PG students

Bruno grew up in Wandsworth in South West London, UK. He received a Bachelors in the Natural Sciences tripos at Cambridge, before switching to part III of the Mathematical tripos to study theoretical physics. As of 2018 he is at Heriot-Watt, studying the dynamics of magnetic skyrmions under the supervision of Bernd Schroers.

Andrew was born in Grantham, England and grew up mostly in Ayr, Scotland. He graduated with an MSci in Physics and Mathematics from the University of Glasgow in 2018. He then went on to obtain an MSc in Mathematical Physics from the University of Edinburgh the following year, writing his thesis on supersymmetry in curved spacetime under the supervision of José Figueroa-O'Farrill. He is now continuing this work with José as a PhD student.

Leo is from Trieste, Italy. He received his BSc and MSc in Theoretical Physics at the University of Perugia. His Master thesis, supervised by Marta Orselli and Niels Obers, was about non-relativistic geometries in the context of the AdS/CFT Correspondence. He is now a PhD student at the University of Edinburgh under the supervision of Jelle Hartong. His research is focused on the study of classical and quantum strings moving in a non-relativistic target space.

Wei was brought up in China, completing his BSc at the Australian National University and ETH Zürich (2020). He has started his PhD in the mathematical physics group at University of Edinburgh under the supervision of Tim Adamo in September 2020. His research interest lies in the field of twistor string theory and geometric reformulations of QFT.

Alice was born in South Wales, UK. She did an undergraduate degree in Experimental and Theoretical Physics at the University of Cambridge, before completing part III of the Mathematical Tripos in her fourth year. Her part III essay, supervised by Paul Townsend, was a review of the BFSS M(atrix) model of M-theory. After a year of working as an Android engineer at RealVNC Ltd., she moved to Heriot-Watt in 2014 to start her PhD with Christian Saemann. Her research interests include the dynamics of M-branes in M-theory and the role of geometry in descriptions of physical systems.

Alec is from Crawley, West Sussex, in the UK. He completed his integrated MSci degree in Physics at the University of Bristol in 2016; the title of his Masters project in theoretical optics (under Professor Mark Dennis) being "Polarisation Singularities in Anisotropic Crystal Optics". After turning down a PhD offer from NTU, he took a year out of academia, during which, among other part-time roles, he enjoyed tutoring A-Level students, before joining Heriot Watt for his PhD in 2017. He is currently studying under Professor Robert Weston, using representation theory of q-deformed algebras in an attempt to derive Baxter TQ-relations for open quantum spin chains.

Linden is from North London, completing his bachelors and masters in maths at the University of Cambridge. He is interested in the integrability of systems, and maintains active research in biostatistics.

Jarah grew up in South Africa. He studied mathematics and physics at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg before moving to the UK to do Part III of the Cambridge University Mathematical Tripos. He is now a PhD student at the University of Edinburgh under the supervision of José Figueroa-O’Farrill. Jarah’s research centres around Lie Theory and Cartan Geometry with a focus towards classifying spacetimes as homogeneous spaces of certain symmetry groups. He also maintains an interest in the analytical foundations of Quantum Theory.

Grigorios was born and grew up in Athens, Greece. He graduated with a BSc in Mathematics and Physics from the University of Edinburgh in 2016, with a dissertation on the geometrical formulation of gauge theories. He then went on to complete Part III of the Mathematical Tripos at the University of Cambridge. He is now working on his PhD at Heriot-Watt, under the supervision of Richard Szabo. His research is focused on strong homotopy Lie algebras of gravity and their braided noncommutative and nonassociative deformations. Further research interests include geometrical and homotopical formulations of field theories, gauge theory, quantum gravity and string theory, while as a hobby he worries about foundational issues of quantum theory.

Benjamin grew up in Germany, receiving his BSc and MSc in Physics at the University of Heidelberg. Under the guidance of Matthias Bartelmann and Johannes Walcher he worked on modified theories of gravity and higher gauge theory. Since 2022, he is working as a PhD student at the University of Edinburgh supervised by Tudor Dimofte. His research interests include TQFTs, generalized symmetries, and anomalies.

Emil grew up in Denmark, where he received his MSc at the Niels Bohr Institute working on non-relativistic holographic dualities under the supervision of Niels Obers. He then went to Cambridge to complete part III of the Mathematical Tripos, where he wrote an essay on bosonization and the particle-vortex duality supervised by David Tong. He is now a PhD student at the University of Edinburgh under the supervision of Jelle Hartong. His research focuses on holographic dualities as they appear in string theory and beyond, as well as aspects of non-Lorentzian geometries relevant to the fluid/gravity correspondence and fluid dynamics more generally with potential applications to strongly coupled condensed matter systems and systems of biophysical interest.

Sergio is from London (UK). He completed a BSc in Physics & Mathematics at the University of Southampton before working in Telcommunications as a research engineer. He returned to academia to pursue an interest in theoretical physics, graduating from Imperial College (2012) with a MSc in "Quantum Fields & Fundamental forces". His dissertation was a review of the Hamiltonian formalism of General Relativity, with a focus on the difficulty of defining gauge invariant observables in gravity. He is currently researching the deformation of wave equations in 2+1 gravity under the supervision of Bernd Schroers. Other scientific interests include quantum gravity, geometry and foundational issues in physics.

Dávid is from Budapest, Hungary. He received his first degree in Medicine at Semmelweis University before switching to Physics. After graduating with a BSc in Physics from Eötvös Loránd University, he completed part III of the Mathematical Tripos at the University of Cambridge. He then continued his studies at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics in Hanover. Since September 2020 he is a PhD student under the supervision of James Lucietti at the University of Edinburgh. He is interested in the study of higher dimensional black holes.

Sonja grew up near Hannover, Germany, and later Nottingham, UK. She completed her Bachelors and Masters degrees in Mathematics at the University of Cambridge, culminating in an essay on Wess-Zumino-Witten Models. From January 2021, she will be a Ph.D. student at the University of Edinburgh, supervised by Tim Adamo. Her research interests are QFTs in strong background fields, with a dash of integrability and twistor theory!

Ross was born in Harare, Zimbabwe, and grew up in Zambia. He read Physics at Merton College, Oxford, graduating with an MMathPhys in 2021. His research studies the relationship between quantum information and the geometry of spacetime.

Vincenzo was born in Avellino, Italy. He completed his BSc in Aerospace Engineering at University of Naples "Federico II" and, then, switched to Physics. He stayed in Naples for his MSc degree in Theoretical Physics. His master thesis, supervised by Prof. P. Vitale, concentrated on the study of Generalised Geometry, its applications to Principal Chiral Models and its relations with the geometry of Double Field Theory. He is now a PhD student at Heriot-Watt University, under the supervision of Richard Szabo. His interests include Differential Geometry, Generalised Geometry and their applications to physics.

Subrabalan (Subri) is a mathematical physicist working at the intersection of supersymmetric gauge theories, topology and geometry. In particular, he is trying to understand the so-called class S theories and their connection to integrable systems. Outside physics, his interests include hiking, bouldering and cooking.

Jørgen grew up in Denmark, where he received his MSc at the Niels Bohr Institute studying 2+1 dimensional non-relativistic gravity under the supervision of Niels Obers and Gerben Oling. Jørgen is now a PhD student at the University of Edinburgh under the supervision of Jelle Hartong. His research is currently focused on applying a recently developed theory of non-relativistic gravity to attain a covariant formulation of the post-Newtonian approximation of general relativity.

Sergei was born in Moscow, Russia. He obtained his Bachelor’s degree in Physics (2016) and, later, his second Master’s degree (2019) at faculty of physics of Lomonosov Moscow State University. His first Master’s degree comes from Part III Mathematics (2018) at the University of Cambridge. In 2018-2019 Sergei was one of the co-lecturers in “Basic structures of differential geometry for physicists” at Lomonosov MSU. Since September 2019 Sergei is working under the supervision of Professor Lucietti. His current research interests lie in the field of higher dimensional black holes and theories of supergravity.

Virinchi hails from the warm climes of Perth, Australia. His tertiary education began with undergraduate studies in physics and maths at the University of Western Australia. He then continued at the same institution, attaining a Master of Physics supervised by Sergei Kuzenko and Evgeny Buchbinder. In 2021, Virinchi relocated to England for Part III of the Mathematical Tripos at the University of Cambridge. Since September 2022, he has been a PhD student at the University of Edinburgh, exploring various mathematical topics regarding black holes, under the supervision of James Lucietti.

Dominik is from Bratislava, Slovakia. He received his Bc. in Physics from Comenius University in Bratislava. He then obtained his MSc in Gravity, Particles, and Fields at the University of Nottingham. In his dissertation, supervised by John Barrett, Dominik investigated the construction of fuzzy complex projective spaces in the spectral triple approach to noncommutative geometry. He is now a student at Heriot-Watt University supervised by Christian Sämann. His research includes looking for classical structures of the (2,0)-theory using the tools of higher gauge theory.

Spyridoula is from Lefkada, Greece. She completed her undergraduate degree in Mathematics at the University of Patras, followed by a MSc in Applied Mathematics. Her master thesis, supervised by Prof V. Papageorgiou, involved a method of full discretization for integrable PDEs. Then she joined Heriot-Watt University as a PhD student under the supervision of Dr A. Doikou. Her research focuses on constructing Lax representations for both integrable PDEs and discrete integrable systems by applying specific algebraic methods.

Benjamin grew up in Baden in the south of Germany. He was educated in physics at ETH Zurich and in mathematics at the University of Geneva, holding MSc degrees in both disciplines. Originally trained in black hole astrophysics, his research now evolves around quantum gravity and holography, where he is interested in addressing aspects of black hole information using methods in conformal field theory.

Girish grew up in Singapore and Bangalore but is originally from Chennai, India. He completed his MSci at Imperial College London and his MSc at the University of Edinburgh, after which he commenced his PhD in November 2020 with his MSc project supervisor, José Figueroa-O’Farrill. He is interested in algebraic and representation theoretic aspects of string theory. In particular, his research focuses on using vertex operator algebras and homological methods to better understand non-relativistic string theories. Apart from mathematics and physics, Girish enjoys sports. He used to be a competitive badminton player, but is now actively involved in bouldering and roped climbing while also practising calisthenics.