Damian Osajda, associate professor

Damian comes from Poland and obtained his PhD at the Institute of Mathematics of the Polish Academy of Sciences in 2004. Since then he has been holding postdoc positions in Paris, Berkeley, Strasbourg, and Lille. He had visiting positions in Montreal and has been employed in Vienna and in the University of Wrocław and the Polish Academy of Sciences.

Damian will be working with the section of Analysis & Quantum, with dual affiliation with the Algebra & Geometry section.

Damian's main area of research is Geometric Group Theory, with the main field of expertise being groups acting on spaces with some nonpositive-curvature-like features. His main achievements are in:

• constructing new groups and spaces with unexpected properties (the first examples of finitely generated groups containing isometrically expanders; high dimensional hyperbolic Coxeter groups),
• exhibiting important phenomena among classical groups (proving biautomaticity of Coxeter groups; fixed-point results and the Tits alternative for actions on CAT(0) spaces),
• developing new classes of groups and spaces, as well as new tools for exploring them (introducing Helly groups; developing general approaches to combinatorial nonpositive curvature).

His work is strongly related to - and he collaborates with researchers within - e.g. metric graph theory, functional analysis, and combinatorial optimization.

Damian has been a recipient of two of the most prestigious Polish mathematical awards: the Institute of Mathematics of the Polish Academy of Sciences Prize for outstanding scientific achievements in mathematics in 2020, and the Main Stefan Banach Prize of the Polish Mathematical Society in 2021.