Upper School Intersession 2025

Explore the world of convex optimization with a specific focus on linear programs. This session will delve into the core principles of convex optimization, emphasizing the role of linear programming as a powerful tool for solving structured problems across various fields. Through practical examples and theoretical insights, attendees will learn how linear programs are formulated, solved, and applied to optimize processes in areas such as operations research, economics, and data science. Whether you’re new to optimization or looking to deepen your expertise, this seminar offers valuable knowledge to help you leverage linear programming for impactful solutions.

Neuroscience is a relatively young field in biomedical research, but it has revolutionized our understanding of how humans and other organisms perceive and interact with the world. Additionally, neuroscience research has elucidated some of the mysteries of brain disease that have long since eluded the medical field. In this intersession course, students will take a survey of the world of neuroscience, with a focus on how the brain perceives and interacts with its environment.

The session will be divided into two parts: 1) a lecture-based survey of neuroscience that tracks the anatomy and physiology of how the brain processes visual stimuli and then plans and executes movements. The session will use the simple example of hitting a baseball to highlight the complex visual and motor computations that that the brain performs in less than a few tenths of a second. 2) The second half of the lesson will be a practical experiment where students will measure their own visual-motor reaction times and to use that data to estimate the speed at which information is processed in their brains and whether we can experimentally modulate information processing.

Explore the world of convex optimization with a specific focus on linear programs. This session will delve into the core principles of convex optimization, emphasizing the role of linear programming as a powerful tool for solving structured problems across various fields. Through practical examples and theoretical insights, attendees will learn how linear programs are formulated, solved, and applied to optimize processes in areas such as operations research, economics, and data science. Whether you’re new to optimization or looking to deepen your expertise, this seminar offers valuable knowledge to help you leverage linear programming for impactful solutions.

We will discuss how lasers, rather than blow stuff up, can cool atoms down to temperatures near absolute zero. At these temperatures, atoms can form macroscope waves that are the matter analog of lasers. Experiments can use these matter waves as emulators for studying quantum materials such as high-temperature superconductors. Moreover, laser-cooled atoms can serve as the key ingredient in quantum devices like sensors and computers. We'll present examples of what the new revolution in quantum science and engineering might bring.

Our Universe is 15 billion years old. In its early phases, it consisted of mainly hydrogen and helium, with only a small admixture of lithium. Yet today, when we look at our hand, we find it consists mainly of carbon and oxygen, a bit of hydrogen and nitrogen, plus some calcium present mainly in our bones. Those elements are crucial to the formation of life, but how and where did they form? In this lecture, presented on an introductory level, Dr. Madejski will talk about the history of elements and how they got dispersed into interstellar space via stellar explosions.