Piotr Chrusciel, professor of gravitational physics at the University of Vienna in Austria, will present the Russell Marker Lectures in the Mathematical Sciences on Feb. 7, 8, 9, and 10, at the University Park campus of Penn State. The lecture series includes a presentation intended for a general audience, "General Relativity: Mathematics and Experiment," which will be held at 8 p.m. on Monday, Feb. 7, in 114 McAllister Building. Chrusciel also will give three specialized lectures: "Black Holes" at 4 p.m. on Tuesday, Feb. 8; "Cauchy Problems for the Einstein Equations" at 4 p.m. on Wednesday, Feb. 9; and "The Cauchy Problem on a Light-Cone" at 4 p.m. on Thursday, Feb. 10. The Marker Lectures are sponsored by the Penn State Eberly College of Science.
Chrusciel is a gravitational physicist whose research focuses on Einstein equations and general relativity. Chrusciel's recent honors include a 2005 Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council Fellowship from the Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences in Cambridge, Mass., and his election in 2004 to the International Committee on General Relativity and Gravitation. In addition, Chrusciel is the recipient of a 1998 Humboldt Fellowship from Germany's Albert Einstein Institute, a 1992 Humboldt Fellowship from Germany's Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics, and a 1984 French Government Scholarship from Universitè Paris VI.
Before becoming a professor of gravitational physics at the University of Vienna in Austria in 2010, Chrusciel held professorship positions at both the Mathematical Institute of the University of Oxford and the Department of Mathematics of France's Universitè de Tours. In addition, Chrusciel was a researcher at the Institute of Mathematics of the Polish Academy of Sciences from 1985 to 1996, an Australian Research Council Senior Research Associate at the Center for Mathematical Analysis of the Australian National University from 1991 to 1992, and a research associate at the Department of Physics at Yale University from 1987 to 1989.
Chrusciel received a doctoral degree from the Institute for Theoretical Physics of the Polish Academy of Sciences in 1986, a master's degree from the Department of Physics of Warsaw University in Poland in 1980, and a bachelor's degree from College Rousseau in Geneva, Switzerland in 1975.
The Marker Lectures were established in 1984 through a gift from Russell Earl Marker, professor emeritus of chemistry at Penn State, whose pioneering synthetic methods revolutionized the steroid-hormone industry and opened the door to the current era of hormone therapies, including the birth-control pill. The Marker endowment allows the Penn State Eberly College of Science to present annual Marker Lectures in astronomy and astrophysics, the chemical sciences, evolutionary biology, genetic engineering, the mathematical sciences and physics. For more information about the lectures, contact Kelli Wilkinson at 814-863-8730.