Uploaded January 2025 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
"I will discuss - in a way that’s accessible to the broader OIST community - the various fun and interesting scientific activities of the Femtosecond Spectroscopy Unit over the past decade."
Chair: Professor Nic Shannon, Theory of Quantum Matter Unit
The Provost Lecture Series will provide an opportunity to celebrate milestones in the careers of OIST faculty members. It will recognize newly promoted professors and those who have received prestigious awards. It will highlight faculty achievements and create a space for retiring professors to talk about their research accomplishments and lessons learned over the course of their career. It is a way to celebrate OIST faculty, introduce them to the broader OIST community, acknowledge their research successes, share about their teaching and mentorship of students, and honor their service to the university.
"I will discuss - in a way that’s accessible to the broader OIST community - the various fun and interesting scientific activities of the Femtosecond Spectroscopy Unit over the past decade."
Chair: Professor Nic Shannon, Theory of Quantum Matter Unit
The Provost Lecture Series will provide an opportunity to celebrate milestones in the careers of OIST faculty members. It will recognize newly promoted professors and those who have received prestigious awards. It will highlight faculty achievements and create a space for retiring professors to talk about their research accomplishments and lessons learned over the course of their career. It is a way to celebrate OIST faculty, introduce them to the broader OIST community, acknowledge their research successes, share about their teaching and mentorship of students, and honor their service to the university.





![Provost Lecture Series: Yejun Feng
Speaker: Yejun Feng, Professor, Electronic and Quantum Magnetism Unit
Title: Where physics is not enough...
Abstract:
Over the past several decades, there has existed abundant amount of physics interest in materials with a pyrochlore sublattice, which can potentially host spin frustrations in the three-dimensional space and lead to exotic spin states of either trivial or non-trivial topological properties. However, experimentally, even the ground state of spinel ZnFe2O4, a classical spin system that had been studied over seventy years, had not been clearly resolved. With arduous efforts from my former Ph.D. student Margarita Dronova and many former and current Unit members, we experimentally improved the chemical quality by limiting various types of disorder in single crystal ZnFe2O4 to a total level of ~0.2% [1]. Such high-quality crystals allow a clarification of the long-range antiferromagnetic ground state with a three-dimensional checkerboard pattern [2]. This full control of materials’ chemistry enables us to further explore the experimental identity of spin glass. Here we introduce non-magnetic cations into ZnFe2O4 in a controlled manner by limiting them only to pyrochlore but no other sites. This destruction of a long-range order draws a similarity to the paradigm of quantum criticality, and the minimal amount of disorder used to drive this evolution allows one to explore spin glass in its emergent state, in the proximity of either long- or short-range order. Neutron magnetic diffuse scattering, probing at pico-second time scale, provides key separations between the entities of long-, short-range orders and spin glass [3].
Reference:
[1] Dronova et al., PNAS 119, e2208748119 (2022).
[2] Dronova et al., PRB 109, 064421 (2024), with Editor’s Suggestion.
[3] Dronova et al., Arxiv:2507.07783.
Chair: Pinaki Chakraborty, Professor, Fluid Mechanics Unit Provost Lecture Series: Yejun Feng](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/BoygP934LeE/mqdefault.jpg)

![[Seminar] Making eDNA data FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable)
Seminar title: Making eDNA data FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable)
Speaker: Dr. Miwa Takahashi, CERC Postdoctoral Fellow, Environomics Future Science Platform, NCMI | CSIRO
Friday, August 30, 2024 - 13:00 to 14:00
Environmental DNA (eDNA) has emerged as a powerful monitoring tool for species detection and distribution mapping, with a remarkable surge in activity over the past decade. Metabarcoding studies have generated millions of DNA sequences with taxonomic assignments, while species-specific eDNA assays have produced comprehensive distribution maps for hundreds of taxa. Despite the widespread practice of data sharing upon publication, inconsistent data formats pose challenges for data reuse. To address this issue, the “Making eDNA FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable)” project has been launched. Our international, multidisciplinary working group, consisting of eDNA researchers, journal editors and biodiversity and omics data scientists, is developing best practice guidelines for eDNA data formatting and sharing. Our aim is to extend the eDNA data lifecycle, facilitating reuse and reanalyses of this invaluable biodiversity data resource. Please join our seminar to learn about the FAIR data principles and the project, and start our discussions on the bottlenecks, needs, and strategies to achieve FAIR eDNA!
https://groups.oist.jp/macc/event/seminar-making-edna-data-fair-findable-accessible-interoperable-reusable [Seminar] Making eDNA data FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable)](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/Cxb1RMoVpwE/mqdefault.jpg)


