A&A Distinguished Speaker Seminar with UCSB's Bassam Bamieh

Monday, May 18, 2026, 4 – 5 p.m.

A&A Distinguished Speaker Seminar with UCSB's Bassam Bamieh
Fragility in Large-scale Dynamics: From Shear-flow transition to Anderson Localization to Networked Dynamical Systems

Reception following!

Abstract
Some mathematical models of physical phenomena can exhibit radically different behavior when modified slightly to account for additional physical mechanisms. This can be understood as fragility of the mathematical model to small "perturbations" in the dynamical description. These phenomena appear to be more ubiquitous than is generally believed. Hydrodynamic stability of wall-bounded shear flows is one striking example where flow fluctuations are highly susceptible to even small irregularities. The well-known phenomenon of Anderson localization is another one where small amounts of material disorder can radically alter the nature of dynamical modes. Recent work has shown that such localization phenomena can also occur without the presence of medium disorder, but rather due to complex geometry such as in vibrational modes of several naturally occurring biomolecules. The common thread between these seemingly disparate phenomena is the fragility of eigenvalues/vectors of large-scale matrices and operators when perturbed in various ways. These observations inspire the search for similar fragilities in large-scale dynamical networks such as the power grid among others. This talk will weave this common thread between these seemingly disparate fields, and connect them to the area of robust control, which is concerned with the behavior of systems in the presence of uncertain dynamics.

Bio
Bassam Bamieh is Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of California at Santa Barbara. His research interests are in the fundamentals of Control and Dynamical Systems such Robust, Optimal and Distributed Control, as well as the connections with problems in the areas of turbulence, thermoacoustics, statistical physics, and network science. He is a past recipient of the AACC Hugo Schuck Best Paper Award, and the IEEE Control Systems Society G. S. Axelby Outstanding Paper Award (twice). He is a Fellow of the International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC), and a Fellow of the IEEE.

Event interval: Single day event
Campus location: Student Union Building (HUB)
Online Meeting Link: washington.zoom.us…
Campus room: 334
Accessibility Contact: aafrontdesk@uw.edu
Event Types: Lectures/Seminars

College of Engineering|Aeronautics & Astronautics|A&A Distinguished Seminar Series

A&A Distinguished Speaker Seminar with UCSB's Bassam Bamieh