Publications

The increasing interconnectedness of the modern world calls for globally equitable solutions to combat pandemic challenges. However, we have seen a tendency in recent decades for high-income countries to resort to “vaccine nationalism,” hoarding vaccine production to the detriment of lower-income countries. In addition, vaccine nationalism can prove detrimental to hoarding countries in the long term, as inequitable global vaccine distribution during the COVID-19 risked exacerbating the rise of harmful immune-escape variants that largely counteracted the original benefits of vaccine hoarding...

We measure the star formation history (SFH) of Local Group dwarf galaxy Wolf–Lundmark–Melotte (WLM) using wide-area (∼4 half-light radii) ground-based near-infrared (NIR) imaging of bright ( M _J −4.9 mag) asymptotic giant branch (AGB) stars. From our NIR color–magnitude diagram (CMD) of 825 stars, we find that our recovered SFH is in excellent agreement with literature SFHs of WLM measured from much deeper CMDs ( M _F090W ∼ +4.3 mag) based on James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) imaging. Read More...

Orthoebolavirus outbreaks place health-care workers (HCWs) at substantial risk, and HCW illness or death can weaken response capacity. The 2026 Bundibugyo virus outbreak in DR Congo highlights the need for deployable countermeasures when species-specific vaccines are unavailable. With candidate antivirals under evaluation, we aimed to estimate the impact of HCW-targeted antiviral post-exposure prophylaxis (PEP) across different readiness, disruption, and allocation scenarios.

Efficient operation of quantum batteries requires not only fast energy transfer but also the ability to halt the charging process to prevent reverse flow. Existing approaches typically rely on direct control of the charger-battery interaction, which can be experimentally demanding. Here we propose a modulator-assisted quantum battery protocol that enables indirect control of energy transfer while keeping the interaction always on. By applying repeated local unitary operations to an auxiliary modulator qubit, we exploit a Zeno-like mechanism to dynamically reshape the effective Hamiltonian and...

In avocado and certain wild relatives in Lauraceae, a highly synchronized daily rhythm of floral sex timing promotes cross-pollination between two hermaphroditic flowering types. A-type plants present female-phase flowers in the morning and male-phase flowers in the afternoon, while B-types show the complementary pattern—a form of heterodichogamy. We mapped this dimorphism to a pair of dominant and recessive haplotypes at SDMYB, which belongs to a subgroup of R2R3 MYB transcription factors established as key regulators of floral maturation with links to circadian hormone signaling. Rhythmic...