Two senior fellows and six junior fellows join the Insitute this summer
Cosmologist Robert Brandenberger and mathematician Walter Schachermayer will spend a year the ETH Institute for Theoretical Studies as senior fellows from August 2015. They will be joined in September 2015 by six starting junior fellows: Alessandro Carlotto, Maria Colombo, Lavinia Heisenberg, Titus Lupu, Aline Ramires and Ran Tessler. In november another senior fellow, particle physicist Riccardo Barbieri, will also join.
Robert Brandenberger is a theoretical cosmolgist who has made numerous important contributions to the subject. Among other things he has developed, together with Cumrun Vafa, the string gas cosmology model that gives an intriguing explanation for why only 3 spatial dimensions are large (and hence we seem to live in a (3+1)-dimensional universe). He has also studied the dependence of inflationary models on the assumptions about the nature of trans-Planckian physics. Professor Brandenberger, an ETH Zurich alumnus, obtained his PhD from Harvard University in 1983. He holds a Tier 1 Canada Research Chair at McGill University and he is also affiliated with the Perimeter Institute. He is the recipient of several awards, including the Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship in 1988 and the CAP-CRM Prize In Theoretical And Mathematical Physics in 2011.
Walter Schachermayer is one of the leading researchers in mathematical finance: many major developments in this field, such as the fundamental theorem of asset pricing and the dual formulation of utility optimization, are inextricably connected with his name. His research interests range from functional analysis to stochastic analysis and control theory. He also stretches out beyond the mathematical community: his articles on the impact of finance on society reach a wider audience. He received his doctorate from the University of Vienna in 1976 and is now professor at the University of VIenna. He received numerous awards, including the 1998 Wittgenstein prize for his work in mathematical finance.
Alessandro Carlotto received his PhD from Stanford University in May 2014 under the supervision of Richard Schoen. His main research interests are in Differential Geometry and Geometric Analysis, with special emphasis on the large-scale structure of asymptotically flat spaces, on the Einstein constraint equations and on various global aspects of the theory of minimal subvarieties. He will join the Institute in September 2015 after being a member of the Geometry group at Imperial College of Science and Technology, London.
Lavinia Heisenberg received her PhD at the University of Geneva in february 2014 under the supervision of Claudia de Rham. After a research visit at Perimeter Institute, she started her first postdoc in Stockholm as Nordita Follow in September 2014. Her main area of expertise is gravity and cosmology. Her research so far has been mainly devoted to the study of field theories, specially within the context of Massive Gravity, higher dimensional scenarios, Galileon fields and vector fields, comprising the fundamental properties of field theories, their cosmological consequences and observational signatures.
Aline Ramires received her PhD in Physics from Rutgers University under the supervision of Piers Coleman. Her work addresses several aspects of heavy fermion systems, ranging from phenomenological models to new theoretical approaches based on supersymmetric spin representations. She is interested in developing new theoretical tools in order to understand the unusual phases of matter observed in strongly correlated systems.
Maria Colombo is interested in partial differential equations, calculus of variations, optimal transport, and geometric analysis. In her PhD thesis, under the supervision of Luigi Ambrosio and Alessio Figalli, she studied some general tools concerning the connection between the Lagrangian and the Eulerian structure of transport equations with non-smooth vector fields; in turn, these tools apply to show that weak solutions of the Vlasov-Poisson system are Lagrangian and to obtain global existence of weak solutions under minimal assumptions on the initial data.
Titus Lupu received his PhD mathematics in May 2015 at the University Paris-Sud Orsay with a thesis on loop soups of Markov processes under the supervision of Yves Le Jan. He worked on the relation of these loop soups to the Gaussian Free Field and showed that the scaling limits of random walk loop soup clusters on a two-dimensional lattice are the Conformal Loop Ensembles.
Ran Tessler is about to receive his PhD from Hebrew University, Jerusalem, under the supervision of Jake Solomon. He works in open Gromov-Witten theory. With his collaborators he has constructed analyzed the intersection theory on the moduli spaces of open Riemann surfaces. He is also interested in probability theory.