Winds of Change: The Decisive Role of Mass Loss in the Evolution of Very Massive Stars

Massive and very massive stars are among the most influential objects in our Universe, being key agents in chemical enrichment, sources of ionizing photons, and representing progenitors of extreme explosions and exotic compact objects. Despite significant progress in our understanding of stellar structure and evolution over the past century, there remain open questions regarding the physical processes of very massive stars (above ∼ 100 M⊙) formation and evolution. The evolution of the most ma...

QUBO-Based Sampling of Lattice Polymers with Classical and Quantum Computers

Charting the SHORES of the Radio Sky - Investigating extragalactic source populations through radio surveys

Surveys of galaxies are among the most powerful tools to investigate the Universe, allowing us to trace the statistical properties of large samples and to connect them to the physical processes driving galaxy evolution. Radio observations, in particular, have historically played a significant role — from settling the steady-state versus Big Bang debate through radio number counts, to shaping our understanding of Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) and, more recently, uncovering obscured galaxy popul...

Lattice field theories for polymer systems

Modified Gravity In Galaxy Clusters: Insights From The Caustic Technique

On the Geometry of Ends of Ricci Shrinkers

In this thesis we study a particular type of Riemannian manifolds, namely gradient shrinking Ricci solitons, or Ricci shrinkers for short. Besides being generalisations of positive Einstein manifolds, Ricci shrinkers play a fundamental role in Ricci flow theory, modeling the finite-time singularities of the flow. While Ricci shrinkers are fully classified in dimensions two and three, in higher dimensions such a classification is far from being complete, and it is customary to study instead th...

When do sex differences manifest? Context-dependent modulation of spatial memory

First-Exit Statistics in Biased, Active and Cognitive Systems

A complete understanding of how biased, active, and cognitive systems process information and behave under fluctuations remains an open challenge. Although first-exit statistics are well known for processes like biased Brownian motion, analytic derivations are often tedious. For active systems, symmetries in first-exit time problems remain poorly understood. Meanwhile, cognitive neuroscience and stochastic thermodynamics have progressed largely independently, despite their shared focus on non...

Ensemble Refinement of Cryo-Electron Microscopy-Derived RNA Structures Using Molecular Dynamics Simulations

RNA molecules play central roles in biology as catalysts, regulators, and structural scaffolds, with their function tightly linked to their ability to adopt complex and dynamic confor- mations. Despite advances in structural biology, accurately characterizing RNA structures remains difficult because of their intrinsic flexibility and the limitations of experimental meth- ods. Cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) has enabled major progress, but RNA structures often contain unresolved regions or ...