Spring 2015 (Tulane)

We thank the Newcomb College Institute for supporting the lecture series “Women Leaders in Physics and Engineering”, featured in the Physics and Engineering Physics colloquium. Within this series invited speakers meet with students for informal coffee/pizza talks, exposing the students to women role models and providing them mentoring and networking opportunities.

Noah Rahman served as a Core Values Judge for the Louisiana Regional First LEGO League, a robotics competition for 5th-8th grade students. In addition, he served as a judge of student projects at the Sci High Science Fair at the New Orleans Charter Science and Mathematics High School. Noah particularly enjoyed interacting with a student, whose project was on varying pH in plant soil, and teaching him about buffers and blood pH.

We welcome new undergraduate assistant Patrick Li

Noa is co-organizing “Symposium 4A: Advances in Computational Materials Science” at the XXIV International Materials Research Congress with Ulises Reveles (Virginia Commonwealth University), Gabriel Merino Cinvestav-Mérida, Mexico), and Thomas Heine (Jacobs University, Germany). Focus topics for the symposium include: recent advances in computational techniques, electronic transport, molecular electronics, oxides, lattice-dynamical properties, electron-phonon coupling, superconductivity, 2D materials: graphene and beyond.

T his Spring, catch Noa at:

• The International Max Planck Research Schools (IMPRS) on Functional Interfaces in Physics and Chemistry, Ringberg Castle, Germany
• The Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics (IPAM) workshop “Machine Learning for Many-Particle Systems“, UCLA
• The 2015 March Meeting of the American Physical Society (APS), San Antonio, TX
• The 249th National Meeting of the American Chemical Society (ACS), Denver, CO

Drawing on his previous experience with functional programming in Scheme, Noah Rahman assisted in presiding over two LSU CCT Science and Math Saturdays workshops, in which middle school age children were introduced to state of the art functional programming via the Haskell language, practiced how to communicate mathematical ideas forthwith, and learned how to use software for doing algebra and geometry on a computer. For Pi Day a great number of projects celebrating pi were undertaken. Noah was able to shed light on practical consequences of techniques such as the advantages and disadvantages of recursion with regards to stack usage, pointed out real world uses of Haskell such as mission critical embedded systems verification for the defense department, and as a bonus got to learn (again) about monads. He would like to thank Profs. Fernando Alegre (BRCC) and Juana Moreno (LSU), and Ms. Kathy Traxler (LSU) for allowing him to participate.