luca spolaor received his ph.d. in mathematics from the university of zurich in 2015, with a dissertation which won a university award. he was subsequently a postdoc at the max planck institute for mathematics in leipzig and a c.l.e. moore instructor at the massachusetts institute of technology. moreover he spent one year as a visiting scholar appointed by princeton university. spolaor is an expert in geometric measure theory, a branch of pure mathematics at the intersection between geometry and analysis/partial differential equations, whose goal is to study the behavior of singular solutions to a number of problems coming mostly from physics, economics and topology. this area of investigation fits between two stronger groups at ucsd, geometric analysis and partial differential equations, so has a synergistic effect.