Mark Dodici, an astrophysicist at the University of Toronto, lays out how binary stars behave near galactic centers and why that matters for several observed phenomena, including hypervelocity stars, repeating partial tidal disruption events, and the dust-enshrouded objects orbiting close to Sgr A*. He walks through recent theoretical work suggesting that as many as half of the stellar binaries in the Milky Way's central parsec shrink to near-contact separations over the course of their main sequence lifetimes, driven by dynamical processes specific to that dense environment. He then examines how the gravitational potential of a disk around an active galactic nucleus can reshape this binary population over time. The talk closes by connecting these models back to unresolved observational puzzles tied to the binary-related phenomena he opens with. Delivered as an IAS Astrophysics Seminar in the Bloomberg Lecture Hall, the talk assumes some background in stellar dynamics but builds its argument step by step from theory toward observation.