Blog

This seminar was the first of ten in our AI3SD Winter Seminar Series. This seminar was hosted online via a zoom webinar. The event was themed around Topology and its applications in Chemistry and consisted of three talks on this subject. Below are the three videos of the talks with speaker biographies, and the full playlist of this seminar can be found here.

Topology: From shapes to numbers (Professor Jacek Brodzki – University of Southampton)

Professor Jacek Brodzki is Professor of Pure Mathematics at the University of Southampton. He is fascinated by interactions between analysis and geometry. His current work revolves around problems in noncommutative geometry arising from the Baum-Connes conjecture, including characterisations of property A, exactness of groups and their consequences. A very important part of Jacek’s research concentrates on applications of geometry and topology to modern data analysis, which was supported by the EPSRC through the programme “Joining the dots: From data to insight” (JTD). He leads a research group which works on creating a deep integration of topological data analysis, machine learning and statistics.

DOI Link

New theoretical and data-driven approaches to the study of molecular conformational spaces and energy landscapes (Dr Ingrid Membrillo Solis – University of Southampton)

Ingrid Membrillo Solis is a research fellow at the University of Southampton since September 2018. She is currently working on problems from algebraic topology, differential geometry and topological data analysis. Ingrid os interested in unstable homotopy theory, fibre bundles, mapping spaces, actions of Lie groups on manifolds, spectral geometry of orbifolds, and their connections to other disciplines such as physics, chemistry and biology.

DOI Link

The Shape of Data in Chemistry – Insights Gleaned from Complex Solutions and Their Interfaces (Professor Aurora Clark – Washington State University)

Aurora Clark is a Professor of Chemistry at Washington State University. Her research employs both quantum and statistical mechanics to study chemical processes within complex chemical environments, focusing upon solution chemistry and liquid interfaces. This includes concentrated electrolytes, liquid/liquid interfaces related to separations science, structured fluids, and phase phenomena. To reveal the hierarchical organization and dynamic behavior in such systems, her laboratory has expanded the tools of graph theory, algebraic and geometric topology, to analyze data from modeling and simulation. Of particular interest is bridging the separate communities of applied mathematics with Chemistry and Materials Science by creating algorithms that are well-suited to simulation data and that provide new physical insight. Dr. Clark is the author of more than 100 publications and is a Fellow of the American Chemical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. 

DOI Link