From December 16 to 18, I co-organized the workshop “EFTs, Gravity, and Fluid Dynamics: Progress, Challenges, and Emerging Opportunities” at UIUC, together with Patrick Draper, Jorge Noronha, and Helvi Witek. The goal was to bring experts from these three fields (that do not always overlap in more specialized workshops) to foster interdisciplinary collaborations and share recent developments and open-problems across these disciplines. We had eight talks and plenty of time for lively discussions and informal chats. The workshop was only possible through generous sponsorship from the Gravity Theory Trust and our Department of Physics.
Personally, I learned a lot — thanks to our excellent speakers, all of whom can “talk across fields” — and came out with new ideas to explore.
Here is the list of speakers and the titles of their respective talks:
- Cliff Burgess, “Open EFTs: The Gravity of Being Open”
- Cynthia Keeler, “Shockwaves in Fluid-Gravity Duality”
- Diandian Wang, “Black Hole Chaos from Shockwaves and Pole Skipping”
- Elias Most, “Relativistic Fluids in Strong Gravity: Shocks and Non-Ideal Dynamics”
- Ira Rothstein, “On the Relativistic Motion of Compact Objects Through a Viscous Fluid”
- Lorenzo Gavassino, “Causality and the thermodynamic arrow of time”
- Luis Lehner, “Many sides of the fluid-gravity correspondence and consequences”
- Pau Figueras, “Classical Effective Field Theories of Gravity in the Era of Gravitational Waves”
If you are looking for a seminar or colloquium speaker, consider inviting them!
I believe we accomplished our goals. In fact, we found the workshop so successful that we are entertaining the idea of making it recurring with a two-year cadence. So stay tuned for 2026.
Here is a group photo of us saying “e ef tees”:
