Team

Michael Kunzinger

Michael Kunzinger is full professor at the Faculty of Mathematics at Vienna University since 2019. He studied Mathematics and Physics at Vienna University and received his habilitation in 2001. His research interests include low regularity Differential Geometry, Metric Geometry, Lorentzian Geometry and General Relativity (singularity theorems, low regularity spacetimes), Generalized Functions and nonlinear Functional Analysis, as well as Partial Differential Equations.

Raquel Perales

Research interests: Geometric Analysis and Riemannian Geometry; in particular, RCD\((K,N)\) spaces, Ricci, integral Ricci and scalar curvature lower bounds, Geometric Flows, Yamabe-type problems, and General Relativity.

Chiara Rigoni

Research interests: Optimal transport, Riemannian geometry, analysis and geometry on metric measure spaces, synthetic curvature-dimension condition, Dirichlet spaces, Gradient flow theory.

Clemens Sämann

Clemens Sämann is a Tenure-Track Assistent Professor at the Faculty of Mathematics at the University of Vienna since February 2025. After finishing his Ph.D. in 2015 at the University of Vienna he held several PostDoc positions in Vienna, Toronto and Oxford. His main research interests are Lorentzian geometry (synthetic and in low regularity) and its applications to mathematical General Relativity, causality theory and impulsive gravitational waves. Furthermore, his interests include Optimal transport and metric (measure) geometry.

Roland Steinbauer (coordinator)

Roland Steinbauer is an Associated Professor at the University of Vienna’s Faculty of Mathematics since 2003. His main fields of research are Mathematical General Relativity (causality theory, cosmic censorship, exact radiative solutions), Low regularity (Lorentzian) Differential Geometry, and (Non-linear) Generalized Functions. In addition he has developed a strong interest in Mathematics Education Research.

Petra Czarnecki

Petra Czarnecki has an economic background and has studied in Innsbruck. In 2011 she started to work for the University of Vienna in the Faculty of Business, Economics and Statistics and changed 5 years later to the Kurt Gödel Research Center of Logic now Institute of Mathematics. Petra Czarnecki joined us in January 2025. She will coordinate international workshops, will support the PIs in financial and personnel tasks and is the contact person for all administrative work.

Luca Benatti

Luca Benatti is a mathematician working in the field of Geometric Analysis and Mathematical General Relativity. He completed his education entirely in Italy, starting in Modena, continuing at SISSA in Trieste, and earning his Ph.D. in 2022 at the University of Trento. He then moved to the University of Pisa, where he spent two years as a postdoc.
His research explores the geometric properties of both Riemannian and Lorentzian manifolds, primarily smooth but with the aim of venturing into less regular scenarios. He has worked on extending geometric inequalities – such as the Riemannian Penrose inequality – to more general settings, employing methods based on geometric flows and PDEs.

Samuël Borza

Samuël Borza earned both his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Mons in Belgium before completing his Ph.D. at Durham University in the UK. Specialising in sub-Riemannian geometry and the analysis of metric measure spaces, he then held a postdoctoral position at SISSA in Trieste. As part of the Emerging Fields project, he is now exploring these topics through Lorentzian lenses, which include sub-Lorentzian geometry, metric spacetime, synthetic notions of curvature, and their applications to mathematical physics.

Davide Carazzato

Davide Carazzato is a mathematician working in the field of Calculus of Variations and Optimal Transport. He earned his bachelor and master degrees at University of Pisa, and he obtained his Ph.D. in 2024 at the Scuola Normale Superione (still in Pisa).
During the Ph.D., Davide was mainly interested in isoperimetric problems containing non-local terms that model electrostatic interactions. Davide mainly focused on the regularity and, in some cases, on the characterization, of the optimal shapes for these functionals.

Miguel Manzano

Miguel Manzano is a mathematical and theoretical physicist working in the fields of Mathematical General Relativity and Differential Geometry. He earned his Bachelor’s degree from the University of Salamanca (Spain), his Master’s degree from the Autonomous University of Madrid (Spain), and completed his Ph.D. at the University of Salamanca in 2023. As a Ph.D. student, he has researched on matching of spacetimes and on the geometry of hypersurfaces and horizons. His main interests include null shells and the cut-and-paste matching procedure, near-horizon geometries and rigidity results, the Cosmic Censorship Hypothesis and the Penrose inequality, stability of black hole spacetimes, and initial value problems in General Relativity. He is currently investigating Lorentzian manifolds equipped with a piecewise smooth metric, in connection with Lorentzian (pre-)length spaces.

Karim Mosani

Karim Mosani is a mathematical physicist mainly interested in problems related to black holes and singularities. He completed his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees at the University of Mumbai before obtaining a Ph.D. from BITS Pilani-Goa in 2022. For his doctoral research, Karim studied gravitational collapse and the formation of spacetime singularities that are naked and are associated with the blow-up of curvature scalars. Later, he moved to Tuebingen University and then to Ruhr University Bochum, where he worked on understanding trapped photon regions in black hole spacetimes. He is now trying to understand the extension of well-known results in general relativity to Lorentzian metrics of low regularity and Lorentzian (pre-)length space.

Joe Barton

Joe Barton studied mathematics at the University of Durham where he obtained his Integrated Master’s degree in 2024. During his master’s studies, he focused topics including Geometry, Analysis and Number Theory. He completed his Master’s thesis in Analytic Number Theory and contributed to a research project on Alexandrov spaces. Following his graduation, Joe joined the Emerging Fields project as a Ph.D. student, where he is now researching the synthetic geometry in the Lorentzian setting.

Matteo Calisti

Matteo Calisti studied Mathematics at the University of Bologna in Italy. He obtained his Master’s degree in 2020. He started his Ph.D. in the University of Vienna in 2021, studying optimal transportation and curvature-dimension conditions in Lorentzian spaces. He also worked on relations between synthetic and analytical definitions of Ricci curvature bounds and on singularity theorems in low regularity. He is also working on curvature-dimension conditions on Lorentzian warped products.

Sebastian Gieger

Sebastian Gieger studied Mathematics at the University of Vienna and finished his Master’s degree in 2024. His Master thesis was about area and volume comparison on Lorentzian manifolds, while his Ph.D. project is concerned with foundational topics in Metric Geometry and their counterparts in Lorentzian Length Spaces.

Inés Vega González

Inés Vega González completed her Bachelor’s degree in Physics at the University of Valladolid. She then pursued a Master’s in Mathematical Physics at Leipzig University, with a thesis focused on the study of black hole spacetimes and energy decay estimates of wave functions. In January 2025, she joined the Emerging Fields project as a Ph.D. candidate, furthering her interest in Mathematical General Relativity. Her research focuses in finding analytic and synthetic extensions of the singularity theorems.

Miguel Prados Abad

Miguel Prados Abad earned his Bachelor’s degrees in Mathematics and Physics from the University of Granada in 2022. He then pursued a Master’s degree at the Complutense University of Madrid, completing it in 2024 with a thesis focused on some properties of the spaces of timelike and lightlike geodesics. During the 2023/2024 academic year, he worked as a Teaching Assistant at San Pablo-CEU University in Madrid. Currently, he is a Ph.D. student involved in the Emerging Fields project, where his research focuses on causal completions within the framework of Lorentzian length spaces.

Jona Röhrig

Jona Röhrig completed his Bachelor’s degrees in Mathematics and Physics at the Leibniz University Hannover and earned a Master’s degree in Physics in autumn 2024 at the Humboldt University of Berlin. During his Master’s program, Jona worked in the field of Lorentzian Geometry, focusing on Gromov compactness in the context of Lorentzian length spaces as the subject of his thesis. In December 2024, Jona joined the Emerging Fields project as a Ph.D. student to further study compactness results in synthetic Lorentzian geometry.

Omar Zoghlami

Omar Zoghlami studied Mathematics at the University of Trento, earning his Bachelor’s degree in 2022 and his Master’s degree in 2024. During his studies, he mostly focused on topics from both Analysis and Geometry, especially Riemannian Geometry. His Master’s thesis was devoted to Static manifolds in General Relativity. In November 2024, he joined the Emerging fields project as a Ph.D. student, doing research on the geometry of non-smooth Lorentzian and sub-Lorentzian spaces.

Tobias Beran

Tobias Beran studied Mathematics at the University of Vienna. Already his Master thesis was on Lorentzian length spaces. His main research interest is in equivalent formulations of the synthetic description of sectional curvature bounds, rigidity statements derived from them and their implications, which was also the topic of his Ph.D. thesis.

Darius Erös

Darius Erös studied Mathematics at the University of Vienna, graduating in 2023 with a master’s thesis on a differential calculus for metric measure spaces.
He is mainly interested in the geometry of metric measure spaces and low regularity semi-Riemannian manifolds as well as the study of Alexandrov spaces and their synthetic Lorentzian counterparts.

Luca Mrini

Luca Mrini studied at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics and graduated with an MSc from the Perimeter Scholars International program in Spring 2024. His primary interest in physics is quantum gravity, the structure of its possible theoretical frameworks, and its observable consequences. Luca pursued this interest in his Master’s essay by studying indefinite causal structure in time-symmetric theories. He is now researching applications of synthetic Lorentzian geometry to quantum gravity for his Ph.D. in the Emerging Fields project.

Marta Sálamo Candal

Marta Sálamo Candal studied Mathematics and Physics at the University of Santiago de Compostela (Spain). She obtained her Master’s in Pure Mathematics (Part III) at the University of Cambridge. Marta is interested in geometry, measure theory, and general relativity. In her Ph.D., she will be working in synthetic Lorentzian geometry, studying Lorentzian optimal transport and singularity theorems.

Alessio Vardabasso

Alessio Vardabasso studied Mathematics at the University of Trieste and SISSA, Trieste. He completed his Master’s Degree in 2023 with a thesis on second order calculus on RCD spaces. His primary research interest is the interplay between different notions of curvature, function spaces and calculus in general in low-regularity geometric structures, with an outlook to applications in Lorentzian geometry.

Argam Ohanyan

Argam Ohanyan studied Mathematics and Physics at the University of Vienna. He obtained his Master’s degrees in Mathematics in 2020 and in Physics in 2022. In his Ph.D. studies, which started in 2020 and concluded in 2024, he investigated singularity and rigidity theorems for spacetimes, mostly in the non-smooth setting.
Now PostDoc at the University of Toronto.

Felix Rott

Felix Rott studied Mathematics at the University of Vienna. He finished his Ph.D. in 2024, during which he mostly worked on fundamental constructions and techniques (e.g. globalisation, gluing and splitting theorems) in the setting of Lorentzian length spaces. His research interests lie at the intersection of metric geometry, Lorentzian geometry and optimal transport.
He is currently a PostDoc at SISSA, Trieste, Italy.

Principal Investigators