Ludwig Hoffmann

I am interested in…

What are you working on?

I am mainly working on active liquid crystal models and apply them to biological systems, trying to better understand the dynamics of cells and tissues. The general idea is to model cells as liquid crystal particles (basically small rods) and allow each of these particles to move around and exert forces on their environment. This results in hydrodynamic equations that can be applied to and solved in different circumstances. For example to understand tissue growth, morphogenesis, structure formation in tissues, or cell apoptosis better.

What are you looking to get out of the DRSTP?

Apart from the regular schools it is a nice environment to get to know PhD students from other universities and learn what they are working on, to get inspiration for my own work or just to see what’s out there, especially in fields that are far away from my own.

What interests do you have apart from your research?

I do sports like skating or bouldering, read books (at the moment mainly centered around politics or political philosophy and art), go to museums and listen to many podcasts about similar topics.

Karina Gonzalez Lopez

I am interested in…

What are you working on?

My main interests reside in computational soft matter. In particular, I am interested in the low-frequency excitations and the mechanical properties of glasses, which are amorphous solids. Distinct from crystals whose atoms are perfectly located at their lattice sites and therefore show long-range order, amorphous solids’ atoms are disordered. There are different types of glasses and many of these are present in our daily lives. For example, not only do we have silicate glasses in our kitchen glassware and windows, but we also see polymeric glasses every day in the PVC pipes, and probably use metallic glasses embedded in our mobile phone sim cards. Despite glasses being so common in our daily lives and nature (our body itself features components that have glass-like behavior!), many fundamental questions remain open in the physics community. Glasses display very different specific heat and thermal conductivity at low temperatures than predicted by theory and disorder seems to be the reason for such discrepancies. My research focuses on generating thousands of different classes of computer glasses and studying their emergent properties. This is not only interesting as it sheds light on last-standing fundamental questions in glassy physics but for its relevance to material science for technological applications.

What are you looking to get out of the DRSTP?

The DRSTP is a place where the theoretical-physics community of the Netherlands comes together. While meeting fellow students and researchers among the Netherlands is a very important aspect of the DRSTP, I find even more interesting the fact that it provides an insight to the current theoretical-physics picture in the Netherlands which would be hard to follow without the DRSTP events, such as “trends in theory”.

What interests do you have apart from your research?

I like reading, especially about Latin-American history and poetry.

Eleftheria Malami

I am interested in…

What are you working on?

I am a PhD student at the Theory Group of Nikhef, working with Robert Fleischer. I work on the field called flavour physics, which studies phenomena related to transitions between different elementary particle species, called “flavours”. Flavour physics played a central role in the development of the Standard Model of particle physics. Even though the Standard Model is a successful theory, there are still phenomena that it cannot explain, like the matter-antimatter asymmetry in the Universe. Thus, we go beyond the Standard Model and we search for possible hints of New Physics. A very promising tool is given by particles called B mesons. In our studies, we focus on benchmark B meson decay processes, which are sensitive to New Physics. We search for New Physics in an indirect way, working at the “high precision frontier”, performing calculations with the highest precision and confronting them with very precise measurements. Fortunately, we live in very exciting times where there is a plethora of experimental data. In these data sets, discrepancies are indicated between theoretical predictions and the measured values. Providing theoretical interpretation of these measurements, we aim to answer the question: are these really signals of New Physics?

What are you looking to get out of the DRSTP?

It is great to have an Institution like DRSTP, which can bring the whole Theoretical Physics community of the Netherlands together. Participating as a student to the DRSTP activities like the annual schools and the PhD days, it helps to build a strong network, meet your fellow colleagues, learn more about their topic and acquire a better understanding of your field. Being also a member of the PhD Student Council, I had the opportunity to receive direct feedback from our co-students and effectively communicate our needs to the Governing Board and our professors.

What interests do you have apart from your research?

Having also studied music, I enjoy playing the piano, singing opera or simply attending nice concerts and performances. In addition, I’m really into reading interesting books, dancing, hiking in nature, travelling and volunteering.