Nath Distinguished Lecture Series
Held annually by the Department of Physics, the Nath Distinguished Lecture Series celebrates discoveries and significant advances on the frontiers of physics and to recognize Northeastern University’s unique contribution to knowledge enhancement witnessed by Pran Nath and Shashi Nath over nearly six decades of their association with the university.
2025 Nath Distinguished Lecturer
Yuhai Tu, PhD
Yuhai Tu graduated from the School of Gifted Young at University of Science and Technology of China in 1987. He came to the US under the CASPEA program and got his PhD in Theoretical Physics from UCSD in 1991 at age 23 (supervisor: Herbie Levine). After three years as the Division Prize Fellow at Caltech, he joined IBM Watson Research Center in 1994. Yuhai Tu has a diverse range of research interests from Physics, Biology, Material Science, to Machine Learning. His earlier work focuses on nonequilibrium statistical physics, nonlinear dynamics, and pattern formation. His pioneering work on collective phenomena in active systems (flocking dynamics) in the 90’s won him the APS Lars Onsager Prize (the highest prize in statistical physics) in 2020. Since 2000, his research interests shift to biological physics.
Tu has made seminal contributions in many areas of biological physics including algorithm development and statistical analysis for high throughput transcriptome data (microarray analysis); quantitative modeling of signal transduction and motility in bacterial chemotaxis; and thermodynamics of nonequilibrium biochemical networks. His recent work focuses on three directions: (1) dynamics of biological networks — biochemical networks for signal transduction and neural networks for coding and computation; (2) thermodynamics of information processing in biological systems; (3) statistical physics of machine learning.
About Pran and Shashi Nath
Pran Nath's Bio
Pran Nath received his B.Sc. at the University of Delhi in 1958, and his Ph.D. at Stanford University in 1964. He taught at the University of California, Riverside between 1964-65 and was an Andrew Mellon Fellow at the University of Pittsburgh 1965-1966. He has been a faculty member at Northeastern University since 1966, where currently he is serving as the George and Kathleen Waters Matthews University Distinguished Professor. Nath is a particle physicist. His early work was on the development of effective Lagrangians and on the U(1) axial anomaly. He is co-inventor of the first supergravity theory and of supergravity grand unification which predicts particles which are discoverable at the Large Hadron Collider. Nath has founded two conferences: “The International Workshop on Supersymmetry and Unification of Fundamental Interactions’, and “The International Symposium on Particles, Strings and Cosmology”, which are held annually around the globe. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society, a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a recipient of the Humboldt Physics Prize. He is author of “Supersymmetry, Supergravity and Unification”, Cambridge University Press (2016). His current work is on dark matter and dark energy intertwining particle physics and cosmology and their unification.
Shashi Nath's Bio
Shashi Nath received her Ph.D. from the University of Chandigarh in 1969 where she worked in the field of anthropology. The same year she moved to Boston. Since then she has been associated with Northeastern University where she taught for over two decades.
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Pran Nath, Northeastern’s longest-tenured professor, pursues the beautiful mysteries of physics
After 58 years, the world-renowned researcher continues to explore the secrets of the universe. His explorations are a mystery to most of us, conducted with a stream-of-consciousness array of mathematical symbols reinforced by terminology that sounds like English taken to the third power.
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What do you get a world-renowned physicist to celebrate his 80th birthday?
A cake? A sweater? A good book?
Physics professors at Northeastern believed that those gifts fell short of capturing the essence of their colleague Pran Nath, so they decided to throw him a conference focused on the latest research into particle physics and cosmology.
