"Follow me
In the car
Off a bridge
We won't go far"

Alessandro Valentino

Since October 2016, I am an Oberassistent at the Institut für Mathematik in Zürich.
Places where I have been before include

You will find a full CV here.

Research Interests

My research area is at the intersection of topology, higher category theory and mathematical physics. I am generally interested in Topological Quantum Field Theory in the categorical setting, which means I spend time with cobordism categories, oo-categories, module categories, etc. . Recently I have been thinking about homotopy actions of groups on higher categories, and duality involutions on bicategories. I am also interested in nonperturbative aspects of QFT in the framework of factorization algebras.

For more details, here you can read my research statement.

In May 2018 I received a Habilitation from the University of Zurich, you can check my thesis here.

Articles

Here is a brief selection of my recent works. A complete list can be found here.

The Serre Automorphism via Homotopy Actions and the Cobordism Hypothesis for Oriented Manifolds

with J. Hesse, to appear on Cahiers, arXiv: 1701.03895

Frobenius Algebras and Homotopy Fixed Points of Group Actions on Bicategories

with J. Hesse and C. Schweigert, T.A.C.(2017), Vol. 32, No. 18, 652

Boundary Conditions for Topological Quantum Field Theories, Anomalies and Projective Modular Functors

with D. Fiorenza, Comm. Math. Phys. (2015), no. 338, 1043

Bicategories for Boundary Conditions and for Surface Defects in 3-d TFT

with J. Fuchs and C. Schweigert, Comm. Math. Phys. (2013), no 321, 543

Teaching

I have always had a great interest for teaching and mentoring students. During the fall 2016-2017, I have been teaching a self designed master class with title "Differential Forms in Algebraic Topology", based on the wonderful book with the same title.
During the fall 2017-2018 I have taught an undegraduate class with title "An Introduction to Category Theory and its Applications".

During the fall 2018-2019 I will give a seminar on Applied Topology: you can find its webpage here.

If you are interested, here you will find my teaching statement.
Here are some students I supervised:

Others

I have a great interest in music and visual arts, in particular electronic music and generative art/design, in which I am more or less actively involved.
I use programming to create systems which exhibit emergent complexity, mostly inspired by natural organisms, and which generate sonic/visual artefacts of all types. L-systems, evolutionary code, musique concrète, logistic equations, Steve Reich, Twitter API, modular synthesizers: if you have heard (any of) these words, you know what I am talking about.
Some of my works are available online: search enough, and I am hopeful you will eventually find them.