Profile

Rui Loja Fernandes obtained a bachelor’s degree in Physics Engineering at Instituto Superior Técnico (Lisbon, Portugal) in 1988. He then moved to the USA and earned a master’s degree in Mathematics in 1991 and a PhD in Mathematics in 1994 from the University of Minnesota. His PhD thesis was entitled “Completely Integrable bi-Hamiltonian Systems” and has been written under the supervision of Peter J. Olver.

In 1994 he returned to Instituto Superior Técnico, where he worked first as Assistant Professor (1994-2002), and then as Associated Professor (2003-2007) and Full Professor (2007-2012). In 2012 he moved back to the USA and since then he is the Lois M. Lackner Professor of Mathematics at University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. In 2016, he became a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society “for contributions to the study of Poisson geometry and Lie algebroids, and for service to the mathematical community”.

His research focusses on differential geometry, more precisely on Poisson and symplectic geometry. Among his most well-known results are a solution to the long-standing problem of describing the obstructions to the integrability of Lie algebroids and a geometric proof of the famous Conn’s linearization theorem, both written in collaboration with Marius Crainic. He is the author of 3 books and more than 50 research papers in peer-reviewed journals. He has supervised 9 PhD students as of 2024.