On March 18, the BGSMath held its first session on careers after a PhD in mathematics, bringing together three speakers with different professional trajectories and 46 early-career researchers from nine institutions.
On March 18, the Barcelona Graduate School of Math (BGSMath) held its first session on career paths following a PhD in mathematics. The activity, organised as a new initiative within the BGSMath’s training program for early-stage researchers, responded to a need that doctoral programs in mathematics rarely address directly: the transition from thesis to professional life, and the range of directions that transition can take.
The session brought together 46 participants, including PhD students, master’s students, and postdoctoral researchers from nine institutions: the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, the Universitat de Barcelona, the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, the Centre de Recerca Matemàtica, the Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia, the CSIC, IDIBAFS, the Université Paris Dauphine, and the University of São Paulo.
Three speakers presented their own professional trajectories and took questions from the audience. Carlos D’Andrea, professor at the UB and affiliated researcher at the CRM, spoke about building a career in academic research: what it requires, how it develops, and what doctoral students should know before they find themselves in the middle of it. Patrick Morris, from the UPC, shared his experience as a postdoctoral researcher, a stage that comes with its own particular uncertainties. Anna Tamarit Sariol, currently at the data visualisation studio Bestiario, described how her doctoral training in mathematics shaped her work outside the university system.
The format was deliberately open. Rather than offering a roadmap, the session allowed participants to hear accounts of different paths and to ask questions that don’t always find space in standard academic settings. For researchers at an early stage of their careers, that kind of direct conversation can be difficult to find elsewhere.
With this first edition, the BGSMath signals its intention to support young researchers not only in their research training but in their broader professional development.
|
|
CRM CommPau Varela
|
The CRM exhibition ‘Les matemàtiques de Gaudí’ moves to the University of Barcelona
After its October run at the UAB, the exhibition Les matemàtiques de Gaudí, produced by the CRM, can be seen at the University of Barcelona’s CRAI Biblioteca de Matemàtiques i Informàtica from 2 to 30 November 2026.
Advanced Course on Free Boundary Problems Opens the Intensive Weeks of the IRP
From 26 to 30 October, around forty researchers attended the Advanced Course on Free Boundary Problems at the CRM, three seven-hour mini-courses given by Bozhidar Velichkov (Università di Pisa), Max Engelstein (University of Minnesota) and Zihui Zhao (Johns Hopkins University). The course was the first of the two intensive weeks of the Intensive Research Programme on Analysis of Free Boundary Problems, which runs until 4 December.
El CRM rep els estudiants de la prova de nivell de Bojos per les Matemàtiques 2027
Els aspirants a Bojos per les Matemàtiques 2027 van visitar el Centre de Recerca Matemàtica (CRM) dissabte 24 d’octubre, després de fer la prova de nivell a la Facultat de Ciències i Biociències de la UAB. En acabat, Tomás Sanz (UB-CRM) els va explicar què té a veure l’escalfament d’una barra de ferro amb els àudios de WhatsApp.
Eight CRM Researchers in the 2026 Stanford-Elsevier List of Highly Cited Scientists
The Centre de Recerca Matemàtica (CRM) has eight researchers in the 2026 update of the Stanford-Elsevier ranking of highly cited scientists, which John P. A. Ioannidis (Stanford University) and Jeroen Baas (Elsevier) compile from Scopus data. Xavier Cabré, Álvaro Corral, Tim Myers, Xavier Ros-Oton, Sergey Tikhonov and Xavier Tolsa appear both in the career-long ranking and in the one for 2025, and Diego Vidaurre and Simeon Ball in the 2025 ranking.
Fish schools and growing tissues: a workshop on how collective behaviour emerges
The Centre de Recerca Matemàtica (CRM) organised the Barcelona Workshop on Kinetic and Macroscopic Models in Biology with Friends II, held from 7 to 10 September at the Institut d’Estudis Catalans. More than thirty researchers discussed how order at the scale of tissues and animal groups arises from local interactions between individuals, in a programme that included talks by CRM researchers Daria Stepanova and Juan Arellano-Tintó. Two of the speakers, James Sharpe (EMBL Barcelona) and Chiara Villa (CNRS, Université Paris Cité), talked to the CRM about their research.
The CRM opens the academic year and unveils its Directors’ Gallery
A review of the year, the Communication Plan 2026–2030 and three research talks filled the morning of 19 October.The unveiling of the Directors’ Gallery.CRM CommPau VarelaCRMComm@crm.catGet the latest CRM news and activities in your inbox.Recent...
The CRM Mentoring Programme, as Told by One of Its Pairs
PhD student Joaquim Duran and mathematician Robert Cardona, one of the pairs in the CRM Mentoring ProgrammeJoaquim Duran (left) and Robert Cardona.CRM CommPau VarelaCRMComm@crm.catGet the latest CRM news and activities in your inbox.Recent...
When the reward comes within reach, the brain changes what it compares
As the tokens piled up, choices got faster and more accurate at the same time. The yardstick for judging each offer had moved.CRM CommPau VarelaCRMComm@crm.catGet the latest CRM news and activities in your inbox.Recent newsletters →Two subjects...
Almost every automaton can be reset with a short word
Guillaume Chapuy (Université Paris Cité, CNRS) and Guillem Perarnau (UPC, CRM) have shown that a random finite automaton with n states can, with high probability, be reset by a word of length of order √n log n. The result, published in ACM Transactions on Algorithms, pins the exponent at 1/2, the lower end of a decade of numerical estimates, and addresses the random version of the synchronization problem behind a conjecture Ján Černý posed in 1964 and which still remains open.
Exposició ‘Les matemàtiques de Gaudí’
CRM quod erat demonstrandum | 48
ADA: Decoding Brain Signals Misaligned in Time
The study addresses a key limitation of current brain decoding techniques: the difficulty of interpreting internal mental processes whose temporal dynamics vary from trial to trial.Decoding what is happening in a person’s mind from their brain activity is one of the...