Talk
Next-Generation Power System Resilience

Bio
Najmeh Bazmohammadi (Senior Member, IEEE) earned a B.Sc. Degree in Electrical Engineering in 2009 and M.Sc. and Ph.D. Degrees in Electrical Engineering with a focus on control theory in 2012 and 2019, respectively. She is currently an assistant professor at the Center for Research on Microgrids (CROM), AAU Energy, Aalborg University, Denmark. Her current research interests include the modeling, optimization, and energy management of hybrid and renewable-based microgrids; model predictive control; digital twins; data-driven systems; and system dynamics.

Talk
What Enhanced Free-Energy Sampling Techniques and Machine Learning Can Tell Us about Effective Catalysts

Bio
Kristen Fichthorn is the Merrell Fenske Professor of Chemical Engineering and a professor of physics at Pennsylvania State University. She received a B.S. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania and a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Michigan. She spent one year working as an IBM Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of California at Santa Barbara before joining Penn State. Professor Fichthorn’s research primarily focuses on multi-scale material simulation, developing and applying theoretical techniques ranging from quantum density functional theory to molecular dynamics, Monte Carlo methods, and continuum theories to varied fundamental problems involving fluid–solid interfaces, with applications in nanoscale materials, thin-film and crystal growth, colloidal assembly, and wetting. In addition to being recognized by Penn State for her outstanding research and teaching, she received the NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award (1990) and Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellowship (1998), and she is a Fellow of the American Physical Society (2011), a Fellow of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (2017), a recipient of the Nanoscale Science and Engineering Forum Award of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (2019), and a recipient of the Langmuir Lectureship of the American Chemical Society (2020).

Talk
Wearable Sensors for Real-World Health Monitoring: Algorithms and Applications

Bio
With over 12 years of academic and industrial experience and a newly established research laboratory, Encarna Micó-Amigo is committed to advancing the development, implementation, and analytical validation of algorithms for extracting biometrics using wearable technology. Her career reflects her growing leadership in digital health, driven by interdisciplinary collaboration and a strong commitment to innovation. Her industrial PhD, competitively funded through the Marie Curie FP7 Actions, and her subsequent role as a research associate in the EUR 50 million Mobilise-D project, focused on developing signal-processing algorithms to study neurological conditions. In 2023, she was top-ranked at University College Dublin for a Horizon 2020-funded postdoctoral fellowship on digital biomarkers for Parkinson’s disease but instead chose to begin her independent academic career as an assistant professor in biomedical engineering at Heriot-Watt University. She currently supervises four PhD students and leads the Sensors for Ubiquity and Physiological Engineering Research (SUPER) Laboratory (https://super.site.hw.ac.uk/people/). Their research focuses on advancing methods for better understanding the effects of anti-Parkinsonian medication, the use of lower-limb prostheses, the prediction of pregnancy complications, and the promotion of physical activity in refugee populations.

Talk
Optical Fiber Sensing Solutions From Macro- to Nanoscale

Bio
Yuliya Semenova received her Master’s Degree in Electronic Engineering from the National University “Lviv Polytechnic” in Ukraine in 1992 and her Ph.D. in Physics from the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences in 1999. She is a professor at the School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at Technological University Dublin, where she worked since 2001, and has been Director of the Photonics Research Centre since 2019. She has over 350 publications in the field of photonics, with her research receiving over 8000 citations. She has given numerous invited talks and tutorials and supervised to completion 17 PhD graduates. She is an associate editor of several journals in her field including IET Electronics Letters and the Journal of Lightwave Technology. Her current research interests span both photonics and applications of photonic devices in engineering with a focus on fiber optics. Much of her research to date has focused on improving the design and performance of optical fiber sensors with applications ranging from macro- to nanoscales. Some of her specific interests are whispering gallery mode effects in microfiber resonators, plasmonic structures, and photonic (liquid) crystal fiber sensors.