Invited Plenaries
- Prof A. Russ Taylor, University of Cape Town, South Africa
Prof. Taylor moved from Calgary, where he was the head of SKA-Canada, to Cape Town 2 years ago to take up a Research Chair position. Here, he has founded the Institute for Data Intensive Astronomy (IDIA), which is designed to help South Africa meet the Big Data challenge arising from the Square Kilometre Array project, which is the world's largest telescope to be built mostly in South Africa. The data rates from the full SKA, planned to be complete in the late 2020's, are so large that current computing in the world cannot meet these requirements. Even South Africa's SKA precursor telescope, MeerKAT, currently being constructed in the Karoo, will be a major challenge. Taylor would give an engaging talk on the immensity of this challenge and how South Africa and the international astronomy community are rising to meet it.
Plenary Title: The Square Kilometre Array: Big Telescope, Big Science, Big Data.
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- Prof. Predrag Cvitanović, Georgia Institute of Technology, United States of America
Prof. Predrag Cvitanović is an expert in chaotic dynamics who studies turbulence using a combination of theoretical tools and direct numerical simulation (DNS) methods. His goal is to describe and control physical turbulent flows in terms of numerically exact solutions of the Navier-Stokes, with no probabilistic assumptions or low dimensional modelling. The requisite theory -nonlinear dynamics, chaos, periodic orbits, group theory - is described in ChaosBook.org and in the open online courses ChaosBook.org. The open source Channelflow.org and OpenPipeflow.org codes make it possible to determine hierarchies of "recurrent flows", computationally demanding but numerically exact unstable time-periodic 3D fluid flows. These form the backbone of turbulent flows and explain turbulent states observed experimentally.
Prof. Predrag Cvitanović is an expert in chaotic dynamics who studies turbulence using a combination of theoretical tools and direct numerical simulation (DNS) methods. His goal is to describe and control physical turbulent flows in terms of numerically exact solutions of the Navier-Stokes, with no probabilistic assumptions or low dimensional modelling. The requisite theory -nonlinear dynamics, chaos, periodic orbits, group theory - is described in ChaosBook.org and in the open online courses ChaosBook.org. The open source Channelflow.org and OpenPipeflow.org codes make it possible to determine hierarchies of "recurrent flows", computationally demanding but numerically exact unstable time-periodic 3D fluid flows. These form the backbone of turbulent flows and explain turbulent states observed experimentally.
- Prof. Phuti Ngoepe, University of Limpopo, South Africa
Phuti Ngoepe obtained his first degree at the University of the North (now University of Limpopo) and completed a PhD in Physics at the University of Witwatersrand. He spent sabbatical at the University of Keele, UK where he commenced with work on computational modelling of materials. He is Professor of Physics at the University of Limpopo and Director of Materials Modelling Centre and holds a SARChI Chair in Computational Modelling of Materials. His research activities range from electronic to nano scales and cover energy storage, mineral processing and alloy development. He has worked with local and international collaborators – in the UK, USA, France and Japan. He has produced several publications in this field, including chapters in three books, and presented invited papers at local and international conferences. He has also contributed significantly to science policy formulation in South Africa. He is a member of several science societies and Founder Member of the Academy of Science of South Africa. Amongst honours bestowed on him are the National Science and Technology Forum award, National Research Foundation Presidential award, National Order of Mapungubwe Silver.
Plenary Title: Simulated synthesis, characterisation and performance of nano-architectured energy storage materials.
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- Prof. Shiping Feng, Beijing Normal University, China
Dr. Shiping Feng is currently serving as Professor of Physics at Beijing Normal University, China. He was born in Ningxia, China, and received his scientific training at Beijing Normal University (the B.S. degree, 1982, the M.S. degree, 1984, and the Ph.D. degree, 1987), Texas Center for Superconductivity at University of Houston, USA (post-doc, 1987-1989), and International Centre for Theoretical Physics at Trieste, Italy (research associate, 1992-1994). He has been working on Condensed Matter Theory, Superconductivity, Strongly Correlated System.
He assumed his appointment at Beijing Normal University in 1989. He was Chairman of Physics Department at Beijing Normal University between 2000 and 2003. He has trained 18 Ph. D. and 19 master’s students and sponsored 3 postdoctoral research associates. He was a recipient of the Qiushi Prize (1997) in China. His research activities extend beyond superconductivity to magnetism and strong electron correlation. His work has resulted in the publication of more than 150 papers in refereed journals. He serves on the editorial boards of various professional journals in China and is associate editors-in-chief of Science China Physics, Mechanics & Astronomy.
Plenary Title: Kinetic-energy driven superconductivity in cuprate superconductors.
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- Prof. Shobhana Narasimhan, Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research, India
Prof. Shobhana Narasimhan did her PhD at Harvard University, under David Vanderbilt, and post docs at Brookhaven and the Fritz Haber Institut in Berlin. Since 1996, she has been on the faculty at the Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research in Bangalore, India, where she is currently a Professor and Dean of Academic Affairs. Her area of research is the computational design of nanomaterials. She is also actively interested in issues related to science education in developing countries, and promoting women in science.
Plenary Title: Understanding and designing novel nanomaterials from first principles
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- Prof. Jianwei Sun, The University of Texas, El Paso, United States of America
Jianwei Sun received his Ph.D in physics from Tulane University in 2010 and did his postdoc work there till 2013. He then moved to the College of Science and Technology at Temple University as a Research Assistant Professor of Physics (promoted to Research Associate Professor of Physics in 2015). He will move to the University of Texas at El Paso as an Assistant Professor on July 2016. Jianwei Sun has been working on the development of density functional theory (DFT) and its applications for more than 10 years. He has designed several efficient and accurate nonempirical functionals that are drastically different from old seminal work and stimulating the rethinking and reconstruction of the old seminal work. The recently developed SCAN density functional is potentially useful throughout materials science, condensed matter physics, chemistry, and biology. He received the 2016 Young Scientist Prize of the Commission 20 (C20) of the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP).
Plenary Title: Efficient and accurate first-principles predictions of structures and energies for Materials Science, Chemistry and Biology
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- Dr. Wei-Min Wang, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China
After his Bachelor, Dr. Wei-Min Wang has been working on theoretical and simulation investigation on laser plasma physics mainly by use of the particle-in-cell simulation code KLAPS developed by himself, which is applied to advanced schemes of inertial confined fusion, laser-plasma based particle accelerators, and novel radiation sources from terahertz to gamma-rays. Dr. Wang got his PhD from Institute of Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), Beijing, China in 2009 and then he became an Assistant research scientist in the institute immediately after graduation. In this year he won the S. T. Tsai award for excellent PhD thesis in plasma physics. In 2012, he became an Associate Research Scientist in Institute of Physics, CAS. In 2015 he won IUPAP Young Scientist Prize in Computational Physics. He has co-authored over 60 papers published in refereed journals (including 6 in Phys. Rev. Lett. and 1 in PNAS).
Plenary Title: Development of particle-in-cell code KLAPS and its applications in laser plasma physics
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