A Growing Global Network
As ISTA graduates and postdocs move on to new horizons around the globe, they join the ranks of professors, lead research groups, start companies, or go on their individual paths to success. In less than 15 years, the global network of ISTA alumni has grown to include respected scientists, corporate leaders, and outof-the-box innovators in industrial research and development. ISTA is committed to maintaining an active connection with and nurturing this growing network of bright minds.
ISTA alumni are global ambassadors of the pioneering spirit of the Institute and its researchers. Many are engaged in academic pursuits, including those who have secured faculty positions at renowned universities and research centers. Furthermore, numerous alumni have chosen to transition into roles in business and industry. This year, we share the stories of three alumni who have built on their experience at ISTA and made an impact in their diverse fields.
Embryogenesis: Patterns and shapes in development
Among the ISTA alumni who have contributed to growing the Institute’s global network is cell and developmental biologist Diana Pinheiro. After her PhD at the Institut Curie in France, where she researched cellular and tissue morphogenesis in Drosophila pupae, Pinheiro joined ISTA’s Heisenberg group as a postdoc in 2017. There she switched from flies to fish and investigated the development of zebrafish embryos. In 2022, she started her own research group at the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology (IMP), a part of the Vienna BioCenter, and received an ERC Starting Grant in 2023. “For a cell to fulfill its function it doesn’t just need to differentiate, it also needs to be at the right place. My lab will explore how a relatively small set of highly conserved developmental signals is able to encode all this complex information—patterning and morphogenesis—to coordinate embryogenesis across scales,” said Pinheiro upon starting her group.
Giving physics a hand – through mathematics
Another ISTA alumna who has embarked on a career in academia at a world-renowned institution is mathematical physicist Simone Rademacher. In 2019, Rademacher joined the Seiringer group at ISTA as an ISTplus postdoctoral fellow after completing her PhD at the University of Zurich Switzerland, where she studied the mathematical properties of many-body quantum systems. In 2022, she joined the Mathematical Institute of the LMU Munich in Germany as a deputy professor in the Stochastics and Financial Mathematics research group. “I am interested in the mathematical analysis of both many-body quantum systems, such as bosonic and fermionic systems and the polaron, and their effective equations. On the one hand, I study the mathematical description of BoseEinstein condensates using central limit theorems and large deviation principles. On the other hand, I am working on the properties of the effective equations for polaron models and their derivation from the many-body quantum systems,” says Rademacher.
An ISTA Alumni Award recipient at Google Research
What the future can hold for excellent PhD students after graduating from ISTA is shown by the example of Alexander Kolesnikov: He received his PhD in 2018, is currently working at Google Research in Zurich, Switzerland, and received this year’s ISTA Alumni Award, which is given to outstanding former ISTA researchers. During his PhD in the Lampert group, Kolesnikov focused on designing computer systems that can automatically learn to analyze and understand visual information, such as images or videos. “The crux of my research is to improve the efficiency with which computers learn to interpret visual data from examples,” Kolesnikov explains. Having become a highly cited scientist in his field in less than five years after completing his PhD, Kolesnikov’s achievements have been duly recognized. “The ISTA Alumni Award recognition has a special meaning for me”, said Kolesnikov, “because ISTA has played a pivotal role in shaping me as a scientist.”
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This piece was originally featured in the ISTA Annual Report 2023.
