Maksym Serbyn develops theoretical frameworks to describe the complexity of many-body quantum phenomena. He has now been awarded his second ERC grant for the project “QMbeyondU: Quantum matter beyond unitary dynamics“.
Maksym was born in Kyiv, Ukraine. He gained his B.Sc. (2007) and M.Sc. (2009), both in Applied Physics and Mathematics, from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology. He then joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) for his PhD research, supported with the Praecis Presidential Graduate Fellowship (2009-2010) and distinguished with the Andrew Locket III Memorial Fund Award (2013). He gained his PhD degree in Physics from the MIT in 2014 for his PhD thesis “Quantum Spin Liquids: Mean Field and Beyond”. Maksym then became a Gordon and Betty Moore Postdoctoral Fellow at the UC Berkeley (2014-2017) and was appointed Assistant Professor at the IST Austria in 2017. Since then he has been leading his research group “Quantum Dynamics and Condensed Matter Theory” at the IST Austria. In 2019 Maksym was also awarded the Ludwig Boltzmann Prize of the Austrian Physical Society “for his pioneering work on the non-equilibrium properties of quantum systems”.
In his first ERC-funded project entitled “Non-Ergodic Quantum Matter: Universality, Dynamics and Control” (ERC Starting Grant 2019) Maksym explored how isolated quantum systems can avoid a thermal equilibrium state, aiming to lay a foundation for a complete theory of non-equilibrium many-body systems.
The ERC Consolidated Grants program provides funding for research projects with a maximum budget of €2 million over a period of up to five years. This prestigious award is designed to support exceptional researchers who wants to consolidate their independence by establishing a research team and continuing to develop a success career in Europe. In this round the success rate was approximately 11,2%.
Some other news on ERC awardees of Ukrainian origin can be found here
Photo copyright: IST Austria