Niels Bohr International Academy

Two Assistant Professors to the NBIA and the Discovery Center

Martin Pessah will be the new Knud Højgaard Assistant Professor at the NBIA.  Martin comes from a 3-year post-doctoral position at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.  He received his Ph.D. in theoretical astrophysics from the University of Arizona in 2007 and is known for his work on the physics of accretion disks through the study of magnetohydrodynamic flows, numerically as well as analytically.  At the NBIA Martin will lead a new effort in numerical astrophysics, aiming to build up a small independent group in that area.

Simon Badger will be new Assistant Professor at the Discovery Center, but will be joining the NBIA as well since the theory group of that center is housed at the NBIA.  He received his Ph.D. from Durham University in 2006 and has since held post-doctoral positions in Sacalay and DESY, Hamburg.  Simon joins Emil Bjerrum-Bohr and Poul Henrik Damgaard in an effort to establish a group that will work on newly developed methods for computing amplitudes relevant for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN.  Others with similar research interests in this area include incoming NBIA post-doc Donal O’Connell and NBIA Ph.D.-student Thomas Søndergaard.  One more post-doctoral hire will also be made soon in this area.

Five new post-docs will join the NBIA in the fall of 2010

Donal O’Connell will start on September 1st, arriving from the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton.  Donal received his PhD from Caltech in 2007 and works on a varietry of different topics around the Standard Model of particle physics and beyond.  Recently, his interests have turned toward new developments in the spinor-helicity formalism for scattering amplitude calculations.

Anders Tranberg joins us in early August, coming from a post-doctoral position at Oulu and Helsinki Universities.  Anders received his PhD from the University of Amsterdam and has since also held a post-doctoral position at Cambridge University.  He works on the internplay between cosmology and particle physics, in particular topics such as Electroweak baryogenesis in the Electroweak theory and beyond.

Ricardo Monteiro will arrive September 1st from Cambrdige University, where he is just finishing his PhD under the supervision of Stephen Hawking.  Ricardo works on General Relativity, in particular on the thermodynamics of black holes and related topics.

Hidehiko Shimada joins the NBIA on September 1st.  Hidehiko works on various aspects of string theory and is presently a post-doc at the Max Planck Institute in Potsdam.  He received his PhD in 2005 from Tokyo University.

Shantanu Mukherjee begins his post-doctoral appointment on September 1st.  Shatanu has just received his PhD from the University of Wisconsin and works on the physics of unconventional superconductors.  He will be working closely with the condensed matter theory group of the Niels Bohr Institute.

Two ‘Ib Henriksen Visiting Professors’ will be joining the NBIA for extended stays

• Starting on August 1st this year, Niels Grønbech Jensen of the University of California in Davis will be visiting the NBIA until the first of September in 2011.  Niels Grønbech Jensen studies the nonlinear dynamics of soft condensed matter systems using numerical techniques.  Some of his interests include the dynamics and phase locking of nonlinear oscillators and soliton systems.  He is currently examining models for phenomena that occur in atomic-scale materials, such as vortex systems, soft matter, and granular materials.
• John Donoghue who works in the Nuclear, Particle and Gravitational Theory Group at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst will be a guest of the NBIA from April 1st to July 1st in 2011.  John Donoghue’s research has covered a broad range of topics in theoretical particle physics and he is especially noted for his work in particle phenomenology.  He has applied effective theory approaches to gain insights into both particle physics and general relativity.  Some of his most recent work has been to examine the Standard Model as an example of emergent physics, building on ideas developed by Holger Bech Nielsen at the NBI.