HAZLETON, Pa. — Asif ud-Doula, associate professor of physics at Penn State Scranton, will deliver the annual Mylar Giri lecture at Penn State Hazleton at 12:20 p.m. on Wednesday, Feb. 28, in Room 001 of the Kostos Building. The lecture is free and open to the public.

An accomplished researcher in the field of massive star winds, ud-Doula has presented his findings at conferences around the world and authored or contributed to numerous works published in scholarly scientific journals.

His lecture, “Surprisingly Strong Winds of Magnetic Massive Stars,” will discuss the nature of radiatively driven winds and how they interact with magnetic fields. Massive stars are at least eight times larger than the sun, ud-Doula explained, and possess strong stellar winds driven by radiation. An increasing number of them have been confirmed to have global magnetic fields that can significantly influence the dynamics of these stellar winds, which are strongly ionized. Such interaction of the wind and magnetic field can generate a copious amount of X-rays, spin the star down, or help form large scale disk-like structures, he said.

He received a doctorate in physics from the University of Delaware and a bachelor's degree in physics/mathematics from City College of New York.

Sponsored by the Lectures and Cultural Events Committee, the event honors late campus physics professor Mylar Giri. As a researcher, his interests included percolation, phase transitions and polymers. Giri taught in Hazleton for eight years before he died in 1988 at the age of 37. That year, the Mylar Giri Lecture series was established to honor him by inviting a distinguished speaker in the natural sciences to Penn State Hazleton.