Invited Speakers

Maria Bruna is an Associate Professor and a Royal Society University Research Fellow at the Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford. Her research develops mathematical methods for stochastic interacting particle systems, connecting microscopic interactions to hydrodynamic/macroscopic PDE models. She is particularly interested in excluded-volume effects, active matter, multi-species systems, and asymptotic homogenisation.

Paola Ruggiero is a Lecturer in Mathematics at King’s College London, where she joined in November 2021. Her research concerns quantum many-body systems both in and out of equilibrium, with a focus on large-scale and hydrodynamic descriptions of non-equilibrium dynamics. Her interests include entanglement measures in extended and disordered systems, out-of-equilibrium phenomena, and field-theoretical methods, in particular (1+1)-dimensional conformal field theory in flat and curved spacetime. Her work includes applications to cold-atom systems, combining quantum statistical mechanics with integrable and hydrodynamic approaches.

Nicola Marzari holds the Chair of Theory and Simulation of Materials at EPFL, and took up the post of Cavendish Professor of Physics at the University of Cambridge in 2025, transitioning there in 2026. Previously, he held the Toyota Chair for Materials Processing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and was the inaugural Statutory Chair of Materials Modelling at the University of Oxford. His research is dedicated to the development and application of electronic-structure simulations to understand, predict, and design the properties and performance of novel materials and devices.

Kay Brandner is an Associate Professor and UKRI Future Leaders Fellow in theoretical non-equilibrium physics. Before joining the Condensed Matter Theory Group at the University of Nottingham in 2020, he held personal postdoctoral fellowships at Keio University (Tokyo) and Aalto University (Helsinki), after receiving his PhD in 2015 from the University of Stuttgart. His research revolves around micro- and nanoscale systems in both the classical and quantum domains; key topics include the fundamental nature of non-equilibrium fluctuations, collective phenomena in settings with many degrees of freedom, memory effects induced by slow relaxation, and the role of thermodynamic constraints.