Seven postdoctoral students from the Faculty of Science, Technology and Medicine (FSTM) have recently received funding from the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) postdoctoral fellowships to acquire new skills through advanced training, international, interdisciplinary, and inter-sectoral mobility.
Investigating biophysics and active matter
Researcher: Chenyu Jin
Project: Microbial navigation strategies in ecologically relevant porous media
With a highly interdisciplinary background spanning biotechnology, chemistry and physics, Dr. Chenyu Jin started her postdoctoral research at the University of Luxembourg in November 2022 and joined the Physics of Living Matter Group led by Prof. Anupam Sengupta.
With the MSCA funding, Chenyu will continue her experimental study on the navigation strategy of microorganisms in porous environments at the University of Luxembourg until February 2025 and then spend 6 months at the Heinrich-Heine University Düsseldorf (HHU) for theoretical understanding and modelling.
Researcher: William Piñeros
Project: Inverse Design of Active Matter
With a background in self-organising strategies in soft-matter, Dr. William Piñeros has been a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Luxembourg in the Physics of Active Matter group under the supervision of Prof. Etienne Fodor since May 2022.
Starting September 2023 and spanning 24 months, William will extend this line of research and investigate how rare events in energy dissipation may encode for emergent material self-ordering at a numerical and theoretical level.
Investigating mechanical engineering
Researcher: Mohammad Mahdi Rajabi
Project: Machine learning-aided multiscale design of porous materials tailored to application-specific, hydro-mechanical performance requirements
Dr. Rajabi embarked on his postdoctoral research journey at the University of Luxembourg in October 2022, where he joined the Legato team led by Prof. Stephane Bordas.
Dr. Rajabi will utilize synergistic insights from computational fluid dynamics, solid mechanics, material engineering, and machine learning to create a computational method for designing engineered porous materials at multiple scales. He will spend 21 months at the University of Luxembourg and 3 months at the University of Strasbourg to accomplish this.
Researcher: Qiuni Fu
Project: Resource Efficient Steel – Recycled Aggregate Concrete Composite Floor Systems
With a background in civil/structural engineering, Dr Qiuni Fu will start her postdoctoral research at the University of Luxembourg in July 2022 and join the Structural Engineering and Composite Structures Group led by Prof. Markus Schäfer.
Qiuni will stay at UL for 24 months to investigate and model the load-bearing behaviour of headed-stud shear connections in profiled steel sheeting-recycled aggregate concrete (RAC) composite floor systems, taking the uncertainty of RAC properties into account via stochastic finite element simulations, uncertainty modelling, and reliability analysis.
Investigating geometry
Researcher: Alexey Balitskiy
Project: Systolic and diastolic estimates in geometry
Dr. Alexey Balitskiy will start his postdoctoral research at the University of Luxembourg in September 2023 in the group of Prof. Hugo Parlier. He will spend 21 months in Luxembourg working on geometry related to slicings and cuttings of surfaces in arbitrary dimensions, and 3 months at Freie Universität Berlin working on connections of geometry with quantum error correction codes.
Researcher: Tommaso Cremaschi
Project: Deformation Theory of infinite-type hyperbolic manifolds
Dr Tommaso Cremaschi joined Prof. Schlenker group in June 2022. Tommaso will spend 22 months at the University of Luxembourg studying 3-manifolds with infinitely generated fundamental group and then 2 months in Nottingham visiting Prof Krasnov looking at interactions with physics.
Researcher: Kate Vokes
Project: Combinatorial and Geometric Methods for Mapping Class Groups of Surfaces
Kate Vokes will be based in the Department of Mathematics, in the group of Hugo Parlier. Her research is in geometric group theory and one focus is on understanding symmetries of surfaces via loops in the surface. She has previous research experience in France, Canada and the UK.