Congratulations to Alec Shute who has been offered a position in credit quantitative research at Nomura bank in London starting this autumn.

Following his PhD from IST, Austria supervised by Tim Browning, Alec joined the Heilbronn Institute in Bristol in 2022. His current research interests are in analytic number theory, and its applications to Diophantine geometry.

Alec was awarded a Heilbronn Focused Research Grant last year in support of his workshop Campana points on toric varieties (Part II). The aim of this workshop was to share expertise in the field of Campana points and initiate new collaborations between the participants in this area.

Alec’s recent paper ‘Local solubility of generalised Fermat equations’ with Peter Koymans, Ross Paterson, and Tim Santens has been published on arXiv:2501.17619.  The aim of this paper is to test a recent conjecture of Loughran, Rome and Sofos, which predicts an asymptotic formula for the number of everywhere locally soluble varieties in certain families.

We wish Alec every success in his new position and future research!