The next colloquium in the fall series will take place on Friday (October 27) at 14:15. Our speaker will be Jaan Praks, who is an associate professor at the Aalto University, Finland.
Jaan Praks is an associate professor (tenured) at Aalto University who is working with small satellite and remote sensing technology. His research interests are small satellites, space technology and microwave remote sensing. Jaan Praks is the PI of the first Finnish satellite, Aalto-1 and founder/advisor in many New Space start-ups in Finland. His team is part of Finnish Centre of Excellence in Research of Sustainable Space, where Aalto is building Foresail satellites. Jaan Praks is a space enthusiast and frequent public speaker on space topics.
Our first colloquium in the fall series is by Anna Watts from the University of Amsterdam on September 15th.
Anna Watts is a Professor of Astrophysics at the University of Amsterdam. Her group studies neutron stars, in particular the ultradense nuclear matter in their cores, and their violent dynamical events such as starquakes and magnetic or thermonuclear explosions. She is an ERC Starting and Consolidator Grant laureate and in 2021 was awarded the Mid-Career Prize by the American Astronomical Society’s High Energy Astrophysics Division.
The title of her talk is: A NICER view of neutron stars
Her abstract reads:
NICER, the Neutron Star Interior Composition Explorer, is an X-ray telescope on the International Space Station. Its primary mission is to measure neutron star masses and radii, quantities that enable us to investigate the nature of the ultradense nuclear matter in the star’s cores. NICER exploits relativistic effects on X-rays emitted from the hot magnetic polar caps of millisecond pulsars, a technique that also lets us map the hot emitting regions on the stellar surface. I will present NICER’s latest results and discuss the implications for our understanding of ultradense matter, pulsar emission, and stellar magnetic fields.
Our next Kumpula Physics colloquium in the spring series will take place on Thursday, June 8th at 13:15 (notice the change of day and time!). Our speaker will be Adrienne Traxler, who is an Associate Professor in the Department of Science Education at the University of Copenhagen.
Adrienne Traxler is an Associate Professor in the Department of Science Education at the University of Copenhagen. Her research focuses on university physics learning environments, as well as other science education contexts. She uses network analysis to model student collaborations and mixed methods to study gender equity issues. Her current work includes characterizing collaboration networks and activity profiles in university physics courses, and investigating the professional support networks of women and LGBTQ+ physicists in the United States.
In her colloquium, titled Gender and physics education: Systemic issues and levers for change, Adrienne Traxler will discuss the role of gender in physics education.
The percentage of women in science, technology, education, and mathematics (STEM) fields has risen in recent decades, but physics continues to lag in gender and racial representation. It is reasonable to ask: What factors drive talented women out of the field, and what can physicists do about it? Decades of research has documented various types of bias faced by women in physics and other STEM fields, as well as emerging research on the challenges faced by LGBTQ+ scientists. This talk will review large-scale statistical trends and selected specifics. I will discuss what physicists can do to help, in terms of how we structure our courses, how we talk with our students, and how we mentor them. In physics education research, treatment of gender has often focused on gender differences in introductory courses, especially via gaps on standardized tests. This work is now being supplemented by a growing number of qualitative and critical perspectives. I will end by highlighting recent work that questions binary deficit-based models of gender, explores complexities of identity such as the intersection of race and gender, or takes up under-studied areas such as disability in physics. As conversations in education shift from increasing diversity to broader issues of equity and inclusion, our research agendas and our classroom spaces must keep up.
Our next Kumpula Physics colloquium in the spring series will take place on Friday, May 5th at 14:15. Our speaker will be Tuija Saresma, who is a senior lecturer at the Research Centre for Contemporary Culture at the University of Jyväskylä
Tuija Saresma holds the title of Docent (Adjunct/Associate Professor) in Cultural Studies and Gender Studies at the universities of Jyväskylä, Helsinki, and Eastern Finland. She has published widely on hate speech and online hate and harassment. Her recent publications include peer-reviewed articles and academic book chapters on hate speech, affective communities on the internet, right-wing populism, gendered violence online, as well as two reports on hate speech by the Finnish Government’s analysis, assessment and research activities. Saresma takes actively part in societal discussion, gives talks and writes popular texts for broad audiences, including several invited blog posts for NGOs and organizations. She is also a former chairperson and currently a board member of the Association for Gender Studies in Finland (SUNS) and the Association for Cultural Studies in Finland, and the treasurer of the international Association of Cultural Studies (ACS). Saresma was granted the Academic of the Year 2022 Prize by the Finnish Union of University Researchers and Teachers.
In her colloquium, titled Hate Speech Online – a threat to equality, participation and academic freedom, Tuija Saresma will discuss how hate speech impact public decision-making processes and affects both individuals and society.
The event will be held on Friday 05.05.23 at 14:15, in Physicum E204 and on Zoom (Meeting ID: 673 9114 9743 – Passcode: kumpula).
Here is her abstract:
The concept of hate speech refers to demeaning, threatening, or stigmatising expressions often based on intolerance and hatred and targeted at a certain person or group of people based on their gender, sexual orientation, ethnic background or race. Online hate is a phenomenon that touches practically everybody in the digitalized contemporary culture. On the internet, easy distribution of content is combined with the ability to communicate to large audiences. Hate speech has become more frequent with digitalisation and the growing popularity of social media. It also coincides with the right-wing populist upheaval.
Our research Hate and Power (2019) analyses the impact of hate speech on public decision-making processes as well as its scale and quality. According to the survey, the experience of hate speech is widespread: A third of municipal decision-makers had been targeted by hate speech because of their work. In recent years it has become apparent that it is not only politicians, but other public actors are also targets of hate speech and harassment. This is a cause for concern: Especially public officials, administrators, police, reporters, researchers and politicians are regularly being targeted for hate speech. Among the producers of hate speech are, based on our research Online hate (published 2022), there is a group of ideological online hate producers that deliberately aim at affecting the political discussion.
Online hate and harassment have negative consequences for both individuals and society: they affect communication, politics, the work of professionals, and freedom of speech, which is the funding pillar of democratic societies. Online hate, threat, and harassment as a new form of violence should be taken seriously: this digitally mediated abuse is an integral part of the chain of violence that links misogynistic gender-based violence, violent political discussion and societal structures, and ideological and political violence. Thus, affective discursive expressions of hatred that spread through social media are not only violent themselves but also pave the way for an ideological readiness to use other types of violence.
Our next colloquium in the spring series is by Tuomas Lappi from the University of Jyväskylä on April 14th.
Tuomas Lappi obtained his PhD from the University of Helsinki in 2005. After postdocs at Brookhaven National Laboratory and CEA/Saclay he moved to the University of Jyväskylä in 2009. He obtained an ERC Consolidator grant in 2015. Since 2022 he is the director of the Academy of Finland Centre of Excellence in Quark Matter. His research revolves around the interactions of quarks and gluons in high energy collisions, such as relativistic heavy ion collisions aiming to produce deconfined quark matter in the laboratory.
The title of his talk is: The Electron-Ion Collider EIC – the most powerful microscope on Earth
His abstract reads:
This talk will discuss the physics program of the Electron-Ion Collider EIC. The EIC will be built at Brookhaven, combining the existing proton and ion beams of RHIC with a new electron accelerator, and should start taking data in the early 2030’s. The EIC will be the first collider energy deep inelastic scattering experiment with polarized protons, and the first to collide heavy ions. It will also have a luminosity that is orders of magnitude higher than previous comparable experiments at DESY. These features allow the EIC to access new aspects of gluonic degrees of freedom in ordinary matter, in particular gluons carrying a small fraction of the nucleus momentum. These gluons are also the relevant degrees of freedom for understanding the creation of the matter that subsequently turns into deconfined quark matter in a relativistic heavy ion collision. Thus the EIC physics program has many connections to the research on properties of the quark gluon plasma.
University of Helsinki
Jaan Praks is an associate professor (tenured) at Aalto University who is working with small satellite and remote sensing technology. His research interests are small satellites, space technology and microwave remote sensing. Jaan Praks is the PI of the first Finnish satellite, Aalto-1 and founder/advisor in many New Space start-ups in Finland. His team is part of Finnish Centre of Excellence in Research of Sustainable Space, where Aalto is building Foresail satellites. Jaan Praks is a space enthusiast and frequent public speaker on space topics.
Our next Kumpula Physics colloquium in the spring series will take place on Thursday, June 8th at 13:15 (notice the change of day and time!). Our speaker will be Adrienne Traxler, who is 
