The first SwissMAP Junior Prize awardees are Freya Behrens, Samir Canning and Romain Panis
We are delighted to announce the first SwissMAP Junior Researcher Prize recipients, recognizing important scientific achievements in Mathematics and Theoretical Physics. This prize, supported by G-Research, highlights groundbreaking contributions from early-career researchers in Switzerland.
The awards will be presented during the SwissMAP Winter School in January 2025 at the SwissMAP Research Station in Les Diablerets.
Freya Behrens (EPFL)
Freya is a PhD student at the Statistical Physics of Computation group at EPFL. She studies how the dynamics of simple interactions in graphs lead to emergent behaviours in complex systems. In her work she uses a combination of statistical physics and computational simulations, with the goal of grounding complex phenomena in analytically tractable models. Next to combinatorial problems she is interested in applying similar methods to understand the foundations of machine learning. In 2021 she graduated with a master in Computer Science from the Technical University of Berlin and holds a Bachelor’s degree in Software Engineering at the Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam.
Samir Canning (ETH Zurich)
Samir is an algebraic geometer interested in the intersection theory of moduli spaces of curves, surfaces, and abelian varieties. He is an Ambizione fellow and Hermann-Weyl-Instructor at ETH Zürich. He graduated from the University of California San Diego in 2022.
Romain Panis (UNIGE)
Romain defended his thesis, Applications of Path Expansions to Statistical Mechanics, under the supervision of Prof. Hugo Duminil-Copin, in August 2024. In September 2024, he started a postdoctoral position at the Institut Camille Jordan (Université Lyon 1), funded by the SNSF, where he is working within Christophe Garban’s group. He is interested in the mathematical study of various models of statistical mechanics, such as the Ising model and Bernoulli percolation. His research focuses on their mean-field regime, which emerges on the hypercubic lattice Z^d in large enough dimensions, and which is characterized by a striking simplification of the models’ critical exponents.
