Dear Mikaela, dear President, dear family and friends, ladies and gentlemen,
It is my pleasure to welcome you to Mikaela Iacobelli's inaugural lecture and to introduce her to you.
Mikaela was born in Giulianova, a coastal town in the Italian Abruzzo region, where she also attended high school at the Liceo Scientifico Marie Curie. At a young age she was equally interested in sciences, languages and literature, but an attentive gift of her mathematics teacher in a challenging period of her adolescent life, made a profound and long lasting impression on her: it was Henri Poincare's book on the foundations of geometry. She then started to study mathematics in Rome.
During her Master's thesis at Roma Sapienza, Mikaela dived into the fascinating world of Vlasov-Poisson equations, marking the beginning of her several important contributions to the field. Such equations shed light on the dynamics of large particle systems with complicated interactions by means of continuous limits. Those limits are an important tool of abstraction for many phenomena in statistical physics, economics, astronomy, social sciences, biology, just to name a few. The equations show remarkable phenomena like, e.g., Landau damping. Only recently Landau damping has been understood rigorously from a mathematical perspective: it is, surprisingly, related to Juergen Moser's (a former colleague at D-MATH) important work on KAM theory. To close this circle of thoughts, and as an invitation to take a look yourself after the lecture: a recent article of Mikaela deals precisely with Landau damping on the torus for Vlasov-Poisson systems.
Mikaela did her doctoral thesis on the 'Dynamics of large particle systems' in Paris in 2015 under the supervision of Emanuele Caglioti and Francois Golse. After her postdoctoral years in Cambridge, Mikaela took an assistant professorship in Durham and finally joined ETH Zurich in 2019 as a senior scientist. Since 2023, Mikaela has been an associate professor.
From time to time, Mikaela still comes back to hyperbolic geometry, examplified by the Poincare half plane, as she recently told me, where her journey into mathematics started with an attentive book gift.
We are very happy to welcome Mikaela as an associate professor at the Department and we are looking forward to her inaugural lecture.