CPA - Postdoc Launch Seminar 2026 - VI
Dear Postdocs,
We have another Caltech Postdocs Launch seminar this Friday!
We've got two exciting talks from Dr. Sijie Ji (EAS) and Dr. Sergi Junyent Espinosa (BBE), whose titles and abstracts can be found below.
And as always - FREE Lunch and beverages will be there before the talk starts. To make sure we can order enough food, please RSVP here beforehand: https://forms.gle/XstbRq1Xu846Lwyc9.
What – Caltech Postdocs Launch
When – Friday, 4th of September, 2026, 11:45 AM. Talks start at 12.
Where – Chen 130
Hope to see you there!
Best wishes,
Postdoc Launch Team
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Making Health Visible: Intelligent Sensing Systems for Continuous and Adaptive CareDr. Sijie Ji
Human health changes continuously through movement, speech, sleep, behavior, and environment, yet most medical AI still relies on episodic clinical measurements and retrospective records, missing how disease risk and functional decline emerge in everyday life. In this talk, I will show how this agenda spans a continuum from what people do, to what happens inside the body, to how they feel, and ultimately to how intelligent systems can support them. Through wireless sensing, mobile and wearable computing, biochemical sensing, and edge AI, my work develops low-burden systems that recover latent behavioral, physiological, and affective states from weak real-world signals, including WiFi-based fall detection, fine-grained hand motion reconstruction, continuous lipid profiling, pain biomarkers, and proactive mental health support. The broader goal is to build cyber-physical intelligence that helps shift healthcare from late clinical reaction to everyday prevention and intervention.
Building yourself: how cells collaborate, and some times compete, to create the early embryo
Dr. Sergi Junyent Espinosa
Our earliest development requires the establishment of specialized cell lineages with distinct metabolic and biosynthetic demands. Yet successful development relies on tight, dynamic coordination among all the cells of the early embryo. How cells manage both to specialize and to coordinate remains unclear, as does the role of metabolism, the engine that powers cellular function, in this process. In this talk, I will illustrate how cell specialization involves the acquisition of refined metabolic states that, in turn, help balance cell fate acquisition and promote embryonic development. I will also show that cell competition, alongside cell collaboration, plays a role in our earliest development - and how exploiting both can help us uncover the rules that build us.