Welcoming Six New Affiliated Researchers to the Centre de Recerca Matemàtica

Jezabel Curbelo and Olli Saari join the CRM research community from the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, while Paloma Bengoechea, Kolja Knauer, Kostiantyn Drach and Arnau Padrol come from the Universitat de Barcelona. With their affiliation, 81 researchers from the UAB, UB and UPC have already joined the CRM in the last few years to bolster the mathematical research carried out in Catalunya, while also strengthening collaboration between institutions.

The Centre de Recerca Matemàtica (CRM) is pleased to announce the addition of six new affiliated researchers, joining the centre’s community from the UPC and the UB. Their diverse backgrounds and research fields promise to enrich the growing environment at CRM. Let’s take a moment to get to know each and every one of them.

Jezabel Curbelo joins us as a Ramon y Cajal Research Fellow at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya. Her academic journey has taken her to various prestigious institutions, including the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences at UCLA and the Laboratoire de Géologie de Lyon. Her PhD thesis (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, 2014) was awarded with the “2015 Donald L. Turcotte Award” (American Geophysical Union). She has received several awards for her research in geophysical fluid dynamics including the ”Leonardo Fellowships 2022” (BBVA Foundation) and the ”2021 L’Oréal-UNESCO For Women in Science” award (L’Oréal Spain).

Kolja Knauer is a Ramon y Cajal researcher at UB since 2019, working in the intersection of Algebraic and Geometric Combinatorics with a focus on Graph Theory and Algorithmics. His contributions to the field include answering questions and conjectures from renowned mathematicians such as Babai & Pultr, Barat & Thomassen, Biedl & Stern, Fukuda, Golumbic et al., Halman et al., Harutyunyan, Hochstättler, Saks & West, and Winkler.

Kostiantyn Drach, a researcher in the fields of dynamical systems, geometric inequalities, and topological data analysis, is set to join CRM from the Universitat de Barcelona. Kostya hails from Kharkiv and he earned his bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees from the V. N. Karazin Kharkiv National University, earning many distinctions on the way.

Paloma Bengoechea, a Ramon y Cajal fellow at the Universitat de Barcelona, has a rich and varied background spanning number theory, geometry, dynamics, and graph theory. Her research bridges the gap between diophantine approximation and number theory, building on the work of Fields Medalists Margulis and Lindenstrauss. Her journey has taken her from obtaining her Ph.D. under the guidance of Don Zagier at the Pierre and Marie Curie University  (Paris IV) to receiving the prestigious Ambizione Grant from the Swiss National Foundation.

Olli Saari, a Ramon y Cajal Research Fellow at UPC, has held post-doctoral positions at the University of Bonn (Germany), Aalto University (Finland), and the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute (the US). He obtained his doctoral degree from Aalto University under the supervision of Juha Kinnunen. He works on Fourier analysis, elliptic and parabolic partial differential equations.

Arnau Padrol, from the Universitat de Barcelona, was a Maître de Conférences at the Institute de Mathématiques de Jussieu – Paris Rive Gauche at Sorbonne Université. He was a postdoc researcher at Freie Universität Berlin under the supervision of Günter Ziegler and Raman Sanyal. He completed his Ph.D. studies at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya. Arnau works on Discrete and Combinatorial Geometry, Convex Polytopes, and Oriented Matroids.

The Centre de Recerca Matemàtica is proud to welcome them to its research community. We look forward to the collaborative opportunities that their presence will bring to CRM.