The 12th annual meeting will be held on Saturday, October 9 (Columbus Day weekend) at Brandeis University. Please save the date.

About 80 people attended the 11th annual meeting. Thanks to all you attended and to all who have contributed and invited talks.

Please join us on Saturday, October 10, 2009 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 8 to 9 contributed talks. The contributed talks will be 3 minutes plus 30 seconds for questions.

One Windows and and one Mac OS X notebook computer will be available on which you can load your talk from a USB flash drive in advance of the session. Powerpoint and Acrobat Reader will be available on both computers and Keynote will be available on the Macintosh. Lunch will last for 60 minutes to give attendees a chance to mingle. Coffee and tea will be available at all times. The meeting will conclude at approximately 3:00 pm to give attendees time to catch the train back to Cambridge.

Session I

1. Seyit Kale, Brandeis University, "Proton transfer reactions via a simple empirical force field."
2. Guangnan Meng, Harvard University, "Free energy landscape of colloidal molecules."
3. Daniel Volovik, Boston University, "Hot and cold temperature streaks in Europe."
4. Christopher A. Serino, Boston University, "New scaling in an old earthquake model."
5. Yue Hu, Wellesley College, "Effects of surfactants on the stability of silica-silicone oil gels."
6. Dapeng Bi, Brandeis University, "A simple scaling in quasistatically sheared granular simulations."
7. Yasheng Yang, Brandeis University, "Self-limited assembly of chiral filaments."
8. Brad Marston, Brown University, "Nonequilibrium statistical mechanics of climate."

Session II

1. Kryngle Daly, Clark University, "Blebbing and antibotic damage in bacteria."
2. Alex Plyukhin, Saint Anselm College, "Langevin dynamics beyond the Markovian approximation."
3. Wenfeng Kang, UMass, Amherst, "Velocity distributions in granular gases."
4. Michael Berhanu, Clark University, "Structure of a floating granular media formed by capillary aggregation."
5. Tom Stone, University of Maine, "Epidemic spreading on adaptive networks with community structure."
6. Matthew Jones, University of Maine, An investigation of the impacts of vaccination and adaptive rewiring on disease spreading in an SIR model."
7. Kirill Korolev, Harvard University, "Genetic demixing: A new look at Fisher waves."
8. Mitch Mailman, Brandeis University, "A static length scale in 2D disk packings."
9. Azadeh Samadani, Brandeis University, "A geometrical model for the chromosome architecture of budding yeast."

Session III

1. Pavel Kraikivski, University of Connecticut, "Actin bundling: Initiation mechanisms and kinetics."
2. Yoshihisa Fujii, Boston University, "Time-resolved study on mechanical properties of polystyrene brush."
3. Andrew Clough, Boston University, "The glass transition temperature of polystyrene film on polystyrene brush."
4. Saonti Chakraborty, WPI, "Nematic to smectic transition in thin 8CB films: Evidence for KT transition?"
5. Rafael Garcia, WPI, "Nematic to smectic transition in thin 8CB films: Evidence for Casimir forces?"
6. Feng Wang, Boston University, "Stealing that bicycle in 3 minutes, how to do it with thermodynamics."
7. Kalum Palandage, University of Connecticut, "Thermal study of Hubbard nanoclusters using exact methods."
8. Oren Elrad, Brandeis University, Dynamic encapsidation of polymers by icosahedral viruses."

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. It is necessary to register in advance so that sufficient food and refreshments will be available. The deadline for registration was Tuesday, October 6. If you know that you are coming and haven't registered, please send a message to Harvey Gould.

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

• Boston Area Quantum Matter Meeting, April 3, 2010, UMass Boston.
• The Fall 2009 Joint meeting of the New England sections of the American Physical Society and the American Association of Physics Teachers will be held on Friday and Saturday, October 16 and October 17, 2009 at the University of New Hampshire. The theme of the meeting is "Our Universe 400 Years After Galileo."
• 41st New England Complex Fluids Meeting, Harvard University, December 4, 2009.
• Check the Boston Area CarbOn Nanoscience website for their next meeting.
• 102 Statistical Mechanics Conference, Rutgers University, December 13-15, 2009. The theme of this meeting is Thermodynamics, Statistical Mechanics, and Fundamental Issues in Biology.

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.
10. Saturday, October 18, 2008.

Organizing committee

• Bulbul Chakraborty, Brandeis University, email
• Claudio Chamon, Boston University, email
• Harvey Gould, Clark University, email
• Michael Hagan, Brandeis University, email
• Bill Klein, Boston University, email
• Sidney Redner, Boston University, email

Advisory committee

• Greg Huber, Jon Machta, David Weitz

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