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    Dr. Durisen will review the basic mechanical principles that govern the formation, structure, stability, and evolution of gas disks around young stars. A number of purely hydrodynamic processes can influence the behavior of disks by producing stresses that induce mass transport or by creating structures that lead to planet formation. The most robust such process proposed so far is the occurrence gravitational instabilities (GIs) due to disk self-gravity. Dr. Durisen will present our current understanding of GIs in disks, which comes primarily from numerical simulations performed over the past decade.
    Among the topics that will be covered are the conditions under which GIs occur, their nonlinear behavior, the critical importance of radiative cooling and irradiation, current disagreements about the outcome of GIs in real disks, interactions between GI-induced turbulence and solid particles, and the possible role of GIs in planet formation.