More from Events Calendar
- Oct 149:30 AMBuild Up Healthy Writing Habits with Writing Together Online (Challenge 1)Writing Together Online offers the structured writing time to help you stay focused and productive during the busy fall months. Join our daily 90-minute writing sessions and become part of a community of scholars who connect online, set realistic goals, and write together in the spirit of accountability and camaraderie. We offer writing sessions every workday, Monday through Friday. The program is open to all MIT students, postdocs, faculty, staff, and affiliates who are working on papers, proposals, thesis/dissertation chapters, application materials, and other writing projects.Please register for any number of sessions:Monday, Wednesday, and Friday 9:00–10:30am (EST) Tuesday and Thursday, 8:00–9:30am and 9:30-11:00am (EST)For more information and to register, go to this link or check the WCC website. Please spread the word and join with colleagues and friends. MIT Students and postdocs who attend at least 5 sessions per challenge will be entered into a gift-card raffle.
- Oct 1410:00 AMInk, Stone, and Silver Light: A Century of Cultural Heritage Preservation in AleppoOn view October 1 -- December 11, 2025This exhibition draws on archival materials from the Aga Khan Documentation Center at MIT (AKDC) to explore a century of cultural heritage preservation in Aleppo, Syria. It takes as its point of departure the work of Kamil al-Ghazzi (1853–1933), the pioneering Aleppine historian whose influential three-volume chronicle, Nahr al-Dhahab fī Tārīkh Ḥalab (The River of Gold in the History of Aleppo), was published between 1924 and 1926.Ink, Stone, and Silver Light presents three modes of documentation—manuscript, built form, and photography—through which Aleppo’s urban memory has been recorded and preserved. Featuring figures such as Michel Écochard and Yasser Tabbaa alongside al-Ghazzi, the exhibition traces overlapping efforts to capture the spirit of a city shaped by commerce, craft, and coexistence. At a time when Syria again confronts upheaval and displacement, these archival fragments offer models for preserving the past while envisioning futures rooted in dignity, knowledge, and place.
- Oct 1412:00 PMLunch with Lawyers – Gibson DunnEnjoy lunch with distinguished alumnae, Kieran Kieckhefer and Hannah Bedard! This informal session is a great opportunity to gain insight into the legal profession, network and ask questions ranging from law school prep to life as an attorney.Kieran Kieckhefer is a partner in Gibson Dunn’s San Francisco office and a member of the Intellectual Property Practice Group. Kieran graduated from the University of Wisconsin Law School, and she received a B.S. in Mathematics from MIT in 2002.Hannah Bedard is an associate in Gibson Dunn’s Washington, D.C. office. She is a member of the firm’s litigation department, and her practice focuses on intellectual property litigation. Hannah received her Juris Doctor from the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School, and she received her Bachelor of Science in Brain and Cognitive Sciences from MIT in 2011.This CAPD event is open to MIT undergraduates, graduate students, postdocs, and alumni. Lunch will be provided by Gibson Dunn.Registration is required for this event. Please register here
- Oct 141:00 PMPGSA October Donut SocialDonut hour hosted by the Polymer Graduate Student Association. Come by and enjoy some sweet treats while discussing polymers and soft matter (or not!) Open to all MIT graduate students.
- Oct 142:30 PMOrganizational Economics Seminar"Acquisitions and Relational Management Practices" | Ameet Morjaria (MIT Sloan)
- Oct 142:30 PMPhysical Mathematics SeminarSpeaker: Stefano Martiniani (NYU)Title: Though This Be Disorder, Yet There Is Order in’tAbstract:Understanding the relationship between structure and properties is crucial to designing materials with novel functions. Crystals have proven to be a highly versatile platform for engineering functions, as the periodicity of their atomic arrangement greatly facilitates the prediction and optimization of their properties. However, not all properties can be realized with periodic structures. Correlated disordered media — materials that do not exhibit conventional forms of long-range order — can achieve transport properties unattainable in periodic systems, such as the formation of isotropic photonic bandgaps, which are highly desirable in optoelectronic applications. By the very nature of disorder, identifying principles and approaches to engineer disordered functional materials is very challenging — in fact, what does it even mean to “engineer disorder”? In this talk, I will show how we established a new state of the art in the design of correlated disordered structures. This approach led us to the discovery of a new class of disordered functional materials that we termed “gyromorphs”, which uniquely combine liquidlike translational disorder with quasi-long-range rotational order, induced by a ring of delta peaks in their structure factor. We predict that gyromorphs outperform all existing isotropic photonic bandgap materials, paving the way for fine control over optical properties. Finally, I will provide an outlook and discuss recent results on how we are leveraging noisy processes to build generative AI models that will accelerate the discovery of novel materials across the periodic table. “Though this be madness, yet there is method in’t” (Hamlet II.ii).References: 1. A. Shih, M. Casiulis, S. Martiniani, Fast generation of spectrally shaped disorder, Phys. Rev. E, 110(3), 034122 (2024) 2. M. Casiulis, A. Shih, S. Martiniani, Gyromorphs: a new class of functional disordered materials, arXiv preprint arXiv:2410.09023 (2024) 3. P. Hoellmer, T. Egg, M.M. Martirossyan, E. Fuemmeler, Z. Shui, A. Gupta, P. Prakash, A. Roitberg, M. Liu, G. Karypis, M. Transtrum, R.G. Hennig, E.B. Tadmor, S. Martiniani, Open Materials Generation with Stochastic Interpolants, Proc. 42nd Int. Conf. Mach. Learn. (ICML), PMLR 267 (2025) 4. M. Martirossyan, T. Egg, P. Höllmer, G. Karypis, M. Transtrum, A. Roitberg, M. Liu, R. Hennig, E.B. Tadmor, S. Martiniani, All that structure matches does not glitter, accepted at NeurIPS 2025, arXiv:2509.12178 (2025)