Stockholm Mathematics Centre Prizes for Excellent Doctoral Dissertation and Master Theses 2020/2021

Excellent Master Theses

Gabriel Andersson

Decoding Neural Signals Associated to Cytokine Activity
Advisors: Henrik Hult and Fredrik Viklund

Gabriel Andersson is awarded the SMC prize for his excellent master thesis. In his thesis, Andersson analyzes neural activity from the vagus nerve in order to extract information about the presence of specific cytokines, which are proteins mediating inflammation. By skillful preprocessing of experimental data, and clever use of methods in mathematical statistics and machine learning, he manages to gain insights in how the cytokine information is encoded. The results have the potential to impact the research field of bioelectronic medicine and future study of inflammatory diseases.
Gabriel Andersson's master thesis on DiVA

Ellen Krusell

Reduced Loewner Energies
Advisor: Fredrik Viklund

Ellen Krusell is awarded the SMC prize for her excellent master thesis which is focused on generalisations of the basic chordal Loewner energy. This direction of research is interesting in itself, combining analysis and probability theory, but also because it has connections and applications to other areas, such as Teichmüller theory. The thesis goes deep into the subject, and presents new results which are generalisations and extensions of recent work. Both theory and arguments are very well presented and there is a perspective for future development of ideas presented in the thesis.
Ellen Krusell's master thesis on DiVA

Martin Nilsson

Faber–Krahn inequalities for point-interaction Hamiltonians in bounded domains
Advisor: Jonathan Rohleder

Martin Nilsson is awarded the SMC prize for his excellent master thesis. Nilsson gives a rigorous and focused presentation of his subject, leading from the basics of Banach spaces up to recent literature on eigenvalue results for perturbations of the Dirichlet Laplacian on bounded domains. The thesis concludes with novel results, extending existing work on Faber–Krahn inequalities for Hamiltonians in such contexts. The thesis shows technical strength and clear insight on a deep topic of current research.
Martin Nilsson's master thesis

María de la Paz Quirós Artacho

Coxeter groups, Hecke algebras and Kazhdan–Lusztig cells
Advisor: Wushi Goldring

María de la Paz Quirós Artacho is awarded the SMC prize for her excellent master thesis. The thesis of de la Paz surveys topics in group theory, representation theory and algebraic geometry, leading up to a series of conjectures by Lusztig. Besides showing thorough understanding and a mature perspective on cutting-edge material, drawing on a broad range of background topics, the thesis is particularly notable for the quality of exposition, giving a lucid and insightful presentation of a technically intricate subject, remaining accessible and clearly-motivated throughout.
Maria de la Paz's master thesis

Excellent Doctoral Theses

Jan van den Brand

Photo by Maren Rankl

Dynamic Matrix Algorithms and Applications in Convex and Combinatorial Optimization
Advisor: Danupon Nanongkai

Jan van den Brand is awarded the SMC prize for his excellent doctoral dissertation, which brought breakthrough results in the areas of dynamic algorithms and optimization, by unifying and simplifying existing data structures.
Jan van den Brand's doctoral dissertation on DiVA

Andrea Serio

Extremal eigenvalues and geometry of quantum graphs
Advisor: Pavel Kurasov

Andrea Serio is awarded the SMC prize for his excellent doctoral dissertation, which obtains sharp results by combining explicit analysis for the Schrödinger operator with geometric analysis coming from the graph structure.
Andrea Serio's doctoral dissertation on DiVA