Presentation:NERS Colloquium: Departmental Welcome
2026-09-11 15:00 - 16:00 (America/Detroit) | Cooley Building - Baer Room (2906 Cooley)
Xiaodong Sun, NERS interim chair and professor, will welcome the NERS community back for the 2026-27 academic year, sharing departmental updates, successes, priorities, and a look at what’s ahead for NERS.

Workshop / Seminar:Project Management Virtual Workshops
2026-09-11 15:00 - 16:30 | Off Campus Location
This series includes six virtual workshops meant to build project management skills, gain hands-on experience, and grow your confidence leading teams through guided practice.

These will occur biweekly from September 11 to November 20, 2026.

Workshop topics include:
• Learning the project lifecycle and core planning tools.
• Building a charter, stakeholder, and risk plan
• Practicing leading a multidisciplinary team through a case
• Gain confidence and transferable skills for any field

Attendance is free, and seats are limited to support close collaboration among participants.

Apply here by September 4th: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfH4c1MkJx9s1Bl5ILhSHn-Jc7yu5TGtW3UYy3iAGjrNEj2zA/viewform

Lecture / Discussion:Pseudo-magnetism in a strained discrete honeycomb lattice
2026-09-11 15:00 - 16:00 | East Hall - 1084
Abstract: Slowly-varying nonuniform strain in honeycomb media can generate an effective pseudo-magnetic field, even though the underlying medium is non-magnetic. This phenomenon was first discovered in graphene and later in photonic crystals, and other physical settings. In this talk, I will start from a discrete nearest-neighbor tight-binding model for a nonuniformly strained honeycomb medium. I will then show how this model leads to a continuum magnetic Dirac Hamiltonian that describes wave packets concentrated near a Dirac point of the undeformed structure. I will focus on unidirectional deformations with bounded gradients that preserve translation invariance along the armchair direction. In this setting, we prove the existence of eigenmodes that behave like plane waves along the armchair direction and are strongly localized in the transverse direction, together with quantitative correction estimates. These results apply to deformations that produce an approximately constant pseudo-magnetic field perpendicular to the plane. They also lead to nearly flat bands and, as a consequence, a very high density of states. These analytical results are also supported by numerical simulations of the corresponding deformations. This is joint work with Michael I. Weinstein.

Contact: Ian Tobasco

Social / Informal Gathering:Sustainability Coffee Chats: Free coffee and good conversation!
2026-09-11 15:00 - 16:00 | Michigan League - Maizie's Cafe
The Student Sustainability Coalition will be hosting our coffee chats throughout the semester and we want you to join us! Passionate about sustainability?--water conservation, AI, carbon neutrality, transportation, ANYTHING!--come chat with us, share your passion(s) and interests, all while helping contribute to a more sustainable University of Michigan! Not to mention: WE WILL BUY YOUR DRINK!

Find us at:
Maizes Cafe every Friday from 3-4p

Conference / Symposium:Transdisciplinary Fellows (2026-2027) (Housing)
2026-09-11 15:00 - 17:00 | Faculty Dining Room

Lecture / Discussion:Smith Lecture: Amanda Ostwald
2026-09-11 15:30 - 16:30 | 1100 North University Building - 1528
Meteorites remain our only samples from Mars. All martian meteorites are igneous, formed by magmas and lavas across large distances and distant time, and so record processes that build and shape the planet’s crust. This talk will explore the physical and chemical processes forming just one suite of meteorites from Mars and the resulting implications for the broader geologic history of the red planet.

Tours:Fall Tour at the Clements Library
2026-09-11 16:00 - 17:00 | William Clements Library
Guided Tour of the U-M Clements Library. Join us for a guided tour to learn more about the Clements’ early American history collections. Highlights include viewing of Benjamin West’s iconic painting “Death of General Wolfe,” a Revolutionary War-era trunk that once housed General Gage’s papers, and viewing our current exhibit "Who Counts? A History of Voting in America." To register or get more information about this event, please contact the Development team at clemdevcom@umich.edu.
