Centre for Water Informatics & Technology at LUMS is pleased to announce the next talk of the "Best of Water Systems Research" seminar series. The talk will be delivered by Dr. Ariel Dinar of UC Riverside and is titled "Dealing with Water Scarcity and Salinity: Adoption of Water Efficient Technologies and Management Practices by California Avocado Growers". 

About the speaker: Dr. Ariel Dinar is a Distinguished Professor of Environmental Economics and Policy at the School of Public Policy, University of California, Riverside (UCR). His work addresses various aspects of economic and strategic behavior associated with management of water, land and the environment. Dr. Dinar received his PhD from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Since then he spent 15 years in the World Bank working on water and climate change economics and policy. In 2008, Dr. Dinar assumed a professorship at UCR. Dr. Dinar founded the Water Science and Policy Center, which he directed until 2014. Dr. Dinar is an International Fellow of the Center for Agricultural Economic Research of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel since November 2010; a Fulbright Senior Specialist since 2003; and was named a 2015 Fellow of the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association. He authored and co-authored nearly 250 publications in peer reviewed journals, policy outlets and book chapters. He co-authored and edited 29 books and textbooks. He founded two technical journals (Strategic Behavior and the Environment, and Water Economics and Policy) for the latter one he serves at present as an Editor-in-Chief. He founded and serves as the Editor-in-Chief of the book series Global Issues in Water Policy.    
 
About the seminar series: The “Best of Water Systems Research” is a webinar series initiated by The Center for Water Informatics & Technology at LUMS. While our companion webcast series “Aab Beeti” is geared towards generating public awareness and meeting leading practitioners and opinion makers in Pakistan’s water sector, this new series (BWSR) is primarily meant for discussing serious scholarship on water resources. The series celebrates distinguished works in water systems research and is aimed towards researchers, practitioners, and technical experts in water-related areas. The list of speakers majorly consists of individuals who regularly deploy quantitative data-driven methods & systems thinking and have earned recognition via peer-reviewed research in top journals. Also, many of the speakers may or may not have a direct interest in the Indus or South Asia’s other basins.

The talks are (mostly) delivered bi-weekly on Wednesday evenings. A tentative schedule for the webinars can be found at https://wit.lums.edu.pk/BWSR2021 which also includes recordings of past sessions and information on future speakers.

A link for attending will be sent via email to registered individuals. Colleagues who register once can attend all future talks without the need to register again.
 

Mr. Shahzad Akhtar Ali is a PhD Student at the Department of Physics, Syed Babar Ali School of Science and Engineering, LUMS and will be presenting on the topic of “Optical Investigations of Excitons and Phonons in Two-Dimensional Semiconductor Materials” on August 6th Friday 3:00 PM (PST)

You can join the session via this link: https://lums-edu-pk.zoom.us/j/96287765818

Dr. Sabieh Anwar will talk about "Single Photon Quantum Information Experiments in Physlab" in an upcoming seminar where he invites everyone to an exciting single photon experiment. 

Join the session via video meeting: https://lums-edu-pk.zoom.us/j/92891597368 

The Centre for Water Informatics & Technology at SBASSE, LUMS is extremely excited to announce the launch of a webinar series intended to celebrate distinguished works in ‘Water Systems Research’. The seminars will be targeted towards researchers and technical experts working in water resource systems and will be delivered by scientists who have produced acclaimed research in the field. Securing the future of our water resources is becoming less of a problem of scarcity and more of a problem of effective management of what we already have. We strongly believe that this can be achieved only by adopting a systems perspective on water that takes into account the intricate linkages connecting the water system with food, energy, technology, and society. 'Best of Water Systems Research' is aimed at propagating the science and techniques of exactly this approach to sustain our water resources. In this series, WIT will be inviting top researchers who have applied systems theoretic methods to address real problems in water resource management.

The first talk will be delivered by Dr. Andrew Bell from Boston University on his work on participatory irrigation management in Punjab, Pakistan. Other confirmed speakers include Dr. Murugesu Sivapalan from UIUC, Dr. Ariel Dinar from UC Riverside, Dr. Grey Nearing from UC Davis, and Dr. Michael Mitchell from CSU Australia. Many other esteemed researchers are (and will be) invited and we are very excited to be able to learn collectively from their wealth of experiences. 

The talks will (mostly) be delivered bi-weekly on Wednesday evenings. A tentative schedule for the webinars can be found at here, while you can register here. The webinars will be streamed via zoom with the opportunity to interact with speakers during the Q&A after the presentation ends. A link for attending will be sent via email to registered individuals. Colleagues who register once can attend all future talks without the need to register again. 

The first talk will be delivered by Dr. Andrew Bell from Boston University and is titled: "Finding the next steps forward for IBIS water governance". The talk is scheduled for 6:00-7:00 pm PKT on Wednesday, July 28, 2021 and will be moderated by Dr. Talha Manzoor, Assistant Professor, Center for Water Informatics & Technology. 

About the speaker: Andrew Bell studies livelihoods and resource decision-making. including domains of irrigation, pest management, ecosystem services, technology adoption and migration. Most of his work applies survey and experimental tools (games, high-frequency smart-phone based surveys) to identify and model behaviour; and agent-based models to understand what these behaviours imply for system-level outcomes under scenarios of environmental change. He received his PhD (2010) in Natural Resource Management from the University of Michigan's School of Natural Resources and Environment (SNRE, now SEAS), also MASc in Environmental Engineering from Waseda University and BASc in Environmental Engineering from the University of Waterloo. 

For more details and queries, contact Soban Hameed Saigol from WIT at soban.hameed@lums.edu.pk.

SBASSE Department of Physics is hosting an online session with Dr. Kamran Rehan from the University of Science and Technology of China on Friday. He will be talking about "Trapped-Ion Systems for Experimental Quantum Physics"  on the 18th June 2021 from 11:30 am to 12:30 pm.

Biography:

Dr. Kamran Rehan is the USTC & CAS-PIFI Joint Postdoctoral Fellow, working at the University of Science and Technology of China. He obtained his PhD in Atomic and Molecular Physics from the Innovation Academy for Precision Measurement Science and Technology (APM), Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) in 2020. During his educational career, he won the CAS-TWAS fellowship, and has received many other national and international awards.

Please tune in to the session via this Zoom Link: https://lums-edu-pk.zoom.us/j/91952238009?pwd=U2g4MGJ6V3J1YktqL3lwN1hjRlovUT09

LUMS SPIE chapter is organizing the "National Optics and Photonics Engineering Conference" on the 8th & 9th of May 2021, online via Zoom. This conference is being held for the students in collaboration with SPIE chapters of GIKI and ITU and will have plenty of opportunities for the students to learn from. The conference will include: 

Hands-on Learning

The instructor engages the students for focused learning. This type of learning is “by doing” learning.

Scientific Talks

Poster and Research Presentation

A brief presentation on a research topic carried on by an individual for 3-minutes and 10-minutes, respectively. The deadline for the submission of your presentations is 5th May 2021. For instant registration, please scan the QR code in the image. 

The winner will be the recipient of Rs. 15,000 while the Runner-up would be awarded with Rs. 10,000.

Workshops

An experimental environment with hardware realizations where the participants are exposed to equipment utilization in laboratory premises.

For any questions, please contact chapter president Ali Raza Mirza.

The Syed Babar Ali School of Science and Engineering is honored to host Dr. Donna Strickland, Nobel Laureate in Physics (2018), as a speaker for the seventh Abdus Salam Annual Memorial Lecture.

Energizing light beyond the luminance of a candle not only cleared the way for explorers on land, sea and air, but also for the explorers inside the laboratory. It begat an era of optics, slewing passion laden explorers towards studying spectacular phenomena like spectroscopy.

Fast forward to the 1980s, a similar leap was in the making. Scaffolded by hard work and a drive to create a high intensity optical laser, Dr. Donna Strickland successfully invented the ‘chirped pulse amplification’ technique, ushering in a new era of research in optics that led to a new understanding of laser-matter interactions, development of new machining techniques that are now used in laser eye surgery and micromachining techniques used in the production of glass used in smartphones.

Donna Strickland is a professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Waterloo and is one of the recipients of the Nobel Prize in Physics 2018 for developing chirped pulse amplification with Gérard Mourou, her PhD supervisor at the time. They published this Nobel-winning research in 1985 when Strickland was a PhD student at the University of Rochester.

Brief biography of Professor Strickland:

Donna Strickland is a professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Waterloo and is one of the recipients of the Nobel Prize in Physics 2018 for developing chirped pulse amplification with Gérard Mourou, her PhD supervisor at the time. They published this Nobel-winning research in 1985 when Strickland was a PhD student at the University of Rochester.

Strickland earned a B.Eng. from McMaster University and a PhD in optics from the University of Rochester. Strickland was a research associate at the National Research Council Canada, a physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and a member of technical staff at Princeton University. In 1997, she joined the University of Waterloo, where her ultrafast laser group develops high-intensity laser systems for nonlinear optics investigations. Strickland served as the president of the Optical Society (OSA) in 2013 and is a fellow of OSA, SPIE, the Royal Society of Canada and the Royal Society. She is an honorary fellow of the Canadian Academy of Engineering and the Institute of Physics and an international member of the US National Academy of Science. Strickland was named a Companion of the Order of Canada.

The lecture will be open to the public and will be zoomed live on the School's social media channels:

SBASSE Facebook  
SBASSE Twitter  
SBASSE YouTube

Compilation of all lectures in this series

This year the 2020 Nobel prize in Physics is shared by Sir Roger Penrose - a Mathematician, Mathematical Physicist and Philosopher of Science whose work has had a profound influence across disciplines. To honour his legendary work, his student, Professor Asghar Qadir was invited for an online talk. Professor Asghar Qadir is a distinguished Pakistani mathematician and one of Penrose’s first students.

A black hole is a region of spacetime where gravity is so strong that even light cannot escape from it. Roger Penrose used ingenious mathematical methods in his proof that black holes are a direct consequence of Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity.

In January 1965, ten years after Einstein’s death, Roger Penrose proved that black holes really could form and described them in detail; at their heart, black holes hide a singularity in which all the known laws of nature cease. His ground-breaking article is still regarded as the most important contribution to the general theory of relativity since Einstein.

About the Speaker: Professor Asghar Qadir’s interests lie in aspects of Mathematical Physics and the Theory of Relativity and he specializes in Twistor Theory. He is a prolific author and has authored several internationally and nationally published books in Mathematical Physics, journal articles in Mathematical Physics as well as Economics. He has mentored several graduate students throughout his career and served on important administrative positions, which include being the Chairman of the Mathematics Department of QAU and later the Dean of Faculty of Natural Sciences at the same university. His contributions to the field as well as the academia have earned him numerous awards which include, but are not limited to: Fulbright Hayes award Hayes award for 1978-79 and Senior Fulbright Fellowship for 1986-87, the Al Khwarizmi First Prize for Mathematics in 1995, Pakistan Academy of Sciences Gold Medal in 1996, Sitara-i-Imtiaz of Pakistan in 1999, ISESCO Award for Mathematics 2003, Distinguished National Professor of the Higher Education Commission of Pakistan in 2004 (for life), and the Hilal-i-Imtiaz of Pakistan in 2008. Professor Qadir has also authored popular articles and a literary criticism paper about “Popular Science and Science Fiction”. He also possesses a flare for writing poems in Urdu and English.

The talk took place online via Zoom on Friday, October 16th, 2020 at 11:00 AM PKST (1-hour talk + 30 minutes Q&A)