Bruno de Mendonça Braga 

About me

I am from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and I have received both my undergraduate and masters degrees from Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 2009 and 2010, respectively. My undergraduate adviser (and semiguru) was Felipe Acker (UFRJ), and my masters adviser was Nicolau Corção Saldanha (PUC-Rio), who very kindly accepted to advise me even though I was not even from his university. 

From 2010 to 2013, I was a PhD student at Kent State University (KSU), United States of America, under the supervision of Joe Diestel (KSU); despite Joe's formal affiliation, most of our meetings took place at other renowned institutions such as Ray's and Eldorado's. In 2013, I decided to transfer to the  University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) to work with Christian Rosendal (UIC) and I obtained my PhD from UIC in 2017. A curious (and irrelevant) fact: after having already accepted to transfer to UIC, KSU offered me to also defend a PhD there, so, technically speaking, I am Prof. Dr. Dr. Braga. But we are not in Germany, so please ignore that.

In 2017, after my PhD at UIC, I went to Toronto, Canada, to be a York Science Fellow (aka postdoc) sponsored by the Simons Foundation at York University; where I worked under the supervision of Ilijas Farah, whom I am very happy to call a friend now. During my time in Toronto, I was also a visiting member of the  Fields Institute and I am forever indebted to all the free food provided by the machine learning conferences that took place there during my visit. In 2019, I went to the University of Virginia (UVA), United States of America, where I was a Mary Ann Pitts Research Associate (aka postdoc) until 2022.

From July of 2022 to December of 2022, I was a professor in the mathematics department of PUC-Rio. Although my stay there was rather short, PUC-Rio was a fantastic place to iniciate my career as a professor and it was great to be able to call my masters advisor a colleague! Since January of 2023, I have been a professor at IMPA. 

At last, during my Ph.D., I got jealous of all those horrible stories of academics trying to solve the "two body problem" and decided to marry an academic as well.  Her name is Masha Brussevich and she is currently a professor in the department of  economics at Ibmec-Rio. In case economics is something that interest you, feel free to stalk her here.

Research Interests

My research interests lie in the realm of geometry and analysis. More specifically, some of my interest are:

• • Functional analysis: linear and nonlinear geometry of Banach spaces and of operator spaces.

  • Noncommutative geometry and operator algebras: rigidity of uniform Roe algebras.

  • Geometry of metric spaces: embeddings and large scale geometry.

  • Logic: Descriptive set theory of Polish spaces and connections between set theory and operator algebras.

Curriculum Vitae

Link.