\r\n16:30 – Keynote Lecture: Bozhi Tian, The University of Chicago
\r\nRethinking Bioelectronic Interfaces: Living, Simple, Sustainable
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\r\n17:30 – Award Ceremony
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\r\n18:30 – Networking, beer & wine, dinner buffet
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\r\nCome and discover the latest advances in bioengineering while connecting with the EPFL BioEngineering community!
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\r\nRegistration
\r\nEvent is free – registration required.
\r\nPlease REGISTER HERE by 15 August 2026.
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tbc
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\r\nAgenda
\r\n12:10 – 12:30 Session
\r\n12:30 – 14:00 Standing Lunch
Triple S (Super Sandwich Seminar) will feature 3 speakers per week, each presenting for 15 minutes, followed by a 5 minutes Q&A session.
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","image_description":"","creation_date":"2025-12-16T15:56:43","last_modification_date":"2025-12-16T15:58:24","link_label":"","link_url":"","canceled":"False","cancel_reason":"","place_and_room":"SV 1717","url_place_and_room":"https://plan.epfl.ch/?room==SV%201717","url_online_room":"","spoken_languages":["https://memento.epfl.ch/api/v1/spoken_languages/2/?format=json"],"speaker":"Yves Paychère - Naef Lab; Steffen Sonnentag, Radtke Lab; Kiruthika Kuma, Antanasijevic Lab","organizer":"Prof. Pierre Gönczy","contact":"Lisa Smith, ISREC Administrative Assistant","is_internal":"True","theme":"","vulgarization":{"id":2,"fr_label":"Public averti","en_label":"Informed public"},"registration":{"id":3,"fr_label":"Entrée libre","en_label":"Free"},"keywords":"Super Sandwich, cancer","file":null,"icalendar_url":"https://memento.epfl.ch/event/export/119055/","category":{"id":1,"code":"CONF","fr_label":"Conférences - Séminaires","en_label":"Conferences - Seminars","activated":true},"academic_calendar_category":null,"domains":[],"mementos":["https://memento.epfl.ch/api/v1/mementos/1/?format=json","https://memento.epfl.ch/api/v1/mementos/6/?format=json","https://memento.epfl.ch/api/v1/mementos/9/?format=json","https://memento.epfl.ch/api/v1/mementos/26/?format=json","https://memento.epfl.ch/api/v1/mementos/111/?format=json"]},{"id":71998,"title":"QSE Quantum Seminar: \"Fibre-optical analogue of the event horizon: Hawking radiation and backreaction\"","slug":"qse-quantum-seminar-fibre-optical-analogue-of-the","event_url":"https://memento.epfl.ch/event/qse-quantum-seminar-fibre-optical-analogue-of-the","visual_url":"https://memento.epfl.ch/image/33331/200x112.jpg","visual_large_url":"https://memento.epfl.ch/image/33331/720x405.jpg","visual_maxsize_url":"https://memento.epfl.ch/image/33331/max-size.jpg","lang":"en","start_date":"2026-07-02","end_date":"2026-07-02","start_time":"12:00:00","end_time":"13:30:00","description":"Please join us for the QSE Center Quantum Seminar with Ulf Leonhardt from the Weizmann Institute of Science who will give a talk about \"Fibre-optical analogue of the event horizon: Hawking radiation and backreaction\" on Thursday July 2nd from 12:00 to 13:30.
\r\nLocation:
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\r\nPizzas will be available at 12:00. All PhDs, postdocs, students, group leaders, and PIs are welcome to join us.
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\r\nTITLE: \"Fibre-optical analogue of the event horizon: Hawking radiation and backreaction\"
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\r\nABSTRACT:
\r\nHawking radiation - the emission of quantum particles at the event horizon of a black hole - connects gravity with quantum mechanics and thermodynamics; the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy has been the benchmark for potential quantum theories of gravity. But Hawking radiation has never been observed in astronomy, only in laboratory analogues and the chances of ever observing it in space are astronomically small. The energy of Hawking radiation must come from the gravitational field around the black hole, but how field quanta generate Hawking quanta has been unknown. In this talk I report on experimental and theoretical evidence for the process that generates Hawking radiation in a fibre-optical analogue of the event horizon. There, as in gravity, it has been believed that Hawking radiation comes from a complicated, cascaded process, but we have found a simple, direct process and measured its backreaction on the field. Our findings suggest an equally direct process for other laboratory analogues and perhaps also for gravitational fields, shedding light on how black holes might radiate.
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\r\nBIO:
\r\nUlf Leonhardt joined the Weizmann Institute of Science as Professor of Physics in November 2012 after an international career. Ulf Leonhardt was born in Schlema, in former East Germany, on October 9th 1965. He studied physics at Friedrich-Schiller University Jena, at Moscow State University and at Humboldt University Berlin where he received his PhD in 1993. He was a Visiting Scholar at the Oregon Center for Optics in the US, a Habilitation Fellow at the University of Ulm in Germany and a Göran-Gustafson and Feodor-Lynen fellow at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden. From 2000 to 2012, he was the Chair in Theoretical Physics at the University of St Andrews, UK. Ulf Leonhardt also had various visiting positions: in 2008 he was a visiting professor at the National University of Singapore and in 2011 at the University of Vienna; in 2012/13 he was an adjunct professor at South China Normal University, fsince 2026 he is a Global Fellow and visiting professor at Vienna Institute of Technology.
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\r\nUlf Leonhardt is the first from former East Germany to receive the Otto Hahn Award of the Max Planck Society. For his PhD thesis he received the Tiburtius Prize of the Senate of Berlin. In 2006 Scientific American listed him among the top 50 policy, business and research leaders of the world of that year. In 2008 he received a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award and in 2009 a Theo Murphy Blue Skies Award of the Royal Society. In 2012 he received a thousand-talent award of China. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Physics and of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.
Many plasticity rules rely on adjusting the strength of synapses between pairs of cells based on their coincident activity. We uncovered a new mechanism for coincidence detection in the Drosophila head direction network. To maintain an accurate sense of direction, head direction neurons that signal orientation during navigation must learn to anchor to relevant external sensory cues in novel environments. Yet the synaptic mechanism for this form of unsupervised learning is unknown in any organism. In Drosophila, GABAergic visual inputs converge onto head direction neurons, and these inhibitory synapses change strength with experience to learn the relationship between visual landmarks and head direction. However, how coincident pre- and postsynaptic activity is detected across this inhibitory synapse is not understood. We discovered that neurons which release the monoamine octopamine close a feedback loop that conveys postsynaptic head direction activity onto presynaptic terminals of visual inputs. This octopamine pathway is required for anchoring the head direction network to visual cues. Furthermore, pairing structured activation of octopamine neurons with a visual cue is sufficient to drive rapid plasticity, even without postsynaptic head direction cell activity. Previous work has extensively characterized coincidence detection mechanisms at excitatory synapses; our work defines a novel mechanism for coincidence detection at an inhibitory synapse, in which postsynaptic activity is relayed via a neuromodulatory neuron onto presynaptic terminals.
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