At the interface of asymptotics, conformal methods and analysis in general relativity

Professor Jean-Philippe Nicolas, University of Brest, France

Professor Jean-Philippe Nicolas received their PhD under the supervision of Alain Bachelot in Bordeaux. This was followed by a postdoc under the supervision of Roger Penrose at the University of Oxford. They were appointed as a Lecturer in 1995 in Bordeaux and then as a Professor in Brest in 2007.

Professor Piotr Chruściel, University of Vienna, Austria

Professor Piotr Chruściel is Professor of Gravitational Physics at the University of Vienna, Austria. He received his PhD from the Institute for Theoretical Physics of the Polish Academy of Sciences under the supervision of Professor J Kijowski, and has held positions at the Polish Academy of Sciences, Université de Tours and the University of Oxford. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Physics and Clare Hall College, University of Cambridge. He won the Prix Plumey de l'Académie des Sciences de Paris in 2003. He serves on the Editorial Board of the journal Communications in Mathematical Physics.

Photo credit: Barbara Mair

Professor Peter Hintz, ETH Zürich, Switzerland

Peter Hintz studies partial differential equations in general relativity. He received his PhD in 2015 from Stanford University under the supervision of Andras Vasy. Following his postdoctoral appointment at the University of California, Berkeley, he was appointed Assistant Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2018. Since 2021, he has been an Associate Professor of Mathematics and Physics at ETH Zürich. For his research, Hintz has received a number of awards, including Miller, Clay, and Sloan Research Fellowships. Furthermore, he was an invited speaker at the ICM 2022, and a plenary speaker at the ICMP 2021.

Mariem Magdy Ali Mohamed, Queen Mary University of London, UK

Mariem MA Mohamed is a PhD student at Queen Mary University of London working under the supervision of Juan A Valiente Kroon and Mahdi Godazgar. After completing a BSc in Astronomy and Physics at Cairo University in 2014, she moved to the UK to pursue postgraduate studies. She completed an MSc in Physics at Imperial College London in 2019. Mariem MA Mohamed has held a faculty position at the Astronomy department of the Faculty of Science at Cairo University since 2016. During her PhD, she published two papers. The first is focused on the investigation of the relation between two different conformal formulations of spatial infinity; namely, Friedrich’s cylinder at spatial infinity and Ashtekar’s hyperboloid at spatial infinity. The second publication is concerned with the evaluation of the asymptotic charges at the so-called critical sets of null infinity for spin-1 and spin-2 fields on Minkowski spacetime.  

Leonhard Kehrberger, University of Cambridge, UK

The path that eventually led Leonhard to the field of analysis in general relativity began in 2014 when they started their Bachelor's studies at the University of Hamburg. Their degree was in physics, but they also took many mathematics courses and found great enjoyment in those, particularly in the analysis courses. After an Erasmus semester in Uppsala, Sweden, and finishing their Bachelor's thesis, they then went to the University of Cambridge for their master's degree. During that time, Leonhard learned much about currently active research fields in mathematical physics and mathematics, and was very happy to discover that general relativity is full of exciting open analytical and physically relevant problems. They thus started doing their PhD under the supervision of Mihalis Dafermos. They was lucky to be able to go on research visits to Münster and Princeton. After their PhD, they will be a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig under the supervision of Dejan Gajic.

Marica Minucci, Queen Mary University of London, UK

Marica Minucci is a final year PhD student in Mathematics at Queen Mary, University of London under the supervision of Dr Juan Antonio Valiente Kroon. Her research is devoted to understanding the mathematical aspects of Einstein’s theory of General Relativity. In particular, she works on devising new strategies to prove the non-linear stability of vacuum spacetimes with positive cosmological constant. The main strategy relies on conformal methods along with hyperbolic reduction procedures. She is also interested in problems arising from the conformal structure of spacetime such as the problem of spatial infinity.

Before starting her PhD, Marica received a BSc and an MSc in Theoretical and Mathematical Physics at University of Naples "Federico II".