Future Proof — ERC Starting Grants for Martina Hofmanová and Julian Fischer

We would to like to congratulate our former scientists Martina Hofmanová and Julian Fischer who rank among Europe's best young researchers. For their excellent work they have each been awarded an ERC Starting Grant.

Martina Hofmanová currently holds a professorship for mathematics at the University of Bielefeld and is a member of the Collaborative Research Center 1283 “Taming uncertainty and profiting from randomness and low regularity in analysis, stochastics and their applications”. She received her Master's degree in mathematics at Charles University in Prague, the largest university in the Czech Republic, and her doctorate at the École Normale Supérieure de Cachan, Atenne de Bretagne in France. At our institute she worked as a postdoc in the group of Prof. Felix Otto.

Her ERC project “Mathematical analysis of fluid flows: the challenge of randomness” is based on the conviction that a probabilistic description is indispensable in modeling of fluid flows to capture the chaotic behavior of deterministic systems after blow-up, and to describe model uncertainties due to high sensitivity to input data or parameter reduction. For a set of selected models, she investigates with her research group different aspects of the underlying deterministic and stochastic PDE dynamics.

Randomness is also in the focus of Julian Fischer's ERC project, which aims to achieve a deeper mathematical understanding of the role of randomness in multi-scale problems in physics and mechanics. With his group he wants to investigate largely unexplored aspects of random and multiscale PDEs. His project will focus on the impact of random microstructure on nonlinear materials, homogenization theories and numerical methods in the absence of clear scale separation, and the stabilizing effect of randomness on interface evolution equations.

In 2017, at the age of 27 Julian Fischer became an Assistant Professor at IST Austria after completing his PhD at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg and subsequently holding two postdoctoral positions at the University of Zurich, Switzerland, and at our institute in the research group of Prof. Felix Otto.