New Members : Sibylle Driezen (ETHZ), Quentin Faes (UZH), Dimitrios Kosmopoulos (UNIGE) & Maksymilian Manko (UZH)

28 Feb 2024

Welcome to Sibylle, Quentin, Dimitrios and Maksymilian.

Sibylle works on integrable deformations of string worldsheet models, their interplay with generalised worldsheet dualities, and their possible relevance for generalisations of AdS/CFT duals. She obtained her PhD in 2019 at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel and Swansea University and, before moving to ETH Zürich, she held a postdoctoral position at IGFAE (U. of Santiago de Compostela).

Quentin defended his PhD thesis in low-dimensional topology in December 2021, under the supervision of Pr. Gwénaël Massuyeau. Since then, he’s been a postoc in Dijon, in Tokyo, and now in the University of Zurich. His research field is low-dimensional topology. His main interests are 3-manifolds, their Heegaard splittings, and surgery equivalence relations among them. He is hence interested in finite-type and quantum invariants of knots and 3-manifolds. In relation, he studies mapping class groups of surfaces and their representations, as well as the Johnson (or Andreadakis) filtration of the Torelli group, and automorphisms of free groups.

Dimitrios is a postdoctoral researcher working in the group of professor Francesco Riva in the University of Geneva. With this group, he has been working on applying techniques from scattering amplitudes and Hamiltonian truncation to study QCD. He did his PhD at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) under professor Zvi Bern. His focus was on studying gravitational waves via scattering amplitudes and deriving constrains on the space of theories of gravity beyond general relativity.

Maksymilian is a PhD Student at the University of Zurich in Prof. Anna Beliakova’s group. His current research concentrates on constructions of Bobtcheva-Piergallini Hopf algebras using both theoretical and computational methods, within the context of algebraization of 3- and 4-manifold invariants, braided tensor categories and topological field theories. Before coming to UZH, he was a master student at the University of Oxford, specialising in topology, geometry and string theory, and wrote his thesis on topological aspects of generalised symmetries in M-theory, under the supervision of Prof. Sakura Schafer-Nameki. He maintains interest in mathematical aspects of field and string theory, as well as in applications of machine learning and symbolic computation in mathematics and physics.

Farewell to Giovanni Felder – a researcher at the frontier between maths and physics

MAPSS - Mathematical Physics Summer School