I am Fellow and Tutor in Mathematics at Exeter College, and Professor of Pure Mathematics at the Mathematical Institute, Oxford.
I completed my undergraduate studies in Mathematics at the University of Iaşi, the oldest university in Romania. I studied for a doctorate and defended my PhD thesis in Mathematics in France, at the Paris-Saclay University, under the supervision of Pierre Pansu. After that, I became Assistant Professor at the University of Lille, France, where I passed my Habilitation degree.
In 2009 I was awarded the Whitehead Prize by the London Mathematical Society for my work in Geometric group theory. The same year, I became Professor of mathematics at the Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford. I held visiting positions at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in Bonn, the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques in Bures-sur-Yvette, the Simons Laufer Mathematical Sciences Institute in Berkeley, California. I visited the Isaac Newton Institute in Cambridge in 2017 as holder of a Simons Fellowship. From 2013 to 2020 I chaired the European Mathematical Society/European Women in Mathematics scientific panel. In 2023, I have been the twelfth Emmy Noether visiting professor at the University of Göttingen, where I lectured on property (T) and a-T-menability.
I wrote a book on Geometric Group Theory together with Misha Kapovich. In 2019, our book made it to the Finalists for 2019 Prose Awards of the Association of American Publishers:
https://publishers.org/news/association-of-american-publishers-announces-finalists-for-2019-prose-awards/#finalists …which is very funny, because, as you may imagine, when writing our book the quality of the prose was not our main concern.
Research interests
My research interests lie in Geometric group theory, Topology, Operator Algebras and Combinatorics.
Part of my work relates to the program of understanding and classifying infinite groups via various tools, such as the investigation of their actions on significant classes of spaces(e.g. Hilbert and Banach spaces) or the study of their geometry when endowed with a natural metric (e.g. a word metric for finitely generated groups or a Riemannian left-invariant metric for Lie groups).
There are many things that I like about Geometric Group Theory. One of them is the endeavour to connect abstract algebraic structures with geometric features that are much easier to understand. Another is that it moves between the discrete world (with its toolkit coming from combinatorics) and the continuous world (where one can use calculus and Riemannian geometry). Recently, I have been involved in research trying to translate features of non-positive curvature in the Riemannian sense into a discrete/combinatorial language. This brought me closer to the part of combinatorics studying expander and median graphs.
I also studied several other properties of infinite groups, such as the property of Rapid Decay (a property of the reduced C*-algebra of the group), and linearity.
More details can be found on my Wikipedia page
