Please join us on Saturday, October 18, 2008 at Brandeis University to meet and talk with your colleagues in the New England area working in statistical mechanics. The goal of these meetings is to offer an informal, friendly, and supportive environment where people from a variety of departments and institutions can exchange ideas and where old and new friends can meet.

There will be coffee, tea, and bagels from 9:00 am to 9:30 am and four sessions beginning at 9:30 am. Each session features a 25 minute invited talk. The first three sessions also include several three minute contributed talks. One Windows and and one Mac OSX notebook computer will be available on which you can load your talk from a USB flash drive or CD in advance of the session. Powerpoint and Acrobat Reader will be available on both computers and Keynote will be available on the Mac. The number of contributed talks will be limited to ensure time for questions after each talk. Lunch will last for 90 minutes to give attendees a chance to mingle. Coffee and tea will be available at all times. The meeting will conclude at approximately 3:30 pm.

Invited speakers

• Mike Hagan, Brandeis University, "How viral capsids adapt to mismatched cargoes: Identifying mechanisms of morphology control with simulations."
• Eleni Katifori, Harvard University, "Collapse and statistical mechanics of pressurized rings in two dimensions."
• Pedro Reis, MIT Applied Mathematics Laboratory, "Anticracks: Localization of deformation in solid foams under compression."
• Boris Svistunov, UMass Amherst, "Diagrammatic Monte Carlo."

Chairs of sessions: TBA.

Contributed Talks

1. Mitch Mailman, Brandeis University, "Soft modes in 2D frictionless packings of ellipses."
2. Udayan Mohanty, Boston College, "Rare events and large thermal fluctuations in the ribosome."
3. Sidney Redner, Boston University, TBA.
4. Jingshan Zhang, Harvard University, "Constraints imposed by nonfunctional protein-protein interactions on gene expression and proteome size."
5. Shanadeen Begay, Boston University, "Replica exchange statistical temperature molecular dynamics."
6. Amandeep Sangha, Boston Universit, "Chaperonin assisted protein folding."

Registration form

The cost of the meeting is subsidized by the New England Section of the American Physical Society, and hence there is no registration fee if you register by the deadline. Please join the New England Section if you are not already a member. (There is no additional cost to join the New England Section.) It is necessary to register in advance so that sufficient food and refreshments will be available. The deadline for registration is Tuesday, October 14. If you miss the deadline, you may still attend the meeting, but the cost will be $10, and we cannot guarantee that food will be available. (We will collect the fee this time.)

Note that to reduce spam, a question has been added to the registration form. Don't forget Einstein's miracle year.

Directions

The location of the meeting at Brandeis University is the same as last year. The meeting will be held on the first floor of Lemberg Lee Hall, Room 180, in the Lemberg Academic Center. As you enter Brandeis through the main entrance on South Street, drive toward the police booth and then take a left. At the next intersection take a left just after the Admissions building. You will quickly be in the T parking lot, behind the theater. Turn right and drive to the very far end of the lot and park. Walk up the roadway ahead of you and enter the Lemberg Academic Center on your right. Campus map, click on the PDF version. No parking permits are needed. Signs will be posted on the day of the meeting.

The Brandeis/Roberts commuter rail stop is very convenient. Trains depart to North Station at 3:44 pm, 6:11 pm, 6:34 pm, and 10:14 pm. Buses are also available.

Announcements

• The Fall 2008 Joint meeting of the New England sections of the American Physical Society (APS-NES) and the American Association of Physics Teachers will be held on Friday and Saturday, October 10 and October 11, 2008 at the University of Massachusetts, Boston.
• 36th New England Complex Fluids Meeting, Brandeis University, September 12, 2008.
• 100th Statistical Mechanics Conference, Rutgers University, December 13-16, 2008.

Previous meetings

1. The first meeting took place on Saturday, October 16, 1999 at Brandeis. We honored the memory of Eugene Gross, a founding member of the physics faculty at Brandeis University and well known researcher in statistical mechanics.
2. Saturday, October 14, 2000.
3. Saturday, October 20, 2001.
4. Saturday, October 19, 2002.
5. Saturday, October 18, 2003.
6. Saturday, October 16, 2004.
7. Saturday, October 22, 2005.
8. Saturday, October 21, 2006.
9. Saturday, October 13, 2007.

Organizing committee

• Bulbul Chakraborty, Brandeis University, email
• Claudio Chamon, Boston University, email
• Harvey Gould, Clark University, email
• Bill Klein, Boston University, email

Advisory committee

• Greg Huber, Jon Machta, Sid Redner, David Weitz

Please send questions, comments, and corrections to Harvey Gould.