ERC Advanced Grant for HITS group leader

Mathematician Anna Wienhard has been awarded a prestigious grant of the European Research Council (ERC) for outstanding scientists, an ERC Advanced Grant. She is group leader of the “Groups and Geometry” group at HITS and professor at the Mathematical Institute of Heidelberg University. For her project on symmetries in mathematics, Anna Wienhard will receive approx. two million euros. The project will run over a period of five years, the host institution is Heidelberg University.

The ERC is funding Anna Wienhard’s research for the second time. In 2014 she received an ERC Consolidator Grant for her work on symmetries and deformation spaces of geometric structures. The present project “PosLieRep – Positivity in Lie Groups and Representation Varieties” builds on the previous one and focuses on Lie groups, which play a central role in many fields of mathematics and are an important tool in theoretical physics. “This is a great success and a clearly visible sign of our close collaboration with Heidelberg University,“ says HITS Managing Director Gesa Schönberger. At present, a total of four ERC grantees are working at HITS.

Since 2012, Anna Wienhard has been professor at the Mathematical Institute of Heidelberg University. She heads the working group on differential geometry and also the geometry and dynamics research station. Furthermore, she is co-spokesperson of the STRUCTURES Cluster of Excellence and a member of the Interdisciplinary Center for Scientific Computing. Since 2015, she has also been leader of the “Groups and Geometry” group at the Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies (HITS). Since October 2020, she has been Scientific Chairperson of the Heidelberg Laureate Forum Foundation that organizes the annual Heidelberg Laureate Forum (HLF), a networking conference where 200 outstanding young researchers in mathematics and computer science interact with the recipients of the most renowned prizes in the fields.

For more information see the Heidelberg University press release: https://www.uni-heidelberg.de/en/newsroom/erc-advanced-grants-for-two-heidelberg-scientists