New Lecturer teaching staff during the 2025/26 academic year

Joan Claramunt Carós graduated from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, ​​where he completed a double degree in Physics and Mathematics, and later completed his doctorate at the same institution. His thesis, focused on the study of the Atiyah problem and Sylvester rank functions in cross products, was awarded the Extraordinary Doctoral Prize.

His postdoctoral career has developed mainly in the international area. After an initial stage at the Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina (Brazil), he joined Lancaster University (United Kingdom) as a senior research associate in the group of Dr. Lukasz Grabowski, linked to an ERC Starting Grant project. He subsequently continued his activity in Germany, first as a scientific assistant at the Universitat Leipzig and, later, as a postdoctoral researcher in the Nonlinear Algebra group of the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences. Before joining the UPC, he worked for two years as an assistant professor at the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid.

Regarding his research activity, Joan has a dual profile that connects abstract algebra and mathematical physics. On the one hand, his research in the field of algebra focuses on rank functions and the problem of group stability. On the other hand, his work extends to mathematical physics, with a special focus on quantum spin systems and many-body quantum physics. The main tools he uses in his research are group theory, the theory of operator algebras (C*-algebras and von Neumann algebras) and quantum field theory.

Roser Homs has been a lecturer at the UPC since September 2025. Her research activity focuses on the field of algebraic statistics and its applications to the life sciences, using tools from commutative algebra, algebraic geometry and computational algebra.

She received her doctorate in 2019 at the University of Barcelona under the supervision of Professor Joan Elias. Her thesis focused on the study of the approximation of local rings by Gorenstein rings using Macaulay inverse systems. She subsequently began her postdoctoral career in Germany, first at the Max-Planck-Institut in Leipzig, within the nonlinear algebra group of Bernd Sturmfels, and then at the TU München, in the mathematical statistics group led by Mathias Drton. In this second stage she began working in algebraic statistics, specifically on problems of identifiability and model selection in statistical graphical models.

More recently, she returned to Barcelona as a Beatriu de Pinós postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Mathematical Research (CRM). Within the group of Professor Marta Casanellas, she began using algebraic methods to address questions in the field of phylogenetics. She is currently a member of the EMS Young Academy.

Eduard Vilalta joins the Department as Lecturer in October 2025. Trained at the UAB and a former student of the MAMME master's degree at the UPC, he focuses his research on the study of operator algebras. Originally introduced by Murray and von Neumann in the study of quantum physics, these algebras are today a central field in Functional Analysis. Often described as "quantum topology", this discipline also combines ideas from Non-Commutative Algebra, Topology and Free Probability.

After receiving his doctorate from the UAB, he received a Fields Postdoctoral Fellowship to carry out a postdoctoral stay at the Fields Institute (Canada, 2023). He then became a postdoctoral researcher at the Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden (2024-2025), working under the supervision of Hannes Thiel within the framework of the Wallenberg project "Order-theoretic methods in operator algebras". As a result of this international activity, he has given talks at centers such as the University of Oxford, Oberwolfach or the Fields Institute itself.