19 January 2021

Magdalena Musat, professor of Mathematics

Appointment

The Dean has appointed Magdalena Musat as Professor of Mathematics at the Department for Mathematical Sciences from 1 December 2020.

Magdalena Musat
Professor Magdalena Musat. Photo: Jacob Helbig

Professor Magdalena Musat obtained her PhD at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. After temporary positions at UC San Diego and the University of Memphis, she came to us from a tenured position in SDU Odense in 2009 - as a recipient of the prestigious Freja award.

She is an expert on functional-analytic aspects of operator algebras, and as such has made important contributions on completely bounded and completely positive maps, noncommutative $L_p$-spaces, as well as applications of operator algebra to quantum information theory.

Her joint work with the late Uffe Haagerup added new insight, among many other things, to the famous Connes embedding problem, and in joint work with Mikael Rørdam, she has further contributed to the clarification of its consequences in quantum information.

Her earlier, more operator theoretic work remains very influential, and she has pushed many modern aspects of on the boundary of operator algebras and neighbouring fields (such as group C*-algebras and expander graphs) both in her own research and to UCPH students through seminars, courses and individual supervision.

Professor Musat is an eminent research expositor and is an immensely popular speaker at conferences worldwide, and was given the very exclusive honour of becoming the Fifty-Second Annual DeLong Lecturer at University of Colorado, Boulder in 2016.

She has an obvious talent for channelling her passion for mathematics to students through clear, ambitious and organized teaching, and recently took on the responsibility of the Master's program in mathematics as the Head of studies.

Her passion for mathematical exposition at the highest level possible also drove her to reinvigorate the department's colloquium and to found the Harald Bohr lecture series.