Professor Alessandro Sfondrini BSc MSc PhD

• PhD, Universiteit Utrecht, 2014
• Scuola Galileiana degree, Università degli Studi di Padova, 2010
• MSc in Physics, Università degli Studi di Padova, 2010
• BSc in Physics, Università degli Studi di Padova, 2008

Alessandro Sfondrini was born in Como, Italy, and undertook his undergraduate studies at the Università degli Studi di Padova from 2005 to 2010 as a Scholar of the Scuola Galileiana di Studi Superiori. During that time, he was a guest of Ignacio Cirac at the Max-Planck-Institut für Quantenoptik in Garching, Germany, working on simulation of quantum lattice systems, and of Razvan Gurau at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Canada, working on aspects of the renormalisation group in quantum field theory.

From 2010, he was a PhD student at the Universiteit Utrecht, the Netherlands, under the supervision of Gleb Arutyunov. His contributions to the study of the AdS3/CFT2 holographic duality earned him the 2013 Vito Volterra Prize of the Italian Physical Society and in 2014, his PhD degree cum laude (the highest distinction in the Netherlands).

From 2014 to 2015, he was a Marie-Curie Fellow at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin in the group of Matthias Staudacher, and served as Chair of the Young Researchers Committee of the Marie-Curie ITN “Gauge Theory as an Integrable System – GATIS”. Afterwards, he was a post-doc (Assistant, 2014-2017) and senior post-doc (Oberassistent, 2017-2020) at the Institute for Theoretical Physics at the ETH Zürich. There, he was twice awarded the ETH Career Seed Grant, the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNF) Spark Grant, and the SNF Agora Grant. This Agora grant resulted in the creation of two animated documentaries (on the black-hole information paradox and on string theory) in collaboration with the popular YouTube Channel Kurzgesagt – In a nutshell, and in a series of outreach activities in Swtizerland.

In 2019, he was awarded a Rita Levi-Montalcini fellowship, which included funding for a tenure-track position in an Italian University of his choosing. He was a Rita Levi-Montalcini Fellow (2020-2023) and Associate Professor (2023-2025) at the University of Padova, and an associated researcher at the Italian Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN). During this time, he supervised numerous BSc and MSc students and seven post-doctoral researchers. He led the String Theory and Fields Initiative of the INFN in Padova, consisting of six permanent researchers and several fixed-term ones. He was awarded research grants totalling over two million Euros, including government funding for a “project of National relevance” and funding from the CARIPLO and CARIPARO foundations.

From 2021 to 2024, he was first a Member and then regular visitor of the School of Natural Sciences at the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton, USA. He also co-authored the second edition of the popular science book “String Theory for Dummies” (Wiley).

Since 2023, he has held the Chair of the COST Action “Fundamental Challenges in Theoretical Physics” which brings together a community of over 900 theoretical and mathematical physicists, mostly based around Europe, providing funding and coordination for researchers exchanges, scientific meetings, and policy initiatives.

From December 2025, he has taken leave from the University of Padova and has been appointed Professor of Mathematical Physics at the University of Birmingham, UK.

• Differential Equations and Mechanics (Autumn term 2026)

Professor Sfondrini is happy to supervise students interested in the theory of integrable models and its applications to string theory and the AdS/CFT correspondence.

Professor Sfondrini’s main research activity relates to the study of integrable systems. These are models which are interacting (in fact, often strongly interacting) but that can nonetheless be solved exactly thanks to hidden symmetries. Integrable systems are one of the pillars of theoretical physics, encompassing models such as the Kepler problem in Newtonian mechanics, the hydrogen atom in quantum mechanics, the Lenz-Ising model in statistical physics, and much more. His interests lies especially in the study of classical and quantum field theories and lattice models by a combination of techniques such as the inverse scattering method, the (thermodynamic) Bethe ansatz, the S-matrix bootstrap, and the study of the underlying algebraic structures such as Yangians and quantum groups.

Since his PhD he has given several contributions to the study of the AdS3/CFT2 duality by treating it as integrable quantum field theory on the worldsheet of the string. This is still one of his main areas of activity, where he expects exciting progress over the next few years.

He has also studied the celebrated correspondence between strings on AdS5xS5 and N=4 supersymmetric Yang—Mills theory (a supersymmetric relative of the theory that governs strong interactions in the standard model). In particular, using the form-factor integrability approach dubbed “hexagon tessellations” he contributed to the study of correlation functions on either side of the duality.

He is also interested in the study of integrable deformations – that is, of ways to parametrically deform an integrable model, losing some of its manifest symmetries, but preserving exact solvability. Alessandro has worked on the so-called TTbar deformations of two-dimensional QFTs and proposed a generalisation dubbed Root-TTbar which preserves classical scale invariance for CFTs.

Finally, recently Alessandro has started studying integrable classical field theories in spacetime dimensions higher than two, which may hold the key to quantitatively understanding a wealth of new strongly-interacting systems.