Lydia Bieri


Lydia Rosina Bieri is a Swiss-American applied mathematician, geometric analyst, mathematical physicist, cosmologist, and historian of science whose research concerns general relativity, gravity waves, and gravitational memory effects. She is a professor of mathematics and director of the Michigan Center for Applied and Interdisciplinary Mathematics at the University of Michigan.

Education and career

Bieri is originally from Sempach, in Switzerland. She studied mathematics at ETH Zurich, earning a diploma in 2001. She completed a doctorate at ETH Zurich in 2007, with the support of a Swiss National Funds Fellowship. Her dissertation, An Extension of the Stability Theorem of the Minkowski Space in General Relativity, was supervised by Demetrios Christodoulou, and jointly promoted by Michael Struwe.
After postdoctoral research as a Benjamin Peirce Fellow in mathematics at Harvard University from 2007 to 2010, Bieri became an assistant professor of mathematics at the University of Michigan in 2010. She became associate professor in 2015, director of the Michigan Center for Applied and Interdisciplinary Mathematics in 2019, and full professor in 2021.

Books

With Harry Nussbaumer of ETH Zurich, Bieri is the coauthor of a general-audience book on cosmology and its history, Discovering the Expanding Universe, She is also the coauthor of a research monograph with Nina Zipser, Extensions of the Stability Theorem of the Minkowski Space in General Relativity.

Recognition

Bieri won an National Science Foundation [CAREER Awards|NSF CAREER Award] in 2013 and was named a Simons Fellow in Mathematics in 2018. She was named a Fellow of [the American Physical Society] in 2021, after a nomination from the APS Division of Gravitational Physics, "for fundamental results on the global existence of solutions of the Einstein field equations, and many contributions to the understanding of gravitational wave memory". She was named to the 2023 class of Fellows of the American Mathematical Society, "for contributions to mathematical general relativity and geometric analysis".