Tero Heikkilä is a professor in the Department of Physics of the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. He graduated from Helsinki University of Technology (now Aalto University) (MSc 1998 and PhD 2003). His research interests include flat-band superconductivity,  superconducting (nano)electronics, topological matter, spintronics, and open quantum systems. He is a pioneer in flat band superconductivity, in particular related to his and his colleague’s prediction on the relevance of flat bands in increasing the critical temperature of superconductivity in graphene-based structures and in general in materials hosting flat bands. In this Simons Collaboration, Tero Heikkilä participates in understanding the role of quantum geometry in observables related to superconducting heterostructures. Tero Heikkilä has received the ERC Starting Grant and led an FET Open project on superconducting detectors.

Aline Ramires is a Scientist at the Institute of Solid State Physics, TU Wien. She received a M.Sc. from the Fluminense Federal University, Brazil (2010) and a Ph.D. from Rutgers University, USA (2015). She was a Junior Fellow at the Institute for Theoretical Studies at ETH Zurich (2015-2018), a SIMONS-FAPESP Young Investigator at the ICTP-SAIFR (2018-2020), and a Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems (2019-2020). She has successfully attracted funding from the Sao Paulo Research Foundation, the Simons Foundation, and the Swiss National Science Foundation. 

In her research, she investigates unusual electronic phenomena in complex quantum materials, for which understanding the role of multiple internal degrees of freedom is key. She has investigated materials in the family of ruthenates, pnictides, and heavy-fermions and introduced the notion of superconducting fitness, which has been acknowledged as a valuable theoretical guideline for understanding the stability of exotic superconducting states and their unusual responses to external fields. She received the Early Career Scholar Award from the University of British Columbia (2021) and the Nevill Mott Prize (2022) for her work in this area. The latter "for her pioneering work for developing new models and innovative mathematical approaches for the description of heavy fermion metals and anomalous superconductors.” 

In this collaboration, Aline Ramires will be involved in the study of the non-trivial interplay of valley, orbital, and spin degrees of freedom in superconductors and in the determination of symmetry-based low-energy effective models for the description of complex material platforms such as twisted multilayer graphene. 

Jörg Schmalian is professor of theoretical physics at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, (KIT) working on the quantum physics of electrons in strongly correlated materials. He and his research team develop theories for quantum materials with novel electric, optic, or magnetic properties. With his collaborators he predicted the recently observed electron hydrodynamics in graphene, formulated the theory of nematic order and fluctuations in iron-based and topological materials, advanced the theory of superconductivity without quasiparticles, and worked on the theory of the glass transition.

At KIT he is the head of the Institute for Theory of Condensed Matter. He also heads  the division Theory of Quantum Materials at the Institute for Quantum Materials and Technologies at KIT. Prior to moving to Karlsruhe in 2011, Dr. Schmalian was a full professor at Iowa State University and Senior Scientists at the Department of Energy Ames Laboratory.  Schmalian serves on a number of international advisory boards, has co-organized numerous international conferences, workshops and summer schools, and has been honored by some awards, including a fellowship from the American Physical Society, the 2022 John Bardeen Prize for superconductivity theory, and the 2023 Physics-Award Dresden. He is a member of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences.

Boris Svistunov is a professor of physics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst (since 2003). He earned an MSc in physics in 1983 at Moscow Engineering Physics Institute. In 1990, he earned a PhD in theoretical physics at Kurchatov Institute (Moscow), where he worked from 1986 to 2003. In 2008 Boris was named a Fellow of the American Physical Society for “pioneering contributions to the theory and practice of Monte Carlo simulations for strongly correlated quantum and classical systems, the invention of the worm algorithm and diagrammatic Monte Carlo techniques, and fundamental theoretical results on superfluid phenomena in quantum gases, liquids, and solids.” In this Simons Collaboration, Boris Svistunov will be working on developing and applying diagrammatic Monte Carlo approach to superconductivity in strongly correlated electronic systems.