Leticia Cugliandolo

Biosketch

Born in Mar del Plata, Argentina, on the 11th of February, 1965, Leticia F. Cugliandolo is a theoretical physicist recognized for her contributions to the understanding of nonequilibrium statistical physics. She is a Professor of Physics at Sorbonne Université, a former member of the Institut Universitaire de France and the former director of the Les Houches School of Physics. She earned her Master’s in Physics from Universidad Nacional de Mar del Plata, Argentina, and her PhD from Universidad Nacional de La Plata, also in Argentina. She was a post-doc at Università di Roma Sapienza, Italia, and Centre d’Energie Atomique Saclay, France. After being Associate Professos at Ecole Normale de Paris from 1997 to 2002, she became full professor at Université Pierre et Marie Curie, which was renamed Sorbonne Université in 2018. She is currently adjunct faculty at the Tata Institute in India. She has received the Premio Raíces from Argentina, the Diploma al Mérito Académico from the city of Mar del Plata, the Prix Irène Joliot-Curie from the Académie des Sciences de France, the Marie Curie Excellence Award from the European Commission, the Prix Langevin from the Société Française de Physique and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She has coauthored over a hundred and fifty publications in refereed journals and co-edited twenty three books in the Les Houches Summer School collection.

Research Interests

Throughout her career, Leticia F. Cugliandolo has explored a wide range of subjects, with her research interests evolving from particle physics to both soft and hard condensed matter. She has made significant contributions to the understanding of the non-equilibrium dynamics of complex systems. Her research has focused on classical and quantum physical systems, both closed and open, whether in relaxation or under external driving forces. Her primary contribution has been the development of a theory for the physical aging of both classical and quantum glassy systems, where the concept of a measurable effective temperature plays a pivotal role. More recently, she has been drawn to the field of active matter, contributing to the understanding of out-of-equilibrium phases, phase transitions, and collective motion. In a different line of research, she studies the non-equilibrium dynamics of integrable systems and their potential description in terms of Generalized Gibbs Ensembles. Other problems on which she had worked in the past are frustrated magnets, coarsening and phase ordering kinetics, neural networks, random matrices, path integral methods for stochastic processes, and topological field theories.