Sylvia Serfaty is a Professor at the Laboratoire Jacques-Louis Lions, Université Pierre et Marie Curie Paris 6. Sylvia Serfaty was a Global Distinguished Professor of Mathematics in the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences. She has been awarded a Sloan Foundation Research Fellowship and a NSF CAREER award (2003), the 2004 European Mathematical Society Prize, 2007 EURYI (European Young Investigator) award, and has been invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians (2006), Plenary speaker at the European Congress of Mathematics (2012) and has recently received the IAMP Henri Poincar´e prize in 2012. Her research is focused on the study of Nonlinear Partial Differential Equations, calculus of variations and mathematical physics, in particular the Ginzburg-Landau superconductivity model. Sylvia Serfaty was the first to make a systematic and impressive asymptotic analysis for the case of large parameters in theory of the Ginzburg-Landau equation. She established precisely, with Etienne Sandier, the values of the first critical fields for nucleation of vortices in superconductors, as well as the leading and next to leading order effective energies that govern the location of these vortices and their arrangement in Abrikosov lattices In micromagnetics, her work with F. Alouges and T. Rivière breaks new ground on singularly perturbed variational problems and provides the first explanation for the internal structure of cross-tie walls.
http://www.ams.org/journals/notices/200409/people.pdf
Personal page : http://www.ann.jussieu.fr/~serfaty/[-]

Ginzburg-Landau type equations are models for superconductivity, superfluidity, Bose-Einstein condensation, etc. A crucial feature is the presence of quantized vortices, which are topological zeroes of the complex-valued solutions. We will present a new result on the derivation of a mean-field limit equation for the dynamics of many vortices starting from the parabolic Ginzburg-Landau equation or the Gross-Pitaevskii (=Schrodinger Ginzburg-Landau) equation.[-]