Speaker: Tai ThaiVenue: Room B328, Anzhong Building, Zijingang CampusAbstract: Composite steel-concrete structures leverage the merits of both steel and concrete materials (e.g., steel has high strength and offers fast and modular construction, whilst concrete has high stiffness and fire resistance). Therefore, they have been increasingly used in high-rise buildings as evidenced by the fact that composite structures have contributed up to about two-thirds of the structural systems used in the top 100 world tallest buildings completion in 2024. This presentation will highlight recent research and developments of composite structural systems used in modern tall buildings. They include composite columns, composite shear walls, and composite joints used in conventional composite buildings (i.e., beam-to-column joints and beam-to-wall joints) as well as the joints used in modular composite buildings (i.e., inter-module joints and module-to-core joints). The research will look at the performance of composite structural systems under both ambient temperatures and elevated temperatures (i.e., fire loading). The presentation will cover experimental testing, numerical modelling, and design code development that was recently incorporated into the new version of composite standard AS/NZS 2327.

Speaker: Prof. David Scott KastanVenue: Online, Tencent Meeting: 253 323 366, passcode: 2025Abstract: In the spring of 1594, a long narrative poem by Shakespeare was published and advertised for sale in London. The title page called it Lucrece. Now the poem is usually known as The Rape of Lucrece, though it was only in 1616 (in its sixth edition) that this became the poem’s title. Perhaps this talk should be called much ado about a title, but it seems to me to offer a way to help us think about the strange poem that is about both rape and revolution, set in the legendary Roman past as the monarchy is overthrown and “the state government changed from kings to consuls.”

Speaker: Prof. Siyu ChenVenue: Room 618, Building of School of economics, Zijingang CampusAbstract: We examine whether investment performance reflects educatable skill or innate ability. Linking China's national college entrance examination (CEE) records (1999-2003 cohorts) to ten years of detailed stock brokerage transactions (2014-2023), we find no significant effect of higher education or financial training on investor performance: elite college graduates and economics majors earn similar returns, Sharpe ratios, and risk profiles as their near-miss counterparts. In contrast, conditional on a rich set of fixed effects, CEE rank, a proxy for innate cognitive ability, strongly predicts portfolio returns. A ten-percentile improvement in CEE rank raises monthly portfolio returns by about 0.05 percentage points, which compounds substantially: investors in the top quartile of CEE rank realize roughly 61 percent higher total returns over ten years than those in the bottom quartile. High-ability investors select higher-ROA, lower-risk stocks, trade less frequently, and engage financial advisors more rationally and less overconfidently. Our results suggest that heterogeneity in returns to wealth largely reflects ability rather than educational credentials.

Speaker: Prof. Ming ZengVenue: Room 530, Chengjun No.7 Building, Zijingang CampusAbstract: Post-earnings announcement drift (PEAD) displays presidential cycles: it earns 4.1% per year during Democratic presidencies but its profitability increases significantly to 14.9% during Republican presidencies. Survey-based evidence also indicates substantial underreaction to earnings news when the US president is Republican. The tax component of firm earnings exhibits significantly higher volatility during Republican periods, likely reflecting higher tax policy uncertainty. Consistently, we find that the PEAD is much stronger for firms with larger exposure to tax policy changes during Republican presidencies. This explanation accounts for the observed presidential cycles in PEAD, whereas existing explanations for PEAD cannot. The cycles are more pronounced among non-microcap firms.

Speaker: Prof. David SternVenue: Room 201, East No.5 Building, Zijingang CampusAbstract: As the field of the History of the Book has grown, a sub-set of the field has developed that might be called “The Material Text,” which is devoted to inspecting the relationship of text to its material inscription, the impact of one upon the other, their connection to reading practice, and the changes that both text and material inscriptions undergo historically. Examples will be drawn from the history of the Jewish book, the speaker’s field of specialization.

Speaker: Prof. Ardis ButterfieldVenue: Room 201, East No.5 Building, Zijingang CampusAbstract: This talk presents a panoramic view of a new edition of Medieval Lyrics in Britain (forthcoming with CUP). A 20-year project, it presents a copying history of lyric from the 12th to the late 15th century. It presents the verses by paying special attention to the manuscripts in which they were copied, to the world of often idiosyncratic handwritten symbols, flourishes and annotations in which they were framed, of musical notation and richly conceived programs of illumination. It is a media study of medieval lyrics as forms of inscription (on parchment but also many other media), of sound, and image.

Speaker: Bernhard KellerVenue: Lecture Hall 210, Haina Complex Building 2, Zijingang CampusAbstract: Cluster algebras are certain commutative algebras invented by Fomin-Zelevinsky around the year 2000. Among them, we find the homogeneous coordinate algebras of Grassmannians, flag varieties and many other varieties of importance in representation theory and geometry. Fomin-Zelevinsky's motivations came from Lie theory and more precisely from the study of Lusztig's (dual) canonical bases which such algebras possess and from his related theory of total positivity. In this talk. we will briefly review the history of cluster algebras and their links to many other subjects including Lie theory, discrete dynamical systems, quiver representations, Donaldson-Thomas theory, mirror symmetry and symplectic topology.

Speaker: Seth DavisVenue: Lecture Hall 245, School of Life Sciences, Zijingang CampusAbstract: Seth Davis earned his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA. He conducted postdoctoral research at the University of Warwick, UK, and later served as a postdoc and independent PI at the Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research (MPIPZ), Germany. He is currently a Professor and Head of the Department of Plant Biology at the University of York, UK. He also serves as an editor for journals such as Molecular Plant and Plant Cell & Environment. His main research interests include: the effects of light/dark changes and cold/heat changes on the plant circadian clock, the regulation of plant metabolism by the circadian clock, and the connections between circadian clocks in different plant species. He has published over 120 papers in internationally renowned academic journals such as Science, Nature, and The Plant Cell, with an H-index greater than 50.

Speaker: Professor Peter NaumannVenue: Room E-250, College of Animal Sciences, Zijingang CampusAbstract: Professor Peter Neumann is a world-renowned expert in bee health, based at the University of Bern's Institute of Bee Health in Switzerland. His research is dedicated to understanding the challenges facing honey bees and other pollinators, with a particular focus on parasites, pathogens, pesticides, and the complex factors behind colony losses. He is a member of European Scientific Academy since 2014. A cornerstone of Professor Neumann's legacy is his pivotal role in the creation and development of COLOSS (Prevention of Honey Bee COLony LOSSes). Recognizing the need for a coordinated, international response to widespread bee declines, he was instrumental in founding this global non-profit network. Under his guidance as a founding president and active member, COLOSS has grown into a vital collaborative body, uniting thousands of researchers and professionals from over 120 countries. The organization is renowned for its standardized monitoring of bee health and large-scale, collaborative research initiatives that generate critical insights into the causes of colony mortality.