This presentation treats space and mobility as inseparable, where space is produced through movement, coordination, and pause, while mobility is always spatially formatted by routes, nodes, and boundaries. Their intersection is therefore not an overlap but a relational field in which placement and movement continuously reify one another. This perspective invites complex mixed methods approaches based on methodological mapping across different forms of evidence, which can show how movements cluster or stretch, while narrative interviews, participatory mapping, and field observation can uncover how actors interpret routes, obstacles, and anchors in everyday life. The aim is not merely conventional triangulation, but conceptual integration: Using different methods to move between patterns in systems and interpretation of experience. Mixed methods research can theorize space-mobility while also exploring how they are experienced, governed, and contested.
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\r\nManfred Max Bergman is Chair of Social Research and Methodology at the University of Basel and Director of the Social Transitions Research Group. He works on methodological innovations to the study of sustainability transitions, inequality, health, corporate responsibility, and social change, with particular expertise in mixed methods research and case study design. He has contributed to scholarship on mobility, inequality, and public space through international comparative and interdisciplinary projects, and previously served as Editor in Chief of the Journal of Mixed Methods Research. His current international engagements include service on the Swiss National Science Foundation’s Indo-Swiss Joint Scientific Board, collaboration with ICSSR in India on an innovative research methods training programme, and a visiting professorship at NUS in Singapore focused on implementation science and transdisciplinary research.
Neuropeptides play a critical role in modulating neural circuits and influencing behavior, yet their precise mechanisms of action remain largely unexplored. In this talk, I will present our latest findings on the role of neuropeptides in neural circuit function, uncovered through the use of novel genetically encoded sensors and silencers designed specifically for peptidergic transmission. By applying these innovative tools, we have identified key pathways and mechanisms by which neuropeptides regulate neuronal activity and orchestrate complex behavioral responses. This presentation will highlight the biological insights gained from these studies, offering a deeper understanding of how neuropeptide signaling shapes brain function and behavior.
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Who develops, finances, and commissions architecture—and in whose interest? This lecture series examines the often-invisible forces that shape architectural production—the clients who commission, the contractors who build, and the capital flows that determine what gets realized. While architects are trained to focus on design, the political economy of construction is largely absent from architectural education—sustaining a disciplinary insularity that obscures architecture's deep entanglement with capital, labor, and power. Yet building is fundamentally contingent: dependent on forces beyond the designer's reach, shaped by actors whose decisions constrain and enable architecture far more than design intentions. The series invites scholars and practitioners whose research illuminates these dependencies: the bureaucratization of architectural practice through corporate management systems, the client as a Mephistophelean figure key to the attainment of projects, the contractor as a decisive agent in determining how architecture is produced, and the entanglement of real estate development, finance, building, and urban form. By exposing the structural conditions of construction's political economy, we seek not to lament architecture's lack of autonomy but to work productively within its contingencies—essential groundwork for reimagining how practice might be organized otherwise.
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\r\nDavide Spina (University of Hong Kong, online) Spina's award-winning dissertation examined the Vatican-controlled real estate developer and contractor SGI (Società Generale Immobiliare), which emerged as a major force in postwar Italy's reconstruction. His research on what journalist Antonio Cederna called \"the Leviathan\" reveals how SGI coordinated 10,000 employees, bureaucratized architectural production, exploited planning regulations, and delivered schemes from residential developments to industrial infrastructure. Currently working on real estate development in 1960s-70s Hong Kong, Spina examines how developers and contractors shape architectural culture through corporate management systems.
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Boiling is one of the most efficient modes of heat transfer, underlying many energy-intensive processes. Advancements in surface engineering have enabled significant enhancement of boiling heat transfer. However, performance gains rarely transfer across conditions or geometries. Two challenges illustrate why: bubble nucleation behavior is poorly reproducible; and increasing nucleating density to raise the heat transfer coefficient typically lowers the system’s maximum achievable heat flux. This talk presents our efforts in addressing each challenge by identifying the governing mechanism and designing for it.
\r\nIn the first part, micro-engineered silicon surfaces isolate two governing length scales: the hydrodynamic boundary layer thickness, which controls nucleation stability through inter-site shielding, and the bubble departure diameter, which governs vapor removal after full activation. We experimentally show that nucleation stability responds to the former length scale (~0.24 mm); heat transfer in the activated regime responds to the latter length scale (~2.5 mm).
\r\nThe second study addresses the high-heat-flux limit, where large vapor structures block liquid return. Capillary wicking through copper inverse opals (~10 μm pores) supplies liquid beneath the vapor. Crucially, the pore cavities are themselves the nucleation sites, so wicking capacity and nucleation density derive from the same structure. Further, CuO nanograss on the pore walls suppresses vapor penetration into the porous layer, enabling thicker structures and greater capillary head. The result is simultaneous enhancement of heat transfer coefficients and maximum heat fluxes.
\r\nTogether, the two works show that mechanism-targeted surface design yields gains that empirical topography optimization does not. They point toward a broader design principle: that nucleation and interfacial transport, treated as controllable rather than given, offer a promising path to engineering phase change processes across applications.
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\r\nhttps://dx.doi.org/10.1021/acsami.9b20520?ref=pdf
\r\nhttps://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-019-10209-w
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\r\nBio: Zhengmao Lu is a Tenure Track Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering at EPFL. Prior to joining EPFL, Zhengmao was a postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at MIT with Prof. Jeffrey Grossman. He received his Ph.D. and M.S. in Mechanical Engineering from MIT, both advised by Prof. Evelyn Wang. At EPFL, Zhengmao leads the Energy Transport Advances Laboratory (η-Lab), aiming to deepen our understanding of phase change phenomena and develop more sustainable energy and water technologies by optimizing interfacial transport. Zhengmao is a recipient of the ERC Starting Grant, MicroFIPS Outstanding Early Career Award, Keck Travel Award in Thermal Sciences, and the Outstanding Graduate Research Award from MIT Mechanical Engineering.
Thesis Directors: Prof. F. Mila, Dr M. Müller
\r\nPhysics doctoral program
\r\nThesis Nr. 11527
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\r\nTo take part in the public defense, please contact directly the speaker
Thesis Directors: Dr. O. Sauter, Dr F. A. A. Felici
\r\nPhysics doctoral program
\r\nThesis Nr. 11288
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\r\nTo take part in the public defense, please contact directly the speaker