Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship

The combined expertise of two academics from the School of Mathematics has played a central role in them being awarded a prestigious Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship which is due to commence in July.

Drs Jonathan Ben-Artzi and Junyong Zhang, whose research areas include kinetic theory and dispersive equations, have successfully obtained the two-year fellowship worth €195,455.

It was awarded after they scored 100% in their application, making it the highest scoring application of all applications in Mathematics, and one of only eight scoring 100% out of the 9,089 submitted across all panels.

Their project, entitled “Geometric Analysis of Dilute Plasmas” (GRANDPA), will focus on studying regularity theory and long-time behaviour of plasmas governed by the Vlasov-Maxwell system. The abstract reads:

“The ultimate goal of this Fellowship is to understand the long time behaviour of plasmas governed by the relativistic Vlasov- Maxwell system. The main difficulty is the hyperbolic nature of Maxwell’s equations (the electromagnetic fields propagate at the speed of light): particles that travel close to the speed of light nearly interact with their own fields. It is not currently known whether particles can be accelerated to such speeds, and, if so, whether this necessarily leads to development of singularities. This is a major open problem.”

Dr Ben-Artzi gained his PhD from Brown University in 2011 and has since worked at Cambridge University and Imperial College London. Dr Zhang received his PhD at the Institute of Applied Physics and Computational Mathematics (IAPCM) in Beijing, and since then has been at the Beijing Institute of Technology, the Australian National University and Stanford University.