OIST is proud to announce that four new faculty members have joined the university. From left to right, Adjunct Professor Simone Pigolotti will join the university as a full-time Associate Professor in July, while Adjunct Professors Paola Laurino and Anastasiia Tsvietkova, will take on full-time Assistant Professorships from September. Jun Tani has joined OIST as a new Adjunct Professor. These new faculty members have a diverse set of research interests including mathematics, chemical engineering and neurorobotics.
Having grown up and completed his studies in Italy, Prof. Simone Pigolotti did a postdoc in Copenhagen before moving to Barcelona to work as a research scientist. Joining OIST from the Max Plank Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems in Germany, Prof. Pigolotti will study biological systems from the perspective of theoretical physics, as the head of the Biological Complexity Unit. His research focuses on the stochastic dynamics of sub-cellular systems and models of bacteria populations.
Prof. Paola Laurino is an organic chemist with broad interests in biochemistry and protein evolution. Having grown up in Italy and completed her studies in the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Germany, Prof. Laurino has spent the last four years as a postdoc at the Weizman Institute of Science in Israel. Now head of the Protein Engineering and Evolution Unit at OIST, her research applies chemical approaches and protein engineering to study and manipulate protein functions.
Born in Lithuania, Prof. Anastasiia Tsvietkova completed her master’s degree in Ukraine and PhD in Mathematics in the US. After post-doctoral scholarships at Brown and Louisiana State University, Prof. Tsvietkova held Assistant Professorships at the University of California, Davis and Rutgers University, Newark. As head of the Topology and Geometry of Manifolds Unit at OIST, Prof. Tsvietkova’s research will focus on topology, geometry and complexity of low-dimensional manifolds.
Prof. Jun Tani completed his studies in Japan and the USA before working at the Riken Brain Science Institute, Sony Computer Science Laboratories Inc. in Tokyo and now, the Korean Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST). As an Adjunct Professor in OIST’s Cognitive Neurorobotics Unit Prof. Tani will focus on understanding brain-based mechanisms for cognition and action by conducting synthetic brain modeling studies using robotics experiment platforms.
