Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology

Twenty years past from the isolation of graphene. In this talk we will discuss some history connected to the graphene discovery. We will also consider how 2D materials, van der Waals heterostructures and metasurfaces inspired by graphene, enriched physics and technology. The talks main emphasis will be made on optics in flatland and plasmonics, a glimpse into a future of flatland will be provided.About Prof. A. N. GrigorenkoProf. A. N. Grigorenko got PhD from Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology in 1989 and worked as a Professor of Physics at the University of Manchester from 2002. He is a specialist in plasmonics, nano-optics, magnetism and superconductors. By Google scholar, he got 37090 citations with h-index 51 and i10-index 104. His best works are on optics of graphene/2D materials and properties of artificial plasmonic crystals.VenueThe DIAS Auditorium, SDU Campus OdenseThis event is open for all. No registration needed.

The democratic triumphalism of the 1990s has given way to a sense that democracy is in crisis – whether because it’s been hijacked by woke metropolitan elites, or because it’s being assailed by populist masses. In this context it’s arguably unhelpful to proceed from the premise that the meaning of democracy had been established, but is now failing because of bad actors (which is not to say that there aren’t bad actors around). To free our imaginations to find new ways forward, we should start by recognising that the meanings of democracy have always been contested, that predominant meanings have changed over time (and varied over space), and that democratic projects have often run into difficulties and had to be rethought. In this lecture I will draw on the findings of a long-running historical research project, ‘Re-imagining democracy’, which looks at the circumstances in which the ancient concept of democracy was ‘re-imagined’ for modern circumstances, from the era of the American and French revolutions. The project spans Europe and both Americas, focussing on a century in which the fortunes of the word were especially changeable and varied. I will try to give a flavour of how and why its meanings and associations varied and changed.About Joanna Innes Joanna Innes is Professor (emeritus) of Modern History at the University of Oxford. She was educated in Britain and the United States, and first employed at Oxford in 1982. Her early research focussed on social policy-making in England, often in a larger European context, initially focussing especially on punishment and poverty. She is now working on the emergence of new topics on the British parliamentary agenda in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, including health, education and working conditions. Her work focusses especially on policy-making processes, in a period in which the British government largely left the initiative to groups outside Parliament. The effect was that policy-making was fairly participatory, and the subject of public debate. Some of this work is collected in her volume Inferior Politics: Social Problems and Social Policies in Britain 1688-1800 (2009). For the past twenty years she has also collaborated with Mark Philp on an international project, Re-imagining Democracy (www.re-imaginingdemocracy.com ). This explores how the ancient concept of democracy was adapted to conceptualise modern problems and opportunities. The project has given rise to three collections of essays (2013, 2018, 2023 – details on the website).  A fourth and final volume, focussing on ‘central and northern Europe’ (including Nordic countries) is currently in train.VenueThe DIAS Auditorium, SDU Campus OdenseThis event is open for all. No registration needed.

In The Road to Freedom Nobel prize winner Joseph E. Stiglitz dissects America’s current economic system and the political ideology that created it, laying bare their twinned failure. “Free” and unfettered markets have only succeeded in delivering a series of crises: the financial crisis, the opioid crisis, and the crisis of inequality. While a small portion of the population has amassed considerable wealth, wages for most people have stagnated. Free and unfettered markets have exploited consumers, workers, and the environment alike. Such failures have fed populist movements that believe being free means abandoning any obligations citizens have to one another. As they grow in strength, these movements now pose a real threat to true economic and political freedom.The Road to Freedom breaks new ground, showing how economics―including recent advances in which Stiglitz has played such an important role―reframes how to think about freedom and the role of the state in a twenty-first century society. Drawing on the work of contemporary philosophers, Stiglitz explains a deeper, more humane way to assess freedoms―one that considers with care what to do when one person’s freedom conflicts with another’s. We must reimagine our existing economic and legal systems and embrace forms of collective action, including regulation and investment, if we are to create an innovative society in which everyone can flourish.About Joseph E. StiglitzJoseph E. Stiglitz is an American economist and a professor at Columbia University. He is also the co-chair of the High-Level Expert Group on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress at the OECD, and the Chief Economist of the Roosevelt Institute. Stiglitz was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2001 and the John Bates Clark Medal in 1979. He is a former senior vice president and chief economist of the World Bank and a former chair of the U.S. Council of Economic Advisers. In 2000, Stiglitz founded the Initiative for Policy Dialogue, a think tank on international development based at Columbia University. In 2011 Stiglitz was named by Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in the world. Known for his pioneering work on asymmetric information, Stiglitz's research focuses on income distribution, climate change, corporate governance, public policy, macroeconomics and globalization. He is the author of numerous books including, most recently, People, Power, and Profits, Rewriting the Rules of the European Economy, and Globalization and Its Discontents Revisited.VenueThe DIAS Auditorium, SDU Campus OdenseThis event is open for all. No registration needed - first come, first served. Streaming option availableStream the event on Zoom

Santiago Quintero de los Ríos defends his PhD thesis at a public lecture titled: ”The Continuous Stochastic Gradient Method”.The PhD defence takes place in IMADA Conference Room (Ø18-509-2)The chairman of the assessment committee, Professor Achim Schroll, will act as chairman at the defence.All are welcome.

Viruses have a significant impact on marine prokaryotic mortality, diversity, and biogeochemical cycling. They do this by infecting and lysing cells, which release labile dissolved organic matter and stimulate the mineralization of inorganic nutrients. The sheer abundance of oceanic viruses results in ~1029 viral infections per day, causing the release of 108–109 tonnes of carbon per day from the biological pool, which are potentially available for recycling by prokaryotes. During infection, viruses can also maintain host metabolism through the use of virus-encoded auxiliary metabolic genes (AMGs), which can alleviate energetic and biosynthetic bottlenecks during virus proliferation. In temperate viruses, however, the viral genome can be integrated into the host genome as a prophage, and prophage-encoded AMGs can increase the metabolic capacity of the host rather than of the phage. Consequently, viruses can affect prokaryote biogeochemical cycling both directly through virus-encoded metabolic genes that support host performance, and indirectly by promoting cell lysis and release of labile dissolved organic matter. In this presentation, I will present our work on the role of marine viruses in shaping microbial communities and biogeochemical cycling. About Mathias MiddelboeMathias Middelboe is a professor in marine viral ecology at the Department of Biology, University of Copenhagen and University of Southern Denmark. He earned his PhD in aquatic microbial ecology from the University of Copenhagen in 1994 and established in 1997 a research group with a focus on the role of bacterial viruses (bacteriophages) in marine environments (water column and sediments). He is especially interested in exploring how interactions between bacteriophages and bacteria drive phage and host diversity and evolution, and in resolving the role of bacteriophages in marine biogeochemical cycling. His research also includes more applied aspects of phage–bacteria interactions, exploring the potential and challenges of using phages to control pathogenic bacteria in aquaculture.VenueThe DIAS Auditorium, SDU Campus OdenseThis event is open for all. No registration needed.

“Philosophizing,” argued the existential philosopher, Karl Jaspers (1932) “starts with our situation”. This lecture introduces key concepts, frameworks and figurations in existential media studies by setting out from a moment of interrelated crises in which advanced technologies such as “AI” (artificial intelligence) are hailed as the inevitable solution to all of humanity’s problems. In the digital limit situation (Lagerkvist 2020, 2022)—as the technology is entrusted to be salvaging us or feared to outperform and render us extinct—“the self” is simultaneously encroached from all sides. In a curious way, new “subjects” are meanwhile envisioned to be born inside the models. This raises a series of pressing questions: What conceptions of the self are actually being forged within this powerful socio-technical imaginary? What norms for being human in the world do advanced technologies bring about, challenge or reactivate? And how can we envision selves and technologies relationally as well as within limits, for promoting an existentially sustainable future with machines? About Amanda LagerkvistAmanda Lagerkvist is Professor of media and communication studies, PI of the Uppsala Hub for Digital Existence and guest researcher at the Centre for Multidisciplinary Research on Religion and Society (CRS)  at Uppsala University. She has been appointed Core Fellow at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Study, The University of Helsinki, for the academic year of 2025-2026. As Wallenberg Academy Fellow (2014-2018) she founded the young field of existential media studies. Her work has spanned the existential dimensions of digital memories, death online and lifeworlds of biometrics. She currently explores intersections of datafication, disability and selfhood; and the ambivalent AI imaginary and its relationship to both futures and endings (with funding from the Bank of Sweden and WASP-HS). In her monograph Existential Media: A Media Theory of the Limit Situation (OUP, 2022) she introduces Karl Jaspers’ existential philosophy of limit situations for media theory. She is the co-editor of Relational Technologies: In Search of the Self Across Datafied Lifeworlds with Dr. Jacek Smolicki (Bloomsbury, Thinking/Media Series) and she is currently under contract for her new monograph Dismedia: Technologies of the Extraordinary Self with The University of Michigan Press.VenueThe DIAS Auditorium, SDU Campus OdenseThis event is open for all. No registration needed.

”Translational biostatistics: From proof to patient and back"

”Translational biostatistics: From proof to patient and back"