Joaquim Serra: inaugural lecture
On 5 April, Professor Joaquim Serra gave his inaugural lecture entitled: "Smoothness in nature and elliptic partial differential equations". He has been professor at the Department since January 2021.
Excerpt from the laudatory speech
by Robert Weismantel, Head of Department
It is now my pleasure to introduce the second speaker of today.
Joaquim Serra studied mathematics in Barcelona and received his doctoral degree in 2014. He left academia to work in a big data consulting company but retured to academia and spent his postdoc phase in Barcelona, Berlin and at ETH before being awarded an Ambizione grant from the SNSF in 2018. It did not take long until Joaquim decided to to apply for an ERC Starting Grant and received it in 2020. With this grant Joaquim became an assistant professor in our department in January 2021.
Joaquim's research is on elliptic partial differential equations. In the early phase of his career he worked on integral differential equations where he developed a boundary regularity theory for such equations. In the next stage Joaquim studied free boundaries, phase transitions and non-local minimal surfaces. All these problems are non-linear geometric variational PDEs and have incommon that the main mathematical goal is to understand how some interface or surface behaves. Currently Joaquim is working on questions in geometric analysis where he tries to use completely new methods from the theory of integral differential equations to tackle conjectures about existence of infinitely many minimal surfaces in a three-dimensional Riemannian manifold.
Joaquim, you are very welcome!