Gérard Ben Arous is a mathematician, specializing in stochastic analysis and its applications to mathematical physics. He currently serves as the director of the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University. Professor Ben Arous works on probability theory (stochastic analysis, large deviations, random media and random matrices) and its connections with other domains of mathematics (partial differential equations, dynamical systems), physics (statistical mechanics of disordered media), or industrial applications. He is mainly interested in the time evolution of complex systems, and the universal aspects of their long time behavior and of their slow relaxation to equilibrium, in particular how complexity and disorder imply aging.
Carolina Brito is a Professor at the Physics Department of the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), in Brazil. She obtained her PhD in Physics from UFGRS, with a part undertaken at CEA-Saclay, France (2007). She did a first post-doc at CEA-Saclay (2008-2009) and she started a second post-doc at Leiden University in 2009, when she became professor in Brazil. She studies properties of amorphous materials and superhydrophobic surfaces. More recently she is applying some of the concepts used to understand properties of amorphous solids to study some aspect of allosteric proteins.
Chiara Cammarota is a Lecturer in the Mathematics Department of King’s College London. She received her Ph.D. degree in Physics from University of Rome “Sapienza” (2010). She continued her scientific career with Postdoctoral positions at the Institute for Theoretical Physics of CEA Saclay (2010-2011) and at the Theoretical Physics and Condensed Matter Lab (LPTMC) of Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris (2011-2013), and with a Researcher Fellow position in the Physics Department of University of Rome “Sapienza” (2013-2015). In 2015 she joined the faculty of the Mathematics Department at King’s College London. Since many years her research efforts have been oriented in the direction of ‘cracking the glass problem’ through the study of equilibrium and out-of-equilibrium physics of amorphous solids via different techniques including replica calculations, field theory approaches, Renormalization Group studies, investigations of stochastic processes, numerical simulations. In recent times she also broadened her interests focusing on examples of disordered systems from ecology and computer science that show strong similarities with the physics of amorphous material.
Atsushi Ikeda is an associate professor in Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Tokyo. He obtained his Ph.D. in Kyoto University in physical chemistry in 2008. Then he was a postdoctoral fellow at Tsukuba University (2008-2011) and Montpellier Universite (2011-2014). In 2014, he was appointed as an associate professor in Kyoto University and moved to the University of Tokyo in 2016. His research interest has been focused on dynamics (in and out of equilibrium) and thermodynamics in a wide variety of glassy and jammed materials including simple liquids, network-forming liquids, molecular liquids, colloidal suspensions, and granular materials.
Edan Lerner is an assistant professor in the Institute for Theoretical Physics of the University of Amsterdam. In 2011 he received his Ph.D. in physics from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. Between 2011-2014 Edan worked as a postdoctoral scientist with Matthieu Wyart in the Center for Soft Matter Research of New York University. In 2014 Edan joined the University of Amsterdam as an assistant professor. His main interests are in elasticity, jamming and yielding transitions in disordered media.
Kunimasa Miyazaki is a Professor in Department of Physics of Nagoya University, Japan. He received his Ph.D. degree in Physics from Tokyo Institute of Technology in 1995. After postdoctral positions in several places including Harvard University (2002-2004) and Columbia University (2004-2006) with Professor David R. Reichman, he was appointed as an associate professor of the School of Physics at Tsukuba Unveristy, Japan in 2008. In 2013, he joined the faculty of the Department of Physics at Nagoya University as a full professor. His main interests are glass/jamming transitions and nonequilibrium systems. He is an expert of kinetic theories of dense fluids such as the mode-coupling theory and combines these expertise with numerical simulations of dynamical and rheological properties of a wide range of soft-glassy systems.
Markus Müller is a Senior Scientist in the Condensed Matter Theory Department of the Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI Villigen, Switzerland). He received his PhD in 2003 from the Université de Paris Sud, Orsay. After postdocs in Rutgers and Harvard University, and employments at Geneva University and the ICTP in Trieste he joined PSI in 2015.
Markus Müller’s research interests lie in quantum and classical disordered systems, in particular in the interplay between glassy or amorphous order and quantum, as well as their respective effects on transport and out-of-equilibrium phenomena. A special area of his interest is the physics of collections of classical or quantum two-level systems, as arise in many different guises in disordered condensed matter.
Tommaso Rizzo is a researcher at the Institute for Complex Systems (CNR-ISC) in Rome. He received his Ph.D. degree in Physics from Federico II University in Naples (2002). He held postdoctoral positions at Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris (2004-2006), Fermi Center in Rome (2006-2009) and Sapienza University in Rome (2010-2011). In 2011 he became a researcher at the Institute for Complex Systems of the National Research Council in Rome. He is an expert in the theory of disordered systems, including Spin-Glasses and super-cooled liquids. At present his main interest is a universal description of the glass crossover extending previous theories beyond the mean-field approximation.
Srikanth Sastry is a professor at the Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research (JNCASR), Bengaluru, India. He obtained his Ph. D. from Boston University in physics in 1993. He held postdoctoral positions at the National Institutes of Health and Princeton University before joining JNCASR in 1998. His research interests include structural relaxation in glass forming liquids and the glass transition, jamming, yielding and memory effects in sheared amorphous solids.
Grzegorz Szamel is a Professor at the Department of Chemistry of Colorado State University. He received his Ph.D. degree in theoretical physics from Warsaw University in 1990. After postdoctoral positions at the University of Utrecht and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, he started his independent career at Colorado State in 1994. His research interests are in the dynamics of complex fluids, in and out of equilibrium. Recently, he has been working on the dynamics of glass-forming liquids and of dense assemblies of active particles.
Gilles Tarjus is a Research Director at CNRS, working at the “Laboratoire de Physique Théorique de la Matière Condensée” (LPTMC) in Paris. His main research interest is the statistical theory of disordered systems, in particular: the glass transition in liquids and polymers; the emergence of cooperative dynamics around the glass transition; the study of hysteresis phenomena and avalanches in disordered systems; the development of non-perturbative renormalization group approaches for phase transitions in presence of disorder.
Hajime Yoshino is an associate Professor at Cyber Media Center and Department of Physics at Osaka University. He received his Ph.D. degree in Physics from Tsukuba University in 1996. After postdoctral positions in the Institute of Solid State Physics at Tokyo Unversity (1997-2000) and SPEC, CEA Scalay (2000) , he was appointed as an assistant professor of the Department of Earth and Space Sicence at Osaka Unveristy in 2001. In 2014, he joined the Cyber Media Center and the Department of Physics at Osaka University as an associate professor. His current interests are theoretical and numerical studies of static and dynamic aspects of glass and jamming transitions in broad range of systems including colloids, spin glasses, frustrated magnets, Josephson junction arrays and continuous constrained satisfaction problems such as continous coloring.