Award for the best PhD thesis
Every Year SISSA awards 3 prizes of the amount of € 1.000,00 each for the best Ph.D. thesis defended at SISSA in each scientific field:
- Mathematics
- Physics
- Neuroscience
Rules
Participation to the 2013 edition is limited to candidates who obtained the Ph.D title at SISSA during the period 1 March 2012 – 28 February 2013.
Deadline: 5 September 2013
Previous Winners
2012
Mathematics
Davide Barilari now Post-Doc @ Ecole Polytechnique, Paris (France)
Title: Invariants, volumes and heat kernels in sub-Riemannian geometry
Supervisors: A. Agrachev and U. Boscain
The thesis of Dr. Barilari is devoted to important problems of geometry, measure theory and analysis in sub-Riemannian spaces. Two of results obtained by Barilari answer classical open questions: the first concerns regularity properties of the Hausdorff's measure and the second concerns the relation between the small time asymptotic of the sub-Riemannian heat kernel on the diagonal and geometric curvature-type invariants. This is indeed an extremely good mature work.
Neuroscience
Claudia Civai now Post-Doc @ Minnesota University - Dept. of Economics, USA
Title: More Equal than Others: The neural basis of unfairness and inequality perception in the Ultimatum Game
Supervisor: R. Rumiati
"The thesis contains four studies (3 of which already published in high ranked journals) in a new field of neuroscience investigating the neural bases of economical decision making. The external examiners (Prof. Alan Sanfey, University of Arizona & Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Nijmegen, and Prof. Stefano Cappa, Università San Raffaele, Milan) were very impressed by her experimental and theoretical work. Immediately after her PhD defense, Dr. Civai started a three year postdoctoral contract to work at the University at Minnesota in collaboration with Prof Aldo Rustichini, a world leading figure in neuroeconomics."
Physics
Michele Burrello now Post-Doc @ Universiteit Leiden - Institut Lorentz, Germany
Title: Topological quantum computation, anyons and non-abelian gauge potentials
Supervisors: G. Mussardo and A. Trombettoni
For his outstanding work on non-abelian anyon physics, in particular for implementing a very efficient search algorithm of a single q-bit quantum gate based on braiding properties of the so-called Fibonacci anyons
2011
Mathematics
Francesco Solombrino now Post-Doc @ Center for Mathematics, Technische Universität München, Germany
Title: Rescaled viscosity solutions of a quasistatic evolution problem in non-associative plasticity
Supervisor: G. Dal Maso
Francesco Solombrino's thesis contains very interesting and very difficult mathematical results on a specific model for elasto-plastic materials used in soil mechanics. More in general, the ideas and the techniques developed in the thesis provide an important contribution to the study of quasistatic evolution problems, a field that has attracted the activity of several international research groups.
Neuroscience
Liuba Papeo now Post-Doc @ Cognitive Neuropsychology Laboratory, Harvard University, USA
Title: The Tie between Action and Language Is in Our Imagination
Supervisor: R. Rumiati
The thesis entitled contains five distinct experimental studies. Three of them have been published, one has been sent to a Journal and one will be submitted shortly. Furthermore, a review article has been completed. All those works have already received many citations. Besides having used different methodologies (fMRI, TMS and neuropsychology,) in her thesis, Dr. Papeo has also carried out very good theoretical work. Professor Caramazza (Harvard and University of Trento) and Professor Peter Hagoort (director of the Donders Institute in Neijmegen, Netherlands), were the external examiners, and highly appreciated her work.
Physics
Raffaello Potestio now Post-Doc @ Theory Group, Max-Planck-Institut für Polymerforschung Mainz, Germany
Title: Coarse-grained modelling of protein structure and internal dynamics: comparative methods and applications
Supervisor: C. Micheletti
For outstanding results in the numerical characterization of structure and dynamical properties of proteins, as testified by the independent selection of one of his papers by the F1000 committee: In this intriguing paper, the authors compared the sequences of homologous proteins. In particular, they chose proteins in which some homologs contain knots while others did not, enabling Potestio et al. to tease out features that may be required for knotting.