Dr. Julia

Discover the fascinating world of aperiodic crystals! These structures boast diffraction patterns without traditional periodicity, unlocking exceptional mechanical, optical, and electronic traits. Pop into an Aperiodic Crystals session at #IUCr2026
tinyurl.com/yun4a5da

Congratulations to 2025 #MacFellow William Tarpeh! The Stanford chemical engineer is working on sustainable and practical solutions to treat wastewater and recover valuable mineral resources.

🗞️: stanford.io/3IZIBqF

Do you like things to be orderly but still a little unpredictable? Check out sessions like “Quasicrystalline, incommensurate modulated, and composite phases” or “Approximate Periodic Symmetry”, just to name a couple.

Browse the microsymposium list at www.iucr2026.org/mic...

Signs Referencing Climate Change Along with Web Pages Removed from Acadia National Park The Bar Harbor Story is generously sponsored by The Witham Family Hotels Charitable Fund.

The federal government has censored the work of dozens of scientists, including work by my lab, on the impacts of climate change on Acadia National Park. Signs have been removed from Cadillac and Great Meadow. They’re also removing signs about the Wabanaki’s sacred connections to Cadillac.

OpenAI admits AI hallucinations are mathematically inevitable, not just engineering flaws In a landmark study, OpenAI researchers reveal that large language models will always produce plausible but false outputs, even with perfect data, due to fundamental statistical and computational limi...

"In a landmark study, OpenAI researchers reveal that large language models will always produce plausible but false outputs, even with perfect data, due to fundamental statistical and computational limits."

www.computerworld.com/article/4059...

Another in a long list of shamefully backward moves this administration has taken that weakens American higher education.

How My Reporting on the Columbia Protests Led to My Deportation As an Australian who wrote about the demonstrations while on campus, I gave my phone a superficial clean before flying to the U.S. I underestimated what I was up against.

Thank you, everyone, for the support. You can now read my full account at The New Yorker.

www.newyorker.com/news/the-led...

Study captures crystal phase changes in unprecedented detail | Cornell Chronicle Using custom-built computer simulations, Cornell researchers have visualized solid-solid phase transitions in unprecedented detail, capturing the motion of every particle in a theoretical material as ...

... as well as a novel reverse transformation pathway that is more complex than any of those proposed or observed previously (involving a 3-fold supercell).

Read more about it in the Cornell Chronicle: news.cornell.edu/stories/2025...

@cornelluniversity.bsky.social
@cornellengineering.bsky.social

... (i.e., the Bain, Nishiyama–Wassermann, and Kurdjumov–Sachs orientation relationships).

We also report: a persistent intermediate body-centered tetragonal phase, a microstructure-dependent transformation pathway, ...

Our paper in Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. @pnas.org on simulating solid–solid phase transformations particle-by-particle is online now: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

We observed all three canonical pathways between the body-centered cubic and face-centered cubic sphere packings in unprecedented detail ...

Essentially all of our work is enabled through grants and wouldn't be possible without federal funding. Federal grants enable scientific research and the livelihood and training of researchers and graduate students at universities.
@cornelluniversity.bsky.social
@cornellengineering.bsky.social

This work was conducted primarily by Dr. Reum Scott and funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), through the now-archived Mathematical and Physical Sciences Ascending Postdoctoral Research Fellowships (MPS-Ascend), as well as by the ACS PRF.
@acs.org

... as well as the implementation of a hierarchical family of isoreticular compounds, layered compounds with tunable perpendicular interactions, and the assembly of "breathing-mode" compounds with free parameters.

doi.org/10.1039/D5CP...

Our paper in Phys. Chem. Chem. Phys. @pccp.rsc.org with @runofthephill.bsky.social on MOF self-assembly simulations is online now, a.k.a. Lego® for MOFs.

We demonstrate the spontaneous assembly of rationally designed, coarse-grained, rigid-body models of 34 distinct MOF nets, ...

A Coarse-Grained Simulation Toolkit for Metal–Organic Framework Synthesis https://dx.doi.org/10.26434/chemrxiv-2025-50s8j?rft_dat=source%3Ddrss

We are looking for a motivated PhD student working on the project "Interplay of structure and dynamics in aluminum phosphate frameworks" in my group at Bremen University.
Application deadline is July 7th.
tinyurl.com/rt62tk6y

📣 We're on the lookout for a creative postdoc with strong computational skills!

Be the go-to person in the lab for building simple but powerful simulations that test wild ideas on biological rythems: from daily cycles of mussel groups at deep sea, to firefly flash synchronization!

More info below👇

We are thrilled to welcome Prof. Raphaële Clément as the Director of our new Electrochemical Materials Department!! 🎉🔋 She’s a battery innovator using NMR magic to unlock greener energy. Welcome to the @maxplanck.de, Raphaële! Learn more at: www.fkf.mpg.de/8744352/2025...
📷 Photo credit: UCSB

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is an independent, coeducational, privately endowed university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Our mission is to advance knowledge; to educate students in science, engineering, technology, humanities and social sciences; and to tackle the most pressing problems Imagine a world without MIT

Imagine a world without MIT. We'd be missing a lot.

www.youtube.com/watc...

Because I have opened a BlueSky window and am procrastinating on reading final papers, let me also share what this spring has been like from my corner of the academic world.

PhD Timeline xkcd.com/3081

What DEI threatens isn’t merit. It’s monopoly. Political science professor Hakeem Jefferson argues for DEI's importance to de-monopolizing universities.

A colleague at Stanford’s business school used The Stanford Daily to argue—poorly—against DEI. The piece was riddled with historical errors and left one searching for fact, so I broke my public writing hiatus to respond.

I hope you’ll read and share the piece.

stanforddaily.com/2025/04/22/w...

Opinion | What Is Lost When We Scare Away Foreign Students The immigration crackdown has come to America’s campuses.

This speaks to the real contributions international students and faculty make every day, and the real harm we are all facing : www.nytimes.com/2025/04/19/o...

Where Students Have Had Their Visas Revoked The Trump administration has quietly revoked hundreds of student visas across the country, wreaking havoc on the system.

As of this morning, we've tracked over 600 student visa revocations at more than 100 colleges.

That's double yesterday morning's count. Send updates to me or @amowreader.com and follow @insidehighered.com interactive visa map here: www.insidehighered.com/news/global/...

DHS Formalizes Policy Screening Noncitizens’ Social Media The Department of Homeland Security is formalizing a policy to search the social media accounts of all foreign applicants for U.S. visas or other benefits, according to a memo issued Wednesday morning...

@liamknox.bsky.social: DHS "formalizing a policy to search the social media accounts of all foreign applicants for US visas or other benefits" per memo. ICE "will collect applicants’ social media handles and scour their accounts for any 'antisemitic activity'”

Trump Officials Freeze $1 Billion for Cornell and $790 Million for Northwestern The funding pause amid civil rights investigations into both universities sharply escalates the Trump administration’s campaign against elite colleges.

Breaking News: The Trump administration has frozen more than $1 billion in funding for Cornell University and $790 million for Northwestern, two officials said.

Urgently reposting! University leadership need to actively check the SEVIS database every day (studyinthestates.dhs.gov/sevis-help-hub). Ask your chair to commit to it.

Yesterday, UW discovered 9 visa cancellations & only found out b/c they ran a status check. www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news...

International student visas, 2.0 A Flourish data visualization by Ashley Mowreader

I'm tracking international students who have had their visas revoked / legal status changed in the past month, check out this handy map to see which institutions have reported visa revocations:

public.flourish.studio/visualisatio...

Legal scholar sees immigrant arrests as a 'struggle for the soul of the country' As ICE agents arrest international students at campuses across the U.S., professor Daniel Kanstroom discusses the law — and the human cost. He says the round-ups are designed to "send a message."

As ICE agents arrest international students at campuses across the U.S., immigration law professor Daniel Kanstroom discusses the human cost. He says the round-ups are designed to "send a message... to scare people, and it's working."

The legality of this aside, having your life disrupted like this mid-semester is awful. For grad students, it doesn't just mean their lives disrupted, it also means research projects thrown into disarray (assuming they survived funding cuts) and classes and labs suddenly deprived of their TAs.