Francesco Arceri
Working with Eric Corwin, September 2017-August 2021
From August 2021, Postdoc at Yale University with Corey O’Hern
Francesco Arceri is a postdoctoral research associate in the Department of Mechanical Engineering & Materials Science at Yale University. He received his Ph.D. in Physics in 2021 from University of Oregon working with Prof. Eric Corwin. During his Ph.D., he studied how the structure of amorphous solids impacts the critical behavior near the jamming transition and the mechanical response under shear stress. He earned his B.S. and M.S. in Physics from La Sapienza University of Rome in 2017. His research is currently focused on studying active deformable particles and further applications to biology-oriented problems.
Eddie Bautista
PhD student
Working with Eric Corwin
Eddie Bautista is a PhD student at the University of Oregon in the Department of Physics. Eddie is studying the energy landscape of soft sphere systems and how the geometry of the energy basins that make up the landscape changes as the system approaches the jamming transition.
Chitrak Bhadra
Postdoc (funding: Simons grant, April 2019-present)
Working with: David Reichman, Grzegorz Szamel and Patrick Charbonneau
Chitrak Bhadra is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Department of Chemistry, Columbia University in the David Reichman Group. His primary interests are analytical and numerical investigations into extensions of Mode Coupling Theory to understand liquid-glass transition and glassy dynamics more accurately. He obtained his PhD in Physics from Jadavpur University, Kolkata (India) in early 2019 and was funded by a national fellowship from the Govt. of India. The topic of his PhD thesis was Fluctuation Dissipation Relations and Generalised Langevin equations in nonlinear systems and presented, among others, significant results in strong coupling regime of open systems.
Horst-Holger Boltz
Postdoc
Working with Jorge Kurchan, Andrea Liu, Sidney Nagel (2017-present)
Horst-Holger Boltz is currently a joint postdoc between the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Chicago and the ECS Paris. He obtained his PhD in 2015 from the TU Dortmund under the supervision of Jan Kierfeld. Afterwards he did a two-year postdoc at the University of Göttingen with Stefan Klumpp.
His current work is on the evolution of the energy landscape in glassy systems under quasistatic driving.
Francesco Cagnetta
Postdoc (2020-present)
Working with Matthiew Wyars, EPFL, Lausanne
Francesco is a postdoctoral researcher in Matthieu Wyart’s group at EPFL, Lausanne. He obtained is PhD in May 2020 at the University of Edinburgh, studying the universal aspects of the dynamics of cell membranes with Martin R. Evans and Davide Marenduzzo. He is currently interested in machine learning, in particular the learning process of neural networks for idealised model data.
Rahul Chacko
Postdoc
Working with: Giulio Biroli, Andrea Liu, David Reichman (2019-present)
Rahul is a postdoc in the group of Andrea Liu at the University of Pennsylvania. He obtained his PhD at the University of Durham (SOFI CDT) under the supervision of Suzanne Fielding and Michael Cates, with a thesis on the rheology of dense non-Brownian suspensions. Rahul’s work within the Collaboration focuses on the dynamics of supercooled liquids and glasses, studied computationally.
Simone Ciarella
Postdoc (2020-present)
Working with: Francesco Zamponi, David Reichman
Simone Ciarella is a postdoctoral researcher at the Laboratoire de Physique Théorique at École Normale Supérieure, in Paris. He is interested in predicting the properties of glassy materials from static information and tuning such properties by tailoring the particles that form the glass. He combines a theoretical approach based on Generalized-Mode-Coupling-Theory that he mastered during his PhD with Liesbeth Janssen, with state-of-the-art numerical methods like machine learning.
Olivier Coquand
Postdoc (2021 – present)
Working with Ludovic Berthier
Olivier Coquand is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Laboratoire Charles Coulomb (université de Montpellier), working with Ludovic Berthier on investigations of glassy dynamics with swap-Monte Carlo algorithms. His PhD, obtained at the Laboratoire de Physique Théorique de la Matière Condensée (Sorbonne université, Paris) in 2018, under the supervision of Dominique Mouhanna, was focused on the study of anomalous elastic behavior in crystalline membranes by various renormalisation group techniques. He then worked for three years in the group of Matthias Sperl at the Institut für Materialphysik in Weltraum (DLR, Cologne) on the study of the rheology of dense granular liquids, building models inspired by liquid-state theory.
He is currently interested in the study of the statistical properties of systems lying in between the ideal simple liquid and crystalline solid states, by use of both theoretical and numerical methods.
Stéphane d’Ascoli
PhD student
Working with Giulio Biroli (2018-present)
Stéphane d’Ascoli is a PhD student working between the Institute of Theoretical Physics (IPhT) of CEA and the Laboratory of Statistical Physics (LPS) of ENS. He is currently investigating the properties of energy landscapes in deep neural networks.
Duc Dam
PhD student
Working with Kunimasa Miyazaki and Takeshi Kawasaki (2022-present)
Duc obtained his B.S. in 2022 at Nagoya University, Japan. His research is currently focused on geometrical properties of systems near jamming transition. He is interested in the connections between the geometry and the dynamics of complex systems such as glassy materials and active matter.
Cameron Dennis
PhD student
Working with Eric Corwin
Cameron Dennis is a PhD student at the University of Oregon under the supervision of Eric Corwin. Cameron is measuring the boundaries of the Gardner regime for zero temperature soft sphere systems.
Rafael Díaz Hernández Rojas
Working with Giorgio Parisi and Federico Ricci-Tersenghi (2021-present)
Rafael is a postdoc working in the group of G. Parisi in La Sapienza University of Rome. He earned his B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in the National University of Mexico, before moving to Rome for his PhD under the joint supervision of F. Ricci-Tersenghi and G. Parisi. His research has focused on studying numerically the microstructral properties of jammed packings, mainly of hard-sphere configurations. He is currently interested in developing random matrix models that exhibit the same spectral properties as real packings.
Giampaolo Folena
Postdoc (funding: Simons Grant)
Working with Francesco Zamponi, Giulio Biroli, Patrick Charbonneau
Giampaolo Folena is a postdoctoral fellow at École Normale Supérieure in Paris. In March 2020 he obtained his PhD under the supervision of Silvio Franz (LPTMS at Paris-Saclay) and Federico Ricci-Tersenghi (University of Rome “Sapienza”), with a thesis focusing on the correspondences between the p-spin spherical model and supercooled liquids.
He is currently working on finite-size corrections of mean-field models of glasses, both at equilibrium and out of equilibrium.
Mario Geiger
Mario Geiger is a PhD at EPFL
Working with Matthieu Wyart
He is studying the neural networks.
Julia Giannini
PhD Student
Working with Lisa Manning (Jan 2020 – Present)
I’m a PhD student in Lisa Manning’s group at Syracuse University. Our research focuses broadly on using the structure of disordered and active solids to make predictions about material dynamics under deformation or driving.
Tomer Goldfriend
Postdoc (funding: Simons Grant, 2017-2020)
From 2020: Postdoc at Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel
Tomer Goldfriend has been a postdoc at the Ecole Normale Supérieure of Paris, working with Jorge Kurchan. He obtained his PhD in 2017 from Tel Aviv University, where he worked under the supervision of Haim Diamant. During his PhD he studied the dynamics of driven, arbitrarily shaped, colloids, also collaborating with Tom Witten from the University of Chicago. In his postdoc at ENS-Paris he moved to work on isolated (classical and quantum) quasi-integrable systems, focusing on slow dynamics, stochastic thermodynamics, and chaos in such systems. Currently he is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel.
Tomer is interested in the synergy between statistical mechanics, nonlinear dynamics, and hydrodynamics, with their applications to different fields: soft-matter physics, condensed-matter physics, quantum systems, with relevance even to planetary systems.
Benjamin Guiselin
PhD (2018-2021 with Ludovic Berthier and Gilles Tarjus, funding: CFM Foundation)
Since September 2021: Non-Tenure track Assistant Professeur at École Normale Supérieure de Lyon (Agrégé Préparateur)
Benjamin Guiselin has been a PhD student at the University of Montpellier under the supervision of Ludovic Berthier and Gilles Tarjus. During his PhD, he has been interested in analytical and numeric approaches to study the thermodynamics of constrained supercooled liquids. He has also investigated the dynamics of model glass-formers close to their glass transition temperature via computer simulations.
He is now at École Normale Supérieure de Lyon where he is involved in teaching activities in the Physics Department, along with research activities in collaboration with Denis Bartolo.
Varda Faghir Hagh
Postdoc (funding: Simons grant, September 2018- present)
Working jointly with Sidney Nagel, Eric Corwin, and Lisa Manning
Varda received their Ph.D. from Arizona State University in July 2018, joined the Simons collaboration on cracking the glass problem in
September 2018, and is working jointly with Sidney Nagel, Eric Corwin, and Lisa Manning on the training of disordered systems. The focus of their research is to understand how the introduction and manipulation of new degrees of freedom in athermal glassy systems can lead to
changes in the mechanical stability of the system. Varda is currently working on the training and controlling the vibrational properties in soft sphere packings.
Yi Hu
PhD Student
Working with Patrick Charbonneau, 2016 – present
Yi Hu is a PhD student at Duke University in the department of Chemistry. Yi studies the dynamics of percolating systems, understanding caging and transport behaviors in disordered media by theory and computational techniques.
Wencheng Ji
PhD Student
Working with Matthieu Wyart, start from 2016.9
Wencheng Ji is a Phd student in the Physics department of EPFL. He is interested in the properties of the localised excitations like two-level systems and shear transformations and studies the relations between them and quasi-localised modes in amorphous solids by theory and numerical simulation.
Gerhard Jung
Postdoc (funding: Simons grant, 2021-present)
Working with Ludovic Berthier and Giulio Biroli
Gerhard is a postdoctoral researcher in the group of Ludovic Berthier at the CNRS in Montpellier. He obtained his Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Mainz (Germany) under the supervision of Friederike Schmid in 2018. After his Ph.D., he joined the group of Suzanne Fielding at Durham University (U.K.) as a short-term visiting researcher. He then worked for two years as a postdoc at the University of Innsbruck (Austria) with Thomas Franosch and afterwards continued his research at Kyoto University (Japan) as postdoctoral JSPS fellow in collaboration with Ryoichi Yamamoto.
His current work is on understanding the connection between local structure and dynamics in deeply supercooled liquids, using machine learning and the swap Monte Carlo algorithm.
Jaron Kent-Dobias
Postdoc (October 2020 – present)
Working with Jorge Kurchan
Jaron is a postdoc at École Normale Supérieure in Paris. He obtained his PhD in June 2020 at Cornell University under the supervision of Jim Sethna. His graduate work included research on analytic properties of critical models, size-scaling in disordered fracture, and development of Monte Carlo algorithms. He is presently studying the structure of complex (with real and imaginary parts) complex (with super-extensive configurational entropy) landscapes with Jorge Kurchan.
Yann-Edwin Keta
PhD student (funding: Simons grant, September 2020-present)
Working jointly with Ludovic Berthier and Robert Jack
Yann-Edwin Keta is a PhD student at Laboratoire Charles Coulomb, Université de Montpellier, coadvised by Ludovic Berthier (Université de Montpellier, Simons PI) and Robert Jack (University of Cambridge). After graduating with a Master Degree in Physics in September 2018 from the École normale supérieure de Lyon, he worked as a visiting research student, from October 2019 to July 2020, at DAMTP, University of Cambridge, under the supervision of Robert Jack and Michael Cates, and MSC, Université de Paris, under the supervision of Frédéric van Wijland, on collective motion in large deviations of active particles.
His current research project aims at analysing, using computer simulation and analytical techniques, the complex phase behaviour and collective dynamics of minimal models of active matter.
Dmytro Khomenko
Postdoc (funding: Simons Grant, 11/2017-10/2020)
Working with Dave Reichman and Francesco Zamponi
Dmytro Khomenko obtained his PhD in 2017 from Weizmann Institute of Science under the supervision of Itamar Procaccia and Victor Lvov, where he studied quantum turbulence in superfluid helium. His current research is devoted to molecular dynamics of low-temperature glasses in the quantum regime.
Cathy Li
PhD Student working with Andrea J. Liu (2018-present)
I’m currently investigating the properties of the MK model computationally. In general, I’m interested in the dynamics and the complexity of glassy systems.
Chloe Lindeman
PhD student (funding: NSF GRFP, 2017-present; Simons Grant, summer 2017)
Working with Sidney R. Nagel (2017-present)
Chloe Lindeman is a PhD student at the University of Chicago. She is currently working with Sid Nagel on modifying spring networks created from jammed packings to elicit a frequency-dependent allosteric response.
Fabián Aguirre López
Postdoc (funding: Simons Grant)
Working with Silvio Franz (2021-present)
Fabián Aguirre López is a postdoctoral researcher at LPTMS, Université Paris-Saclay in Paris. He obtained his PhD in November 2020 from King’s College London under the supervision of Ton Coolen. He worked on models of random networks with a tuneable number of shorts loops and on statistical physics of high dimensional statistical inference. He is currently working on spin glasses and models on random graphs.
Giulia Garcia Lorenzana
PhD student
Working with Giulio Biroli and Ada Altieri (2022-present)
Giulia Garcia Lorenzana is a PhD student between École Normale Supérieure and Université Paris Cité. Under the supervision of Giulio Biroli and Ada Altieri, she is studying spatially extended ecosystems, modeled through Lotka-Volterra equations with random interactions.
Alessandro Manacorda
Postdoc at École Normale Supérieure (2018-2021) working with Francesco Zamponi
From 2021, postdoc at University of Luxembourg
Alessandro Manacorda obtained his PhD in 2017 at Rome University Sapienza, with a thesis on lattice models of fluctuating hydrodynamics in granular and active matter under the supervision of Andrea Puglisi. From 2018 to 2021, he worked as a postdoc at École Normale Supérieure in Paris, focusing on the dynamical mean-field theory of infinite-dimensional particle systems, in and out of equilibrium. Since September 2021, he is postdoctoral researcher at University of Luxembourg, working on the collective behavior of new models of active matter.
Felix-Cosmin Mocanu
Postdoc (funding: Simons Grant, July 2020 – present)
Working with Francesco Zamponi, Ludovic Berthier
Felix-Cosmin Mocanu obtained his PhD in Chemistry in November 2019 from the University of Cambridge, co-advised by Stephen Elliott and Gábor Csányi. During his doctoral studies he focused on the physics of amorphous semiconductor materials with resistive switching, as used in electronic phase-change memory devices. In parallel he worked on fitting the high-dimensional potential energy surfaces of these materials using kernel-based machine learning techniques. In December 2018 he started a postdoc in the Electrical Engineering Department in Cambridge with Prof. Jong Ming Kim on the physics of semiconducting quantum dots and amorphous oxides, for display and smart textile applications.
Since July 2020 he is a postdoctoral researcher Laboratoire de Physique Théorique at École Normale Supérieure, in Paris, working with Francesco Zamponi and Ludovic Berthier on the properties of glassy systems at low temperatures
Peter Morse
Postdoc with Patrick Charbonneau (2019-present)
Peter Morse is a postdoc in Patrick Charbonneau’s group at Duke University studying the finite size effects of the Gardner transition. He earned his PhD with Eric Corwin at the University of Oregon where he studied the role of geometry in jammed systems via metrics of the Voronoi tessellation in addition to studying the percolation of rigid clusters near jamming. As a postdoc in Lisa Manning’s group, he investigated properties of rearrangements in sheared systems and the relationship between shear and random force.
Flavio Nicoletti
PhD student
Working with Silvio Franz and Giorgio Parisi
Flavio Nicoletti is a PhD candidate in joint cotutelle between the universities ‘Sapienza’ of Rome, Italy and ‘Paris-Sud’ of Paris, France. He studies vector spin glass models at low temperatures, focusing on the modelling of glassy excitations by means of mean field models. He started his PhD in November 2019 and will defend his thesis in May 2023.
Yoshihiko Nishikawa
Postdoc with Ludovic Berthier (2020-present)
Yoshihiko Nishikawa obtained his PhD degree in 2018 at the University of Tokyo under the supervision of Koji Hukushima. His doctoral researches focused on development of Monte Carlo algorithms and phase transitions in spin systems using large-scale Monte Carlo simulations. Since May 2021, he is a postdoctoral researcher at Tohoku University in Japan, working on the low-temperature thermodynamics and dynamics of glassy systems with Ludovic Berthier at the University of Montpellier.
Nidhi Pashine
PhD student
Graduate Student with Sidney Nagel (2014-2021)
Postdoc at Yale University with Rebecca Kramer-Bottiglio (2021 onwards)
Nidhi is an experimental physicist. As a graduate student, she worked with spring networks and other systems that are based on jamming. She investigated the properties of such systems and tuned them to show interesting mechanical responses. She is also interested in memory and training in glassy systems. She is currently working with granular materials where she is interested in tuning the mechanical and vibrational response of granular packings.
Mauro Pastore
Postdoc (funding: Simons grant, 2021-present)
Working with Silvio Franz
Mauro is postdoctoral researcher at the Laboratoire de Physique Théorique et Modèles Statistiques, Orsay. He obtained his PhD in October 2020 in Milan under the supervision of prof. Sergio Caracciolo, with a thesis on replica theory. He is working on spin glasses and neural networks.
Franco Pellegrini
Postdoc (funding: Simons Grant, 2019-2020) working with Giulio Biroli
From September 2020: postdoc at ENS, Paris
Franco Pellegrini obtained his PhD from SISSA (Trieste), working with Erio Tosatti on atomic scale models of friction and the dissipative dynamics of classical and quantum systems. During his postdoc with Giulio Biroli he worked on the description of the training dynamics of neural networks and other machine learning models. His research interests revolve around the construction of simple models to improve our understanding of complex systems out of equilibrium.
Marko Popovic
Postdoc
Working with Matthieu Wyart
I am a postdoc in with Matthieu Wyart at EPFL, Laussane. I obtained my PhD in Max Planck Institute for Physics of Complex Systems in Dresden working on hydrodynamic description of developing fly wing tissue with Frank Juelicher. Currently I am using elasto-plastic models to study plasticity of amorphous solids.
Riccardo Ravasio
PhD student (funding: Swiss National Science Foundation)
Working with Matthieu Wyart, 2016-2020
From 2020, Postdoc University of Chicago
Riccardo received his master degree in Theoretical Physics in 2016 from Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca in Milan, after an exchange at École Polytechnique in Paris and an internship at the Institue of Theoretical Physics of CEA in Saclay. Currently, he is working under the supervision of Matthieu Wyart on the study of elasticity in materials that present specific long-range response as allosteric proteins do in nature.
Sean Ridout
PhD student at University of Pennsylvania (funding: Simons grant)
Working with Andrea Liu (PhD supervisor), 2016 – present
Sean Ridout is a PhD student at the University of Pennsylvania. Under the supervision of Andrea Liu, he is studying critical phenomena near the jamming transition of soft spheres.
Jason Rocks
PhD student (September 2013-present)
Working with Andrea Liu
Jason Rocks is a PhD student at the University of Pensylvania working with Andrea Liu. He studies disordered complex systems in soft matter and biological physics through a topological lens, utilizing new methods in topological data analysis to identify structural order parameters that govern the physical properties of these systems. His thesis work has focused on using this approach to understand the structural mechanisms by which biological networks, such as allosteric proteins and the brain vasculature, are able to attain functionality.
Félix Roy
PhD student (funding: CFM Fondation pour la Recherche, 2017-present)
Working with Giulio Biroli, 2017-present
Félix Roy is a PhD student at the Institute of Theoretical Physics (IPhT) of CEA, Saclay. Under the supervision of Giulio Biroli, he is currently investigating the dynamics of interacting ecosystems, based on the mean field Lotka-Volterra model with random interactions.
James Sartor
Phd student
Working with Eric Corwin
James Sartor is a PhD student at the University of Oregon under the supervision of Eric Corwin. James is directly measuring the entropy of the force configuration of jammed packings by enumerating all of the possible force configurations that will keep a system in mechanical equilibrium.
Antonio Sclocchi
PhD student (Funding Simons Grant starting September 2017)
Working with Silvio Franz (Starting September 2017)
Antonio Sclocchi is a PhD student of Université Paris-Sud 11 working at LPTMS with Silvio Franz on the dynamics of the glass transition. He graduated in 2016 in Physics of Complex Systems in a joint master between Politecnico di Torino and Université Paris-Sud; his previous research experience regards spin-boson models in quantum physics.
Ethan Stanifer
Ph.D. Student
Working with Lisa Manning
Ethan Stanifer is a PhD student at Syracuse University under the supervision of Lisa Manning. Ethan is currently working on structural analyses of amorphous material as predictors of plasticity with the goal to constrain elastoplastic and other continuum models. He also works with sparse random matrix models and their relationship to low dimensional glassy physics.
Georgios Tsekenis
Postdoc (funding: Simons grant, 2018-present)
Working with Giorgio Parisi
Georgios Tsekenis is currently a Researcher at the Sapienza University of Rome focusing on jamming and glasses with Giorgio Parisi. Georgios started his studies in Athens, Greece. He got his PhD from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2012 on the avalanching behavior of crystalline plasticity. He published on complex networks at Northeastern University and friction experiments at Harvard before joining the Simons Collaboration on cracking the glass problem. Since then he has published on the Gardner behavior of near crystals and currently is focusing on the energy landscape of jamming and glasses.
Ge Zhang
Postdoc with Andrea Liu, (2017-present)
At the University of Pennsylvania, he is studying avalanche propagations in quasistatically sheared soft-sphere models using machine learning.
Mingyuan Zheng
Ph.D. Student
Working with Patrick Charbonneau
Mingyuan Zheng is a PhD student in the Chemistry Department at Duke University. Mingyuan is primarily interested in percolation and dynamics in systems with frustration, which she studies using analytical and computational approaches. She is also working on the DMFT of active particles, which she studies using high-dimensional simulations of an active Brownian random Lorentz gas model.