I am ICREA Research Professor at Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya and a member of CRM and IMTECH.
Throughout my career, I have secured several prestigious grants from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), including an Advanced Research Fellowship, and from the Leverhulme Trust, for a total of more than two million euro.
Recently, I have been the European Mathematical Society Distinguished Speaker at the Poisson 2024 Conference in Napoli and joined the ArXiv scientific advisory board.
I my previous employment at the University of Birmingham, I created the Geometry and Mathematical Physics group, while here at UPC, together with Eva Miranda and Marco Gualtieri, we created the excellence unit SYMCREA.
My research is mainly in Integrable Systems, an area at the crossroads of many disciplines including Analysis, Geometry, Mathematical Physics and Algebra. My interests include isomonodromic deformations, Frobenius manifolds, (quantum) Teichmüller theory, quantum algebra and mirror symmetry.
I earned my PhD in Mathematical Physics from the International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA) in Trieste, Italy, in 1998, with a dissertation titled "Algebraic Solutions to the Painlevé-VI Equation and Reflection Groups,”which was published on Inventiones Mathematicae and on Mathematische Annalen. Following my doctoral studies, I held postdoctoral positions at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute (MSRI) in Berkeley and at the University of Oxford under the supervision of Professor Nigel Hitchin. I later served as a temporary University Lecturer at the University of Cambridge and as a lecturer in Applied Mathematics at the University of Manchester. In 2008, I accepted a readership at Loughborough University, where I was promoted to a personal chair in 2014. In February 2018, I was appointed as a Professor of Mathematics at the University of Birmingham. Finally in 2024, I moved to UPC as ICREA Research Professor.
During my career, I mentored for 4 Phd students as principal supervisor and eight post docs (Guido Carlet, Idan Eisner, Timothy Magee, Giordano Cotti, Livia Campo, Harini Desiraju, Omar Kidwai, Nikita Nikolaev).