University of Cape Town, South Africa
Since August 2015, Álvaro (Aranjuez, 1980) has been a Permanent Faculty Lecturer in the Department of Mathematics and Applied Mathematics at the University of Cape Town (UCT) and a full-time member of the UCT Astrophysics, Cosmology and Gravity Centre (ACGC) at UCT. Previously, awarded a PhD at the Complutense University of Madrid (2010, Summa cum Laude) on theoretical and observational constraints in extended theories of gravity. Subsequently held a postdoctoral fellow post at the UCT Cosmology and Gravity group and obtained a Marie Curie postdoctoral contract at the ICE-IEEC Barcelona. Between 2014 and 2015, he was given a Profesor Ayudante Doctor (Assistant Lecturer) contract by the Theoretical Physics Department at the Complutense University of Madrid.
Álvaro’s publications include more than 50 peer-reviewed articles with seminal contributions in the areas of cosmological large-scale structures, foundations of theories beyond Einsteinian gravity and indirect methods of dark matter detections. Álvaro is also a scientific referee for twenty-two journals and several international scientific agencies and has been responsible for enabling several MSc and PhD students to graduate.
To date, Álvaro has been member of the scientific teams for seventeen research funded projects. Since 2016 he has been a member of two running EU-COST actions and along the course of his career he has been the Principal Investigator (PI) for six funded research projects in both Europe and South Africa.
In 2017 he was appointed as an Associate in the SKA Cosmology collaboration and was honoured with the Young Researcher Award, (UCT College of Fellows, 2017) and the Claude Leon Foundation Merit Award for Early-career Researchers (2018).
fessor at Georgia Tech. My group is expert on the Physics of soft materials with a focus on the connection between microscopic order and macroscopic properties. Soft materials are materials whose properties are determined by internal structures with dimensions between atomic sizes and macroscopic scales. They are characterized by energies that are typically comparable to kT. As a result, they have low elastic moduli, often ~1-10 Pascals. Typical soft materials include liquid crystals, polymers, colloidal suspensions and emulsion drops. These materials, unlike conventional simple liquids, are locally heterogeneous and can have broken symmetries that affect their physical properties. Hence, although they often exhibit liquid-like behavior, soft materials also often exhibit properties of solids. Our laboratory studies the physics of soft materials with a focus on the connection between microscopic order and macroscopic properties. The underlying theme is to pursue basic understanding and address fundamental questions. However, we also address applied problems and pursue industrial collaborations since many of the materials we study can be viewed as model systems for those that are often used in applications. Current projects include (i) studying the phase and non-equilibrium behavior and properties of dense microgel suspensions, (ii) understanding the consequences of confinement and curvature over the equilibrium states of ordered materials, which in many cases require the existence of topological defects in their ground states, and (iii) electrohydrodynamics of toroidal droplets and jets.
Licenciado en Física en la Universidad de Córdoba, continuó sus estudios realizando el máster de “Ingeniería Matemática” en la Facultad de Matemáticas de la Universidad Complutense de Madrid. Esto le abrió las puertas de un grupo de investigación en la E.T.S.I. de Caminos, Canales y Puertos de la Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, donde realizará la tesis doctoral. Esta experiencia laboral le permitió profundizar en el estudio de detectores de tipo pórtico para la monitorización de emisiones gamma y de neutrones, con aplicaciones en puertos, acerías y aduanas. Mientras contribuía en diversos convenios de colaboración, completó sus estudios con el máster de “Tratamiento estadístico-computacional de la información” en la E.T.S.I. de Telecomunicación de la Universidad Politécnica de Madrid y el máster de “Física Nuclear” en la Facultad de Física de la Universidad Complutense de Madrid. Ya en la última fase de su doctorado, fue seleccionado para una beca en el CERN en el grupo de protección radiológica, donde aplica su conocimiento del software de simulación Monte Carlo. Sus funciones son desarrollar estudios radiológicos de los experimentos del LHC (ALICE, ATLAS, LHCb y CMS) con vistas a los trabajos de mejora de YETS, LS2 y LS3; la optimización de los planes de trabajo de las intervenciones desde el punto de vista radiológico (tasas de dosis y niveles de activación); y la revisión de los modelos geométricos desarrollados en FLUKA.
Félix es profesor asociado del Rudolf Peierls Centre for Theoretical Physics de la Universidad de Oxford. Félix investiga el comportamiento de los plasmas (gases ionizados) usados en experimentos de fusión nuclear. Para obtener energía de la fusión nuclear, el combustible (formado por isótopos del hidrógeno) tiene que alcanzar temperaturas diez veces mayores que la temperatura del centro del Sol. A esta temperatura, el hidrógeno se ioniza, y se pueden emplear grandes campos magnéticos (de orden de varios teslas) para confinarlo. El plasma de hidrógeno inmerso en un fuerte campo magnético usado en fusión se comporta de manera poco intuitiva: responde de manera muy distinta a fuerzas paralelas y perpendiculares al campo magnético. Félix estudia y modela plasmas magnetizados usando herramientas analíticas y sofisticados códigos cinéticos. Félix colabora con los experimentos JET y MAST del Culham Centre for Fusion Energy.
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