IGFAE researcher Anxo Fariña Biasi obtains the ‘Junior Leader’ postdoctoral grant from the ‘la Caixa’ Foundation

The researcher Anxo Fariña Biasi from the IGFAE, a USC research centre that is part of the CIGUS Network – an initiative promoted by the Xunta de Galicia that brings together the centres of the system that have accredited their scientific excellence – has been one of the beneficiaries of the Junior Leader postdoctoral grants of the La Caixa Foundation. Anxo’s project at the IGFAE is the only one funded in Galicia in this call.

Fariña is a theoretical physicist, and carries out his work at the interface between mathematics and physics. After his PhD at the IGFAE, he did a postdoctoral stay at the Jagiellonian University of Krakow (Poland). Afterwards, he obtained a Junior Research Chair grant at the École Normale Supérieure – PSL in Paris (France), before returning to the IGFAE thanks to the Junior Leader programme.

Over the next few years, Anxo Fariña will carry on with his research at the IGFAE, which ‘seeks to develop a theory that allows us to better understand wave phenomena, energy transport processes that occur everywhere: in sound, light, sea waves, earthquakes and even in extreme events such as the collision of black holes’. Thus, ‘understanding their behaviour is crucial not only for predicting natural phenomena such as tsunamis, but also for improving communication technologies, such as mobile telephony, and advancing medical techniques, such as ultrasound imaging. My research aims to provide the theoretical foundations necessary for the development of these practical applications’.

The Junior Leader grant is aimed at recruiting excellent researchers of any nationality who wish to pursue their careers in Spain or Portugal in the areas of health and life sciences, technology, physics, chemistry, engineering and mathematics. This fellowship is an opportunity and a recognition of a research career, as Anxo says ‘they give you the resources and means necessary for young people to develop ambitious and innovative research ideas. It is a great motivation. For me it was a real change’.