Congratulations to Ben Lees who has been offered a lectureship at the University of Leeds starting in the new year. Ben joined the Heilbronn Institute in Bristol in October 2019 following a Humboldt Fellowship position at the Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany. He obtained his PhD from Warwick in 2016 under the supervision of Daniel Ueltschi and Roman Kotecký.

Ben’s research is concerned with graphical representations of classical and quantum spin systems, phase transitions, and properties of correlations between spins in these systems. Ben produced two papers on this topic this year, one exploring a link between the surface code quantum information, the eight vertex model, and the Ising model classical statistical mechanics models, proving correlations inequalities for these models. He also proved a Griffiths inequality for the classical spin O(N) model in wide generality by using a connection to a graphical representation that he introduced with Lorenzo Taggi in 2020.

We wish Ben every success in his new position!