Maria Colombo (mathematician)

Maria Colombo is an Italian mathematician specializing in mathematical analysis. She is a professor at the EPFL in Switzerland, where she holds the chair for mathematical analysis, calculus of variations and partial differential equations.

Education and career

Colombo was born in Luino, near the Swiss border with Italy. She competed for Italy in the 2005, 2006, and 2007 International Mathematical Olympiads, earning bronze, gold, and silver medals respectively.
She earned bachelor's and master's degrees in mathematics at the University of Pisa in 2010 and 2011, and completed a PhD in 2015 at the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, under the joint supervision of Luigi Ambrosio and Alessio Figalli. Her dissertation, Flows of non-smooth vector fields and degenerate elliptic equations: With applications to the Vlasov-Poisson and semigeostrophic systems, was published as a book in 2017 by Edizioni della Normale.
She did postdoctoral research with Camillo De Lellis at the University of Zurich and was a junior fellow at the Institute of Theoretical Studies at ETH Zurich. She then joined the EPFL as an assistant professor in 2018, and was promoted to full professor in 2021.

The Accademia dei Lincei gave Colombo their Gioacchino Iapichino Prize for 2016. She was the 2017 winner of the Carlo Miranda Prize of the, and the 2019 winner of the Bartolozzi Prize of the Italian Mathematical Union. She is the 2022 winner of the biennial Peter Lax Award, to be given at the International Conference on Hyperbolic Problems, and the 2023 winner of the Collatz Prize of the International Council for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, "for her fundamental contributions to regularity theory and the analysis of singularities in elliptic partial differential equations, geometric variational problems, transport equations, and incompressible fluid dynamics". In 2024, she was awarded the EMS Prize for breakthrough results in fluid dynamics, optimal transport and kinetic theory, and for her impact on analysis more broadly. That same year, she was awarded the Stampacchia Medal.

Colombo is married to Simone, an engineer, with whom she has four children.