Alberto Cattaneo
Alberto Sergio Cattaneo (26 June 1967 in Milan) is an Italian mathematician and mathematical physicist, specializing in geometry related to quantum field theory and string theory. Biography. Cattaneo graduated in 1986 from the "liceo scientifico" Liceo "A. Volta" in Milan. He studied physics at the University of Milan with "laurea" in 1991 and Ph.D. in 1995. His "laurea" thesis "Studio delle proprietà di localizzazione su catene quasiperiodiche mediante gruppo di rinormalizzazione nello spazio reale" (A study of the localization properties on quasiperiodic chains via renormalization group in real space) was supervised by Luciano Girardello. Cattaneo's Ph.D. thesis  Teorie topologiche di tipo BF ed invarianti dei nodi (Topological BF theories and knot invariants) was supervised by Maurizio Martellini. As a postdoc, Cattaneo was from 1995 to 1997 in Harvard University's physics department, where he studied under Arthur Jaffe, and from 1997 to 1998 in the University of Milan's mathematics department, where he studied under Paolo Cotta-Ramusino. In the University of Zurich's mathematics department, Cattaneo was from 1998 to 2003 a professor extraordinaries and is since 2003 a professor ordinarius. At the University of Zurich's Institute of Mathematics, he was the deputy director from  2013 to 2015 and the director from 2015 to 2017. He was in the autumn of 2001 a guest in Harvard University's mathematics department, where he worked with Raoul Bott, and was in the spring of 2005 at IHES. Much of his research concerns topological field theories with applications to knot theory. With Giovanni Felder he developed a path integral interpretation of the deformation quantization of Poisson manifolds (introduced in 2003 by Maxim Kontsevich). Cattaneo was elected a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society in the Class of 2013 (announced in 2012). in 2006 he was an Invited Speaker  with talk "From topological field theory to deformation quantization and reduction" at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Madrid. He is married with one child.