Faculty of Science, Technology and Medicine
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Faculty of Humanities, Education and Social Sciences
Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust
Luxembourg Centre for Systems Biomedicine
Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History
Luxembourg Centre for European Law
Luxembourg Centre for Socio-Environmental SystemsDistinguished
Attracting distinguished scientists and thinkers.
2025
By Prof. Ralf SEPPELT (LCSES), Prof. Harlan KOFF (FHSE) and Prof. Conchita D’AMBROSIO (FHSE)
The UN Sustainable Development Goals have been widely adopted for purposes of framing long run, global sustainability challenges. Of the 17 goals, eight are closely tied to essential food, land, water, climate, and biodiversity outcomes that are already under intense pressure. Can the future demands for food, fuel, clean water, biodiversity, climate change mitigation and poverty reduction be reconciled?
Ensuring the long-term sustainability of land and water resources, even as we seek to meet the world economy’s growing demands, requires informed management of the complex networks of policies, infrastructure and technologies that connect the food and resource nexus. In addressing this challenge, local, meso-, and global scale perspectives are required. The local scale refers to the socio-economic and environmental conditions in the neighborhood of individual landowners with their surrounding environment. The meso-scale can be thought of as regional scale, with regions varying from small watersheds to entire river basins.
At the other end of the spectrum from local scale, the global scale encompasses the entire world. Processes interact across these local, meso-, and global scales. For example, local decisions of individual agents can affect food, land, water and biodiversity at larger meso-scales, and the aggregation of local decisions affects conditions all the way up to the global scale. Local conditions are in turn shaped by meso-scale and global-scale environmental processes such as climate change, as well as economic conditions as reflected in prices determined by global markets.
One cannot understand the ramifications of climate change or shocks to global markets, such as tariff changes, without understanding the collection of local decisions, and one cannot formulate local decisions without understanding how local conditions are driven by larger meso-scale and global-scale forces. Informed decision-making requires multi-scale information that integrates from local to global scales.
This DISTINGUISHED Project GLASS will lay the foundation in the Institute for Advanced Studies for Global-Local-Global analysis of land and water sustainability challenges in Luxembourg, the EU and globally. It thus provides new insights and establishes and another way to bridge scale between to the (mostly) global focus of the Luxembourg Centre for Socio-Environmental Systems (LCSES) as well as the research in the labs of Prof Koff and Prof D’ Ambrosio which focus on local and regional studies in the Global South.
Prof Ralf SEPPELT
LCSESDirector of the Luxembourg Centre for Socio-Environmental Systems
By Prof. Harlan KOFF (FHSE) and Dr. Rachel RECKINGER (FHSE)
The proposed Distinguished visit by Dr. Vivian Valencia to the University of Luxembourg will play a pivotal role in advancing the interdisciplinary integration of resilience science within the SPICES² project—an initiative focused on promoting policy coherence and sustainable food system transformation across Luxembourg, Quebec, and Mexico. Over the course of eight weeks, Dr. Valencia will collaborate with PIs Dr. Rachel Reckinger and Dr. Harlan Koff, along with postdoctoral and doctoral researchers and local stakeholders, to apply and refine the ABCD resilience framework (Agency, Buffering, Connectivity, Diversity) as a diagnostic and planning tool for climate adaptation within food systems.
This visit will be instrumental in embedding resilience thinking into ongoing participatory visioning processes and policy analyses within the Luxembourg case study, testing the operational relevance of the ABCD framework for identifying systemic strengths and vulnerabilities. Dr. Valencia will co-facilitate transdisciplinary foresight workshops, deliver public lectures, lead training for early-career researchers and lecture in master’s courses. Her presence will also catalyze a comparative analysis across national contexts, enabling knowledge exchange and the adaptation of the framework to Mexico and Quebec.
In addition to empirical and methodological contributions, the visit will serve as a launchpad for high-impact scholarly output and strategic consortium development. Dr. Valencia will co-author a policy brief and a scientific article, and engage in preparatory work for a Horizon Europe proposal, positioning the University of Luxembourg at the forefront of resilience-informed, policy-relevant food systems research. Her expertise in agroecology, sustainable food systems, and global sustainability governance—honed through collaborations with institutions such as FAO, Wageningen University, the World Economic Forum, and CGIAR—ensures that the visit will meaningfully contribute to both academic excellence and societal impact.
By Prof. Adolfo DEL CAMPO ECHEVARRIA (FSTM) and Prof. Jean-Marc SCHLENKER (FSTM)
Turbulence, one of the great unsolved mysteries of physics and mathematics, is everywhere—from stormy weather and industrial flows to the beating of the human heart. More than half a century ago, Nobel laureate Richard Feynman suggested that “quantum turbulence,” a tangled dance of microscopic vortices in superfluids, could serve as a simplified model to unlock turbulence’s secrets. With modern advances in ultracold physics, researchers can now create and control exotic states of matter such as Bose–Einstein condensates, opening an entirely new arena to explore turbulence at the quantum level.
The new project TopTurbCQ brings together these worlds by building on a breakthrough in classical turbulence made by physicist Alexander Migdal (IAS Princeton). Migdal recently proposed that turbulence follows a strikingly simple “area law,” in which the circulation of fluid around any closed loop depends only on the area it encloses—not its shape. This idea, confirmed by numerical and experimental studies, points to hidden geometric rules that may govern turbulence universally.
TopTurbCQ aims to test whether such universal laws also apply in the quantum realm. Since the mathematical equations for quantum fluids differ from classical ones only by an additional “quantum pressure” term, the project seeks to bridge the two descriptions and uncover the topological foundations of turbulence that transcend both domains. Success could not only deepen our fundamental understanding of turbulence but also impact fields ranging from astrophysics and atomtronics to climate modeling and medicine.
Prof Adolfo DEL CAMPO ECHEVARRIA
FSTMFull professor in theoretical condensed matter physics
2024
By Prof. Alexandre TKATCHENKO (FSTM), Prof. Alexander SKUPIN (LCSB) and Prof. Daniele BRIDA (FSTM)
Quantum forces are ubiquitous in nature, but their true nature is still a mystery. This project aims at shedding light on them by combining our expertise in chemical physics, condensed-matter physics and biology with new ideas from quantum optics. Quantum forces have been known for almost a hundred years: many of the forces between electrically neutral particles and substances turned out to be caused by quantum fluctuations of the electromagnetic field. Quantum fluctuations create the capillary forces that lift water from the ground to the leaves of plants and the van der Waals forces acting in many chemical and biological processes. In micromachinery, they cause stiction and friction, and there their manipulation in advanced materials is of great current interest. The quantum forces between pieces of material are well-understood and well-tested in experiments, but not so the quantum forces inside materials. The distinguished visitor has been a pioneer in this field and an expert on metamaterials and quantum optics. We plan to combine his and our experience to develop a workable theory of quantum forces in inhomogeneous materials. This theory will allow us to solve practical problems, and it may also shed light on one of the greatest intellectual problems of science: the nature of dark energy that causes the expansion of the universe to accelerate. This is possible, because the “material” of space acts on electromagnetic waves and their fluctuations like an ordinary material. Understanding quantum forces better in ordinary materials will also help us understanding them better in space, making this visit an exciting opportunity for research of the largest possible range, from engineering materials on the nanoscale to shedding light on dark energy in the universe.
Assoc. Prof Alexander SKUPIN
LCSBAssociate professor/Chief scientist 2 in Modelling of Biomedical DataProf Daniele BRIDA
FSTMHead of DPHYMS, Full professor in Experimental Condensed Matter Physics
2023
By Prof. Christophe LEY (FSTM), Prof. Diane PIERRET (FDEF) and Prof. Gautam TRIPATHI (FDEF)
Time-dependent data, also known as temporal data, is a vital and ubiquitous aspect of various domains, including finance, economics, healthcare, weather forecasting, and social media analysis. As the availability and complexity of temporal data continue to increase, there is a growing need for adapted robust methodologies and techniques to model and analyze such data in order to extract valuable insights.
Professor Taniguchi is a world-renowned expert in the analysis of such data, specialized in time series data analysis techniques and inference for stochastic processes (modelling, estimation, hypothesis testing). Since this combined skillset is not present at the University of Luxembourg, his visit would be a unique opportunity for researchers from all Faculties and Interdisciplinary Centers to learn about these approaches through discussions with him, a short course that he will teach and a workshop, and to collaborate with him on their burning research questions. Very concretely, he will work with Prof. Ley and his team on the creation of time series models for directional data on the sphere (with applications in many domains including space science and climatology), with Prof. Tripathi and colleagues from the Department of Economics and Management on estimating and forecasting econometric models to answer policy related questions, and with Prof. Pierret and colleagues from the Department of Finance on statistical inference in financial engineering, risk analysis and portfolio management. Outside the academic world, he shall give a public talk, organized within the realm of the Luxembourg Statistical Society, on modern challenges, risks and chances related to time-dependent data, have two meetings with representatives from banks and insurance companies in Luxembourg, and solidify links with the professional Japanese community (e.g., the Embassy of Japan) in Luxembourg.
2022
By Prof. Alexandre TKATCHENKO (FSTM) and Prof. Aurélia CHENU (FSTM)
Predictive understanding of functional systems in materials science, chemistry, and biology requires the development of practical approaches for modeling intermolecular forces. In this context, a key challenge is to develop accurate and efficient electronic polarization functionals applicable for a wide range of systems and that can accurately describe dispersion (van der Waals and Casimir) interactions.
The development of the corresponding new-generation first-principles methods demands combined efforts of scientists with expertise in physics, chemistry, and computer science. Prof. Katharine Hunt, a Distinguished Professor at the Michigan State University, is especially renowned for proposing revolutionary ideas in the field of electronic polarization in molecular systems. Especially known for her work in quantum chemistry, Prof. Hunt has a broad range of scientific interests and expertise including chemical physics, astronomy/astrophysics, thermodynamics, and quantum computing.
The aim of this proposal is to invite Prof. Hunt to the University of Luxembourg for three months. During her stay, intensive collaborations with several PIs and their groups are foreseen. Moreover, two public lectures will be given by Prof. Hunt, including a discussion of the challenges that female scientists face in their path towards examplary careers in physics and chemistry.
The visit of Prof. Hunt to the University of Luxembourg will be connected with the BRAINSTORM workshop “Intersections Between Quantum Fields and Quantum Chemistry” where she is one of the invited speakers. This should strengthen the efforts of this workshop to initiate an interdisciplinary collaborative work on developing robust electronic polarization functionals that would be broadly applicable for modeling complex molecules and materials.
Assoc. Prof Aurélia CHENU
FSTMAssociate professor in Theoretical physics, with a focus on quantum systems