Villum research funding for Emanuel Reinecke and Johannes Wiesel

Villum Foundation has just awarded 126 million DKK to 14 early-career researchers and their groundbreaking ideas. With these grants, the researchers will have the chance to lead their own research project for the first time. What unites these projects is the courage to challenge existing knowledge and the passion to create something new.

Emanuel Reinecke

Emanuel has received DKK 10.2 million for his project “p-Adic Invariants in Algebraic Geometry”. The grant will enable Emanuel to recruit two PhD students and two postdocs. He explains:

“Many problems in the sciences can be recast as, or approximated by, seeking solutions to polynomial equations. The goal of this project is to gain new insights into geometric objects defined from such equations by using p-adic invariants, which are derived from fractal-like number systems based on a chosen prime p.

“We will exploit recent progress in the field to study new properties of these p-adic invariants, give refinements which can capture more information, and use them to analyse and classify geometric objects”.

Emanuel Reinecke has a PhD from the University of Michigan (USA), 2020. After that, he was associated with the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton (USA). He has been a Tenure Track Assistant Professor at the Department for Mathematical Sciences since 1 September 2025, associated with the department’s section for Algebra & Geometry.

Johannes Wiesel

Johannes receives DKK 8.2 million for his project “Variational analysis in the Wasserstein space of stochastic processes”. This will enable the recruitment of two PhD students and one postdoc.

"Modern mathematical finance needs tools that remain reliable even when market conditions change. This project develops practical ways to measure and manage this “model uncertainty” using optimal transport for stochastic processes, capturing time-dependent data and cutting computing cost with variational methods in the Wasserstein-distance framework", says Johannes.

"The results will strengthen robust finance and also aid statistics, machine learning, time-series analysis, and operations research".

Johannes Wiesel has a Master of Science in Business Mathematics from Ulm University (2016) and a Master of Advanced Studies in Mathematics from the University of Cambridge (2015). He has a PhD in Mathematics from the University of Oxford (2020) and worked at Columbia University and Carnegie Mellon University, USA. He became an associate professor here in Copenhagen in 2025, affiliated with the Section for Insurance and Economics.

More about Johannes Wiesel: Johannes Wiesel receives SIAM prize - and permanent position at MATH | NNF grant for research into green finance