in Algebraic Geometry in Warsaw The scholarships are offered within the Sonata Bis grant "Complex contact manifolds and geometry of secants (CoCoMaGeS)" supported by NCN (National Science Center, Poland).
Institute of Mathematics of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw www.impan.pl announces an open call for
a 2-year long PhD scholarship under the supervision of Jarosław Buczyński in collaboration with other team members listed on the project webpage.Details and conditions:
- Approximate starting date: 1st October 2020.
- At the starting date the applicant must be enrolled to a PhD program at a Polish institution specialising in mathematics.
- Candidates are required to have at least basic knowledge of algebraic geometry.
- Students must plan to work in one of the topics of the project: (complex) contact manifolds, quaternionic-Kähler manifolds, twistor constructions, quaternion geometry, secant varieties, tensor rank, Waring rank, and/or Hilbert schemes. Prior experience in these or related topics will be beneficial for the application.
A successful student will receive a scholarship of 2200PLN per month. In addition, the researcher will be granted a limited access to research costs, such as travel to conferences etc. The fellow must respect the NCN rules of funding, including those listed on page 7 of this document. In particular, no salary from NCN is allowed at the same time as his/her scholarship in the project (page 7, subsection 2.1.3, item (b)). Also this document is relevant to the recruitment process.
The position comes with no additional teaching duties (except those required as a part of the PhD studies).
Each application should contain a brief (1-2 pages) research plan and a CV with a list of achievements and publications. In addition, it is suggested that the applicant arranges one recommendation letter to be sent directly by the referee.
Applications should be submitted before August 23, 2020 via e-mail to the principal investigator of the project Jarosław Buczyński, jabu@mimuw.edu.pl, with the subject line containing the project abbreviation "[CoCoMaGeS]". All other related inquiries should also be sent in the same way.
The applications will be analysed by the committee of Piotr Achinger, Jarosław Buczyński (chair), and Michał Kapustka. The committee reserves the right to interview the best candidates prior to the decision. The decisions should be sent around Sept 10, 2020.
Additional information:
Receiving the scholarship offer does not imply admission to PhD studies. By default, the candidates should be already admitted to a doctoral school in Poland, perhaps even after a year or more of the studies. In particular, the length of the scholarship (2 years) is not equal to the length of the PhD studies (by default 4 years). Moreover, the scholarship from the grant is not in contradiction with receiving the standard PhD scholarship. Unfortunately, it is already past the deadline for the applications for PhD program at MIMUW/IMPAN. Moreover this process is beyond the control of the committee responsible for this grant. Maybe other universities in Poland have still their applications open.
The non-default (exceptional) process is to first apply in the above call from the grant, and if the committee recommends the candidate, he/she would have to undergo an extra process of recruitment which replaces the above default process. We have no clue how the exceptional process is organised, but we heard it is possible. We only know that for the first year it would be impossible to obtain the regular PhD student scholarship (for this, one needs to participate in the default process). In this sense, going through the exceptional process, would be a disadvantage compared to a situation, when the candidate would go through a default process, as he/she would potentially only have the scholarship from the grant, no default student scholarship.
The default PhD programme in Poland (as mentioned above) takes about four years. Very good students (in addition to the scholarships funded by universities) may apply for further remuneration in grants (such as this project), and also for their own grants (and other programmes). Thus, it is not the intention of this call to completely fund the PhD studies of the applicant, instead to serve as an additional encouragement to work in research in the area of algebraic geometry, rather than doing extra paid jobs (like extra teaching, or other regular job). That is why we offer only 2 years of scholarship, whereas after these two years, the students should be able to apply for their own grants (for instance, Preludium at NCN, but there might be also other opportunities).
