Group members
Academic staff
Tom Bridgeland
Interests: Mirror Symmetry, Derived Categories, Moduli Spaces, Hall Algebras
Contact: Personal website, t.bridgeland@shef.ac.uk, room J18b
Biography: Tom learnt his trade in Edinburgh before moving to Sheffield in 2004. He spent the years 2011 and 2012 as a Research Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford.
Andrea Brini
Interests: Topological Strings, Mirror Symmetry, Gromov-Witten theory, Integrable Systems
Contact: Personal website, a.brini@sheffield.ac.uk, room J21
Biography: Andrea got his PhD at SISSA in 2009 and spent time as a postdoc in Geneva and Imperial College in 2009-12. He obtained a CNRS permanent research position in 2013, and held visiting research positions at Imperial College (2016-18) and MSRI Berkeley (2018), followed by an academic post in Birmingham in 2018/19. He joined the University of Sheffield in 2019.
Marco Fazzi
Interests: Superconformal Field Theories, Dualities, Geometrical aspects of AdS/CFT, D-brane dynamics, K-stability, Matrix Factorisations
Contact: m.fazzi@sheffield.ac.uk, room J10
Biography: Marco got his PhD at ULB Brussels in 2016. He was a postdoc at the Technion (2016-2019), a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at Milano-Bicocca (2019-2022), and finally a postdoc at Uppsala University (2022-2023), holding visiting positions at UC Santa Barbara, Weizmann Institute, SISSA Trieste, and Nordita. He joined the University of Sheffield in 2024.
Paul Johnson
Interests: Gromov-Witten theory, Orbifolds, Hilbert schemes, Partitions
Contact: Personal website, paul.johnson@shef.ac.uk, room J06b
Biography: Paul initially completed his undergraduate at the University of Chicago. Following this he obtained his master’s at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and PhD at the University of Michigan under Yongbin Ruan. He then held various postdoctoral positions at Princeton, Imperial College London and Columbia University. He was associate professor at Colorado State University for one year before moving to the University of Sheffield.
Albrecht Klemm
Interests: Topological String theory, Mirror symmetry, Gauge theory, Arithmetic of Calabi-Yau motives with applications to Feynman integrals
Biography: Albrecht got his PhD at the University of Heidelberg in 1990, and held professorships at the Humboldt University in Berlin, the University of Wisconsin at Madison and the University of Bonn. He joined the University of Sheffield in March 2025 as the Leverhulme International Professor of Mathematical Physics.
Cheuk Yu Mak
Interests: Symplectic topology, Fukaya category, mirror symmetry, low dimensional topology, Hamiltonian dynamics
Contact: c.mak@sheffield.ac.uk, room K10
Biography: Cheuk Yu Mak obtained his PhD in Mathematics at the University of Minnesota in 2016. Subsequently, he worked at the Institute for Advance Study (2016-2017), University of Cambridge (2017-2020), Edinburgh (2020-2022) and Southampton (2022-2024) before joining Sheffield in 2024.
Cristina Manolache
Interests: Moduli spaces, Gromov-Witten theory
Contact: c.manolache@sheffield.ac.uk, room J23
Biography: Cristina got her PhD at SISSA, Trieste and following this, she held postdoctoral positions at Humboldt Berlin and at Imperial College London. She came to the University of Sheffield as a senior lecturer in 2019.
Evgeny Shinder
Interests: Derived Categories of Coherent Sheaves, Grothendieck Group of Varieties
Contact: Personal website, e.shinder@sheffield.ac.uk, room J24
Biography: Evgeny defended his PhD at Northwestern University under Andrei Suslin. Afterwards he was a postdoc at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics, University of Bonn, the Hausdorff Research Institute for Mathematics and the University of Mainz. In 2013-14 he was a Whittaker postdoc at the University of Edinburgh, before coming to Sheffield as a lecturer in 2014.
Postdocs
Marcelo S. Atallah
Interests: Hamiltonian dynamics, C^0-Symplectic topology, Quantitative Symplectic topology
Contact: Personal website, m.s.atallah@sheffield.ac.uk, room K16
Biography: Before joining the University of Sheffield for a postdoc, Marcelo received his PhD in 2024 at the Université de Montréal under the supervision of Egor Shelukhin. In 2022, he was a Program Associate at the Simons Laufer Mathematical Sciences Institute (former MSRI) during the Floer Homotopy Theory program. He received his MSc in 2019 at the Instituto de Matemática Pura e Aplicada (IMPA).
Alexey Elagin
Interests: derived categories of coherent sheaves, triangulated categories, representations of finite-dimensional algebras, group actions on categories
Contact: a.elagin@sheffield.ac.uk, room H11
Biography: Alexey got his PhD in Moscow, and worked there as a research fellow before moving to Edinburgh in 2023 and then to Sheffield in 2024 as a postdoc.
Luca Giovenzana
Interests: K3 surfaces, Hyperkähler manifolds, Mirror Symmetry, K-stability
Contact: Personal website, l.giovenzana@sheffield.ac.uk, room K29
Biography: Luca got his PhD in Chemnitz under the supervision of Christian Lehn in 2021. Afterwards he was a Postdoc at Loughborough University before joining the University of Sheffield as a postdoctoral fellow in 2023.
Ivan Tulli
Interests: Hyperkähler and quaternionic-Kähler geometries, twistor spaces, stability conditions and BPS states, string theory, resurgence, Higgs bundles
Contact: Personal website, i.n.tulli@sheffield.ac.uk, room K16
Biography: Ivan got his PhD in 2020 at the University of Texas at Austin, USA, under the supervision of Andrew Neitzke. He then held a Cluster of Excellence: Quantum Universe postdoctoral position at the University of Hamburg, before starting in 2023 his current postdoctoral position at the University of Sheffield.
PhD students
Kuba Krawczyk
Supervisor: Marco Fazzi
Interests: Strings, AdS/CFT and Black Holes, Noncommutative Geometry, Geometrical and Categorical Structures in Physics
Contact: kkrawczyk1@sheffield.ac.uk, room J14b
Biography: Before joining Sheffield, Kuba completed his BSc at the University of Warsaw and MSc in Theoretical Physics at the University of Amsterdam.
Jingxiang Ma
Supervisor: Andrea Brini
Interests: Gromov-Witten theory, Mirror Symmetry, Birational Algebraic Geometry
Contact: jma75@sheffield.ac.uk, room J14b
Biography: Jingxiang obtained his bachelor's and master's degree at Peking University, China. He then moved to Sheffield to start his PhD.
Robert Rogers
Supervisor: Cristina Manolache
Interests: Moduli spaces, Enumerative Geometry, GIT
Contact: rrogers4@sheffield.ac.uk, Room J14b
Biography: Robert completed his Integrated Master's degree at the University of Warwick before moving to Sheffield for his PhD.
Haoran Shi
Supervisor: Cheuk Yu Mak
Interests: Symplectic topology, symplectic cohomology, Fukaya category.
Contact: hshi37@sheffield.ac.uk, Room J25-7
Biography: Haoran completed his Master’s degree at Beijing Normal University. Then, he moved to the University of Sheffield for his PhD.
Keith Worden
Supervisor: Cristina Manolache
Interests: Enumerative Geometry, Nonlinear Dynamics, Theoretical Physics
Contact: K.Worden@sheffield.ac.uk
Biography: Started off as a theoretical physist aeons ago with a degree from York University. Moved into field of structural dyamics and currently spending most of his time doing various flavours of machine learning.
Menelaos Zikidis
Supervisor: Tom Bridgeland
Interests: Geometry of Moduli Spaces, Non-Abelian Hodge Theory, Bridgeland Stability Structures, Mirror Symmetry, DT-Theory.
Contact: Personal website, mzikidis1@sheffield.ac.uk, room J14a
Biography: Menelaos completed his masters and undergraduate studies in Mathematics and Physics at the University of Heidelberg. He then joined the University of Sheffield for his PhD.