Three New Junior Professors Join IHES

IHES is pleased to announce the upcoming arrival of three new Junior Professors, who will further strengthen the Institute’s dynamic environment and scientific excellence: Sridip Pal, Semon Rezchikov, and Zhongkai Tao.

The arrival of three new Junior Professors at IHES in August and September marks an important milestone for the Institute. Coming from various fields—pure mathematics or theoretical physics—these researchers represent a new generation of promising scientists. Having previously conducted their research at leading institutions in different countries, they reflect a wide diversity of academic backgrounds and origins. This variety greatly contributes to the international dimension of IHES and to the richness of the intellectual exchanges that flourish there.

Working alongside Permanent Professors and benefiting from the Institute’s intellectually stimulating environment, they will have the opportunity to pursue their work independently while becoming part of IHES’s strong tradition of fundamental research.

The Institute hopes to play a pivotal role in their academic journey, as it has for previous Junior Professors who have since joined prestigious institutions such as the CNRS and ETH Zurich. These recruitments reflect IHES’s ongoing commitment to renewing its academic community and maintaining its position as a world-leading center for fundamental research.

Sridip Pal conducts research at the intersection of conformal symmetry, quantum chaos, and quantum gravity. He was trained at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research in Kolkata, earned his doctorate at the University of California in San Diego, and subsequently held a position as a Founder’s Circle Member at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He then became a Sherman Fairchild Postdoctoral Scholar Research Associate at the California Institute of Technology. He has already established several collaborations with researchers in the Paris region, including Dalimil Mazac (IPht, CEA-Saclay), Balt C. van Rees (CPhT, École polytechnique) and Slava Rychkov (IHES).

Semon Rezchikov is interested in Floer homology and symplectic geometry. His work aims to push the algebraic possibilities of this theory in new directions. For example, he is trying to use techniques from homotopy theory to explain the arithmetic phenomena arising in symplectic invariants. A graduate of MIT, he completed his PhD at Columbia University before conducting postdoctoral research at Harvard. He then held a position as an NSF/Veblen Research Instructor at Princeton and the Institute for Advanced Study. At IHES, he hopes to further explore the consequences of his previous work on cyclotomic structures in symplectic topology. He also wishes to return to his earlier research on the Fueter equation. 

Zhongkai Tao has a strong interest in analysis, particularly in spectral theory and microlocal analysis. He has also worked on problems arising from general relativity, condensed matter physics, and hyperbolic dynamical systems. After studying at Xi’an Jiaotong University, he earned his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley under the supervision of Maciej Zworski. He looks forward to taking advantage of IHES’s proximity to Paris, a city that has played a major role in the development of microlocal analysis and which he describes as “a great place to learn different areas of math”.