Blavatnik Awards for Young Scientists 2011, Volume 1260

This volume comprises contributions from faculty and postdoctoral finalists of the 2011 New York Academy of Sciences Blavatnik Awards for Young Scientists. The Awards celebrate the excellence of some of the most promising young scientists in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut by acknowledging their highly innovative, multidisciplinary accomplishments in the life sciences, physical sciences, mathematics, and engineering. Included in this volume are manuscripts of the individual finalists' areas of research, which provide a glimpse of some of today’s most compelling scholarly work.

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Calabi-Yau manifolds and their degenerations / Valentino Tosatti

Emerging topics in epigenetics : ants, brains, and noncoding RNAs / Roberto Bonasio

Lighting up the brain's reward circuitry / Mary Kay Lobo

Searching for new physics at the frontiers with lattice quantum chromodynamics / Ruth S. Van de Water

Quo vadis, data privacy? / Johannes Gehrke

Exploring the birth and death of black holes and other creatures / Szabolcs Márka

Harnessing the world's biodiversity data : promise and peril in ecological niche modeling of species distributions / Robert P. Anderson

Protein function and allostery : a dynamic relationship / Charalampos G. Kalodimos

Plate tectonics and planetary habitability : current status and future challenges / Jun Korenaga

Accurate evaluation and analysis of functional genomics data and methods / Casey S. Greene and Olga G. Troyanskaya

Molecular dispersion spectroscopy : new capabilities in laser chemical sensing / Michal Nikodem and Gerard Wysocki

For 200 years—since 1817—the Academy has brought together extraordinary people working at the frontiers of discovery. Among the oldest scientific organizations in the United States, it has become not only an enduring cultural institution in New York, but also one of the most significant organizations in the global scientific community.