SCI-skolans nyinstallerade professorer hyllades med filmer

Professor of Physics with specialization in Experimental Astroparticle Physics

Josefin Larsson is a Professor of Astrophysics and Deputy Head of the Physics Department at KTH. She is also a Wallenberg Scholar. Before taking up a position at KTH she did her MSc at Lund University, a PhD at the University of Cambridge and a postdoc at Stockholm University.

Josefin Larsson’s research deals with some of the most extreme phenomena in the universe; powerful stellar explosions like supernovae and gamma-ray bursts, and the compact objects that they leave behind. She investigates fundamental open questions regarding these phenomena, including how the explosions are triggered, as well as how the properties of the compact objects (neutron stars and black holes) are connected to the properties of the progenitor stars and explosions. Together with her research group, Josefin Larsson addresses these questions by analysing observations that cover most of the electromagnetic spectrum.

Professor of Theoretical physics with specialization in astroparticle physics

Three types (or ‘flavours’) of neutrinos occur in the Standard Model of Particle Physics. These are ultra-light electrically neutral particles, which in the Standard Model have no mass and are related to charged leptons, such as electrons and muons. In the late 1990s, it was discovered experimentally that neutrinos have a property that enables them to switch between the three flavours, a process known as neutrino oscillation. This can only occur if the neutrinos have a low but non-zero mass, which thus indicates physics beyond the Standard Model.

Through his research, Blennow largely focuses on how the Standard Model can be extended to explain this mass. Observations of the universe on cosmological and astronomical scales indicate that much of the matter that exists is not made up of matter as we commonly know it, comprising protons, neutrons and electrons. The surplus is ascribed to ‘dark matter’, which is by necessity electrically neutral and cannot be described by the Standard Model either. Blennow’s research also aims to theoretically build models for the dark matter and explore how these can be studied experimentally.

Professor of Fluid mechanics/multiphase flows

Lisa Prahl Wittberg has been a Professor in Fluid Mechanics with a specialisation in Multiphase flows since 2021, leading the Biomedical flows research group at the Department of Engineering Mechanics.

Lisa’s research focuses on multiphase flows, such as drops in air or particles suspended in a liquid. Multiphase flows are found in numerous industrial applications, but also in biological flows as the blood flow or the transportation of medicine or pollution particles in the human airways.

Lisa looks at flows found in the human body and in artificial devices for the critically ill. The aim is to improve the understanding of pathological processes and device performance in clinical applications where extracorporeal life support, hemodialysis and respirators are needed. Flowing in artificial devices such as cannulas and blood pumps exposes the blood to situations that differ from normal ones and may increase the risk of complication.

Professor of Mathematics

Maurice Duits orginally came to KTH as a postdoc in 2011, and was promoted to full professor in November 2021. His research is largely inspired by the fact that many large systems consisting of random small parts behave in predictable ways.

For example, how is it that many objects around us appear to be static and not chaotic, but they are all built out of atoms that behave quite wildly individually? Moreover, how is it that the randomness that remains in such systems often follows laws that are universal, and the same law can be found in seemingly very different models?

For mathematicians the challenge is to build a framework to study the mechanisms behind such phenomena, by studying large classes of models that are simple enough so that they can be analysed in detail. One of Maurice favourite scientific research fields is the random tiling of planar domains. In such models, one tiles a large two-dimensional region randomly by a given number of small shapes. There are many possible ways to tile, but the vast majority seem to have roughly the same shape with smaller fluctuations.

The shape depends heavily on the region that is tiled, but the fluctuations are described by universal laws. Maurice and his team are currently developing new mathematical tools to study such phenomena.