Research Seminars @ Illinois

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Tailored for undergraduate researchers, this calendar is a curated list of research seminars at the University of Illinois. Explore the diverse world of research and expand your knowledge through engaging sessions designed to inspire and enlighten.

To have your events added or removed from this calendar, please contact OUR at ugresearch@illinois.edu

Special Biological Physics Seminar- "Chaotic worms: from the dynamics of animal behavior towards a physics of complex, evolved systems"

Event Type: Seminar/Symposium
Sponsor: The Physics Department
Location: Loomis 464
Date: Apr 28, 2025 1:00 - 3:00 pm
Speaker: Gregory Stephens, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
Contact: Janice Benner
E-Mail: jbenner@illinois.edu
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Originating Calendar: Physics - Biological Physics / iPoLS / STC-QCB Seminar; From molecular motions within a cell to gene expression and neural activity, the living world is a teeming dance of heterogenous, interconnected components. But how can we understand the remarkable diversity of biological forms and functions? And what is the role of a physical perspective? I address these questions on the scale of entire organisms where the effects of such dynamics are quantifiable through posture tracking from deep machine vision. I describe a framework which fuses dynamical systems, statistical physics and information theory with precision measurements to identify important behaviors and their meaning, and I demonstrate this approach in the wiggling of the nematode C. elegans. We find a low-dimensional and chaotic phase space with a symmetric Lyapunov spectrum, and spanned by three sets of unstable orbits corresponding to forward, reverse and turning locomotion. Within this space, we construct a Markov dynamics which is also predictive of long-time behavior transitions. Our “inverse” approach, where observed behavior is used to infer underlying dynamics, offers a general strategy with which to seek effective theories and emergent principles of complex, evolved systems.

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