Events Listing

IEEE is glad to host another social on November 21st at 6:30 PM in the IEEE room for board games, dinner, and the chance to hang out with your fellow ECE peers! We will have games, both digital and analog. You will also get to meet as many members as you want and talk about school, hobbies, and much more. Excited to see you there.

 Please RSVP here.

Recommended for all ages

Join the Bell Museum at our November star party!  This time, all eyes are on Jupiter. Out on the Bell Museum roof deck, we’ll have our telescopes set up to observe Jupiter and some of our favorite winter deep space objects (weather dependent). Inside, we’ll have hands-on activities and a look at the research on Jupiter being done by University of Minnesota scientists.

Shattering Pre-Conceptions in Power Electronics

Sometimes progress ends before it even begins…When our point of departure begins within a pre-existing framework and we forget that it is only a model with many assumptions on what is possible. And perhaps history has distorted some of these and we think they are facts. In this seminar, I will introduce some unconventional schemas for overcoming pervasive limitations in (a) partial power processing in energy storage systems, (b) digital control of variable frequency power converters, (c) high-frequency current sensor feedback, and (d) multiple access wireless power transfer. I will discuss the hardware and models, the foundations of the theory, and share results from hardware and simulations.

About Professor Avestruz

Al-Thaddeus Avestruz is an Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, MI, USA. He received the SB degree in physics with electrical engineering, the SM and EE degrees, and the PhD degree in electrical engineering and computer science from MIT. His research interests include the design, modeling, and control of high-performance power electronics in energy systems, and wireless power transfer for energy, mobility, medicine, and the Internet of Things. He is the chair of TC1: Control and Modeling of Power Electronics for the IEEE Power Electronics Society. He was the Technical Program Co-Chair of the 2021 IEEE Wireless Power Week (WoW) and is the General Chair of the 24th IEEE Workshop on Control and Modeling for Power Electronics (COMPEL) in 2023. He has over a decade of industry and entrepreneurial experience, and holds 12 issued U.S. patents. He was awarded the NSF CAREER in 2021.

Unique Insights into Magnetic Skyrmions Provided by Neutron Scattering

Magnetic skyrmions are chiral spin textures in-which the magnetic moments curl into a continuous, coplanar loop, bounded by moments in the out-of-plane direction. This configuration provides a non-trivial topology and quasiparticle qualities, including skyrmion dynamic modes. Hybrid skyrmions have shown the largest stability envelope, which includes room temperature and zero magnetic field, making them attractive for skyrmion spintronic devices. In the first part of this talk I will present the basic usage of small angle neutron scattering (SANS) in preparing an ordered lattice of hybrid skyrmions. Then, using grazing incidence SANS and neutron reflectometry, we elucidate the 3D structure of the skyrmions – which is important for both the toplogy and stability. In the third part, we use SANS as an in situ probe of the gigahertz skyrmion dynamics and discover a spin wave fractal network. Time permitting, I will discuss our recent work coupling skyrmions to superconducting vortices.

About Professor Dustin Gilbert

Dustin Gilbert is an Assistant Professor in the Materials Science and Engineering Department, at the University of Tennessee. He received his Ph.D. in Physics from the University of California in Davis in 2014 and was an NRC postdoctoral fellow at the NIST Center for Neutron Research before joining the faculty at the University of Tennessee in 2018. Prof. Gilbert conducts research on nanoscale systems with an emphasis on magnetic materials and phenomenon. This research has included hard drive materials, biomedical materials, magneto-ionic systems, biomedical materials, and high entropy alloys and oxides, as well as fundamental research into proximity effects and hysteretic reversal processes. Recently, Dr. Gilbert was awarded a DOE Early Career award to investigate chiral magnetic structures, including specifically magnetic skyrmions, using neutron and X-ray scattering.

The event will be a live presentation on Zoom to discuss common non-immigrant visas and green card options for international students, including recent developments. Sarah Peterson, a nationally-recognized immigration attorney based in Minneapolis with over 16 years of advanced employment-based immigration experience, will discuss strategies and answer questions.

This event will be held via Zoom on Thursday, November 10th, and it will include a live Question and Answer opportunity with Sarah who will be present to address some questions from the audience. This session will be recorded and shared on the ISSS website.

Recommended for all ages

Spotlight Science is a regular program connecting you to current science conducted at the University of Minnesota and in our community. Join researchers, students, and special guests for conversations and unique interactive experiences.

Connect with researchers from the University of Minnesota who will showcase their exciting work in brain science through a day of demonstrations and exciting hands-on activities. Explore what the brain does and how it changes over a lifetime. Investigate human and other animal brains up-close. Learn about the consequences of brain injury and drug addiction.

More information and details

Physical computation

What makes something a computer? We are familiar with computational artifacts--devices made by people--but are there any "natural" computers? Many neuroscientists maintain that the brain is in fact a computer, so that we should explain its workings in computational terms. Some biologists explain phenomena as diverse as cell dynamics, swarming behavior, and slime mould foraging as computational. Many of these tacitly employ a "simple mapping account" which holds that any phenomena that can be modeled ("mapped") as a Turing machine or some equivalent notion is a computer. But this account wildly overgeneralizes, allowing almost any physical thing of sufficient complexity to be a computer, thereby threatening to rob computational explanations of their power. After reviewing the problems that various amendments to the simple mapping account face, I suggest a quite different account: what makes something a computer is how an agent uses the thing. Finally I draw some lessons from this agent-centric view for computational explanations in the natural world.

About Professor Sam Fletcher

Sam Fletcher is Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, a Resident Fellow of the Minnesota Center for Philosophy of Science, and an External Member of the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität.

WIE is excited to welcome Collins Aerospace to the University of Minnesota Twin Cities. They will provide an informational session on  Wednesday, November 2, from 5:00 pm - 6:00 pm in 512B Bruininks Hall. Food will be provided! Bring friends and come to listen to what it's like working at Collins and the opportunities they have for UMN students! You must RSVP. 

The University of Minnesota Police Department and the Global Gopher Influencers will give you tips about staying safe on campus and preparing for winter.

Join us for a live presentation discussing the various types of employment-based visas (including H-1B) and paths to permanent residency (“green card”). The presentation will be done by John Medeiros, an immigration attorney with nearly 30 years of experience in immigration law.  This event will be held via Zoom on Tuesday, November 1st at 12:00pm CST, and it will include a live Question and Answer opportunity with John who will be present to address your questions. This event will also be recorded and shared on the ISSS website. There will be other immigration attorney presentations in the month of November.
Zoom Registration Link