Science Forum
The E.E. Just Science Forum provides an opportunity for our communty members, fellows, interns, alumni, or faculty members to present their research to an enthusicatic STEM audience in an informal setting.
Wednesdays 5:30 pm - 7pm
Each term, some of our weekly Jam Session are replaced by an E.E. Just Science Forum presentation. This event features talks by Dartmouth faculty, by visiting scientists, and/or by E.E. Just fellows or interns. The gatherings usually include a relatively brief presentation with a Q&A session. The speaker typically spends a little time with the audience—either before or after the talk—over dinner in the E.E. Just Room. This is a great opportunity for our fellows and community members to learn more about exciting ideas in STEM and to network with scientists working at the forefront of their fields.
Recent Science Forum Talks
AI - Past, Present, and Future
George Cybenko, Professor of Engineering, Thayer
Artificial Intelligence is having an enormous impact on many aspects of human activity. After a brief history of AI, starting with the seminal 1956 Dartmouth Conference, I will present the technical breakthroughs that got us to the present technologies. The bulk of this presentation will focus on future possibilities for AI, which will be interactive with the audience.
Isavuconazole versus Standard of Care as First Line Outpatient Antifungal Therapy for Dimorphic Fungi.
Mark Hsia '28 - EEJ 2025 Summer Intern
Histoplasmosis, coccidioidomycosis, and blastomycosis are dimorphic fungi that cause severe systemic and pulmonary infections with high morbidity and mortality. Standard-of-care antifungal treatments for these diseases remain limited, with only two first-line outpatient therapies and variable efficacy and safety profiles. Through funding from the E.E. Just Society and a collaboration with the Mycoses Group and Dr. Andrej Spec at Washington University School of Medicine, the first comparative study was conducted proving a third antifungal, isavuconazole, to be a comparable alternative first-line treatment with a favorable safety profile to the aforementioned dimorphic infections.
Big Science with Small Galaxies
Burçin Mutlu-Padkil, Assistant Professor of Physics and Astronomy
Dark matter makes up about 85% of the matter in the Universe, yet we still don't know what it is. While it has never been directly detected in laboratories, astronomy offers powerful clues. The smallest and faintest galaxies are the most dark-matter-dominated systems we know, making them ideal laboratories for studying its nature. Thanks to modern sky surveys, we are rapidly discovering more of these tiny galaxies in our cosmic neighborhood. In this talk, I will highlight how the search for the faintest galaxies is opening a new window into one of the biggest mysteries in physics.
Know Your Planet, Know Your Star, Know Your Galaxy: How Galactic History Shapes Our Solar System
Rayna Rampalli, PhD (former EEJ Graduate Fellow)
When considering our own origins on the only planet known to host life, astronomers seek to understand the conditions around the stars that host planetary systems. But those stars do not form in isolation: they are born from gas shaped by our Milky Way Galaxy's history. In this talk, I will show how stars serve as the linchpin connecting planets to the Galaxy, using our Sun as a case study. The Sun has long appeared chemically unusual compared to other Sun-like stars, a difference often attributed to the formation of the Solar System. I will demonstrate that this apparent peculiarity instead reflects the chemical evolution of the Milky Way. Viewed in its true Galactic context, the Sun is not exceptional and reshapes how we interpret planetary systems across the Milky Way, including our own.
Bee Larceny in Pollination
Natalie Rodriguez, PhD Candidate & EEJ Graduate Fellow
Why do some bumblebee visitors act like sneaky burglars, sipping nectar without doing the pollination "pay‑back" that plants expect? We suspected the culprit might be a microscopic hitchhiker living inside the sweet liquid itself. In a recently published paper in iScience, we discovered that the nectar‑loving yeast Metschnikowia reukaufii secretes a fragrant "scent‑trail" that lures bumble‑bees to cheat. In field experiments, Bombus workers found robber holes 2 seconds faster and spent ≈ 60 % more time on yeast‑infested Cordyalis and Mertensia flowers than on controls. Gas‑chromatography revealed a bouquet of 14 new volatile compounds released after just two days of fermentation, and olfactometer tests confirmed that bees are drawn to this perfume. In short, a microscopic microbe can spin a sweet‑smelling lure that turns helpful pollinators into opportunistic nectar thieves.
Mapping the Outskirts of Ultra-Faint Dwarf Galaxy Horologium I
Sasha Campana, PhD Candidate & EEJ Graduate Fellow
We present deep Magellan/Megacam stellar photometry of the ultra-faint dwarf galaxy Horologium I (Hor I). Our data reaches ~ 1 - 2 magnitudes deeper than the discovery data from the Dark Energy Survey (DES), motivating our determination of its properties (e.g., ellipticity, position angle, half-light radius, and signs of tidal disruption). We investigate the morphology of Hor I through a matched-filter technique that maximizes the signal-to-noise against the background. The smoothed matched-filter map of Hor I shows the main body of the satellite along with a slightly extended feature. We inject an artificial galaxy with the same properties as Hor I to characterize the background and find that the extended feature may be a sign of a disturbance in the system.
Trust Between Humans and AI
Bruno Miranda Henrique, PhD (former EEJ Graduate Fellow)
Trust calibration between humans and Artificial Intelligence (AI) is crucial for optimal decision making in collaborative settings. Excessive trust can lead users to accept AI-generated outputs without question, overlooking critical flaws, while insufficient trust may result in disregarding valuable insights from AI systems, hindering performance. Despite its importance, there is currently no definitive and objective method for measuring trust calibration between humans and AI. Current approaches lack standardization and consistent metrics that can be broadly applied across various contexts, and they don't distinguish between the formation of opinions and subsequent human decisions. In this talk, I will present a solution to trust calibration between humans and AI and illustrate it with some quantitative results.
From DNA to Protein: The Molecular Assembly Line
Assistant Professor in the Department of Molecular and Systems Biology at the Geisel School of Medicine
The cells in your body contain genes made of DNA. Genes store the genetic information passed on to you by your parents. This information serves as the recipe to make proteins, and proteins build, maintain, and heal every tissue in your body. The cellular machinery that makes proteins reads this recipe with the help of small molecules called transfer RNAs (tRNAs), which supply the necessary building blocks in the correct order to construct specific proteins. To function properly, tRNAs must fold into the correct three-dimensional shape, a process that requires tRNAs to be decorated with chemical modifications. In this seminar, we will discuss the importance of this decorating process in normal physiology and in the context of diseases such as cancer.
Rooting in place: Trees and perennials reflect permanence in urban gardens and communities
Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies at Dartmouth College
Urban community gardens are often viewed as a means for improving equity and access to greenspace and ecosystem services in cities, yet persistent inequities in homeownership and wealth in cities across the US may influence species composition in urban gardens and consequently what kinds of ecosystem services are provided, to who, and for how long. In this paper, we link patterns of tree planting and perennial crop cultivation in urban gardens to trends in garden abandonment, homeownership, and race across the city of Boston, MA where the nation's oldest urban gardens persist in a landscape segregated according to lines of wealth and race. We find that urban gardens with more trees are older, have less plot abandonment during the growing season, higher proportions of perennial plant species including many medicinal herbs, and are positively correlated with white populations and homeownership, revealing an interconnectedness between trees, perennial plants, race, and land tenure security.