Speaker: Yan Hongjun, associate professor at Yale School of Management

Venue: Room 216, the new Guanghua Building

Date: March 17, 2011 (Thursday)

Time: 14:00-15:30

Organizer: Guanghua School of Management, Peking University (PKU)

Intro: This paper examines the impact of U.S. Treasury note auctions on the secondary Treasury market, repo markets, and the equity market. Since both the exact dates and amounts of the auctions are announced in advance, these shocks are largely anticipated. Nevertheless, the lecturer and his colleagues find that Treasury security prices in the secondary market drop significantly before the auctions and recover shortly after them. A simple self-financed strategy that exploits this return pattern yields an annualized Sharpe ratio of above one. These results, together with further evidence in both Treasury and repo markets, appear to be consistent with the hypothesis of primary dealers’ limited risk-bearing capacity and the imperfect capital mobility of Treasury investors (e.g. U.S. and foreign governments, insurance companies). Their evidence suggests that these frictions are of first-order importance even in those most liquid financial markets. The estimated costs for issuing Treasury notes are between 9 and 18 basis points of the auction size, an order of magnitude larger than the estimates of auction markups in the literature, which usually calculates the markup as the difference between the auction price and a benchmark price on the auction day, and hence ignores the drop of the benchmark price before auctions. As an example, their estimated cost of issuing Treasury notes alone is over half a billion dollars in 2007.

Speaker: Yang Zhen, professor at PKU College of Chemistry and Molecular Engineering

Venue: Room 101 at Deng Youcai Lecture Hall, the new Biology Building at PKU

Date: March 18, 2011 (Friday)

Time: 13:00-14:30

Organizer: PKU School of Life Sciences

Intro: The natural product exists in an infinite range of complexity and diversity, and often presents dazzling biological activities. The total synthesis of complex natural product s involves distinct synthetic problems which require not only ingenuity and skills, but also the unique strategies and tactics for their ad hoc solution. The research program of Professor Yang’s group aimed for the development of novel synthetic methodologies and strategies, then applied them to the syntheses of complex natural products, which is highly attractive, valuable, and rewarding in both chemical embodiments and medicinal demand. To those who enjoy challenges and aspire the awesome power of creating new molecules; and to those who also treasure the tremendous medicinal potential of natural product-likes compounds, their approach provides potent chemical tools and physiological insight may be invaluable for the treatment of diseases and utilized as probes to regulate the importantly biological targets.

Speaker: Mitani Hiroshi, professor at the University of Tokyo

Venue: Room 110, Jingyuan Courtyard No.2 (PKU Department of History)

Date: March 18, 2011 (Friday)

Time: 15:10-17:00

Organizer: PKU Department of History

Speaker: Patricia, Ecuador scholar

Venue: Room 205, Natural Science Classroom Building

Date: March 21, 2011 (Monday)

Time: 14:10-14:50

Organizer: PKU Department of History

Speaker: Dr. Jacob Benus, IMPAQ International

Venue: Room 302, the new building of PKU School of Economics

 
Date: March 21, 2011 (Monday)

Time: 15:30-17:00

Organizer: PKU School of Economics

Intro: This talk will discuss the purpose rigorous evaluations methodologies and explain how alternative quantitative evaluation methods are used to evaluate the effectiveness of programs. It will present two examples of how the U.S. Department of Labor has used evaluation studies to develop labor programs.

Speaker: Professor Ye Xiangdong, University of Science and Technology of China

Venue: Room 1114, Natural Science Building No.1

Date: March 23, 2011 (Wednesday)

Time: 14:00-15:00

Organizer: PKU School of Mathematic Science

Intro: The famous Szemeredi's theorem asserts that a subset of natural numbers with positive density contains arbitrarily long arithmetic progressions. There are several proofs of the theorem. In this talk, Professor Ye wants to explain the main idea of Furstenberg's proof using ergodic theory. In Furstenberg's proof the convergence of the multiple ergodic averages plays a great role. The speaker will review the progress along this line. Meanwhile related questions in topological dynamics will be discussed.

Date: March 24, 2011 (Thursday)

Time: 16:10-17:00

Organizer: PKU School of Life Sciences

Intro: The ends of linear eukaryotic chromosomes are capped by telomeres that protect chromosome termini from degradation, end to-end fusion and recombination. In most of cancer and stem cells, telomere length is maintained by telomerase, the enzyme that adds repeats of TTAGGG DNA to the end of telomeres. Due to the technical challenge, several fundamental questions remained to be elucidated in the field, including the structure of telomere end, the mechanism underlying telomere maintenance by telomerase in mammalian cells as well as the regulatory machinery involving telomerase action. By developing a series of new techniques, I provide robust and definitive answers to these questions by demonstrating:
1) Each chromosome terminates with a long and short single-stranded overhang at its two ends, respectively;
2) In human cancer cells, every telomere was elongated by a single telomerase molecule;
3) Telomerase mediated extension of G-rich strand is uncoupled with the complementary C-rich strand synthesis;
4) Telomerase adopts two major extension modes, processive and distributive under homeostatic versus disequilibrium length conditions;
5) Telomerase action is regulated by P28, a new identified component of telomerase holoenzyme.
Associated with these findings, multiple factors were identified that have a potential to be the therapeutic target for telomerase based cancer treatment.