Zakarias Sjöström Dyrefelt and Alexandra-Iulia Otiman appointed Associate Professors
Zakarias Sjöström Dyrefelt and Alexandra-Iulia Otiman has been appointed Associate Professor at the Department of Mathematics, starting on 1 May 2026.
Zakarias Sjöström Dyrefelt
Zakarias joined the department in 2022 as a tenure-track Assistant Professor, alongside a three-year fellowship at the Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies (AIAS), and became a full-time member of the department in 2025. His research is in Kähler geometry, at the intersection of differential, symplectic, and complex algebraic geometry.
He completed his undergraduate studies in Gothenburg, Sweden, and obtained his PhD through a joint position between École Polytechnique (Paris) and Université Toulouse III. He subsequently spent four years as a postdoctoral researcher at ICTP and SISSA in Trieste, Italy, before coming to Aarhus.
Zakarias is very happy to be part of the active geometry group in Aarhus and looks forward to continuing to build his research profile and group. In particular, he aims to further develop the ideas behind his Villum Young Investigator project “Effective Testing in Complex Geometry” while strengthening collaborations both locally and internationally. A central focus of his work is understanding when infinitely many conditions related to stability and the existence of canonical metrics in Kähler geometry can be reduced to finitely many that are, in principle, testable in practice.
“I’m particularly interested in how geometric structures in high-dimensional spaces can be better understood—especially when questions that appear infinitely complicated can be brought into a form that reveals new insight.”
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Alexandra-Iulia Otiman
Alexandra-Iulia joined the department in 2022, while at the same time holding a fellowship at the Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies (AIAS) until 2025. Since 2025, she has been fully affiliated with the Department of Mathematics. Her research lies broadly in complex differential geometry, with a focus on understanding the geometric properties of complex manifolds.
Alexandra completed her bachelor’s, master’s and PhD studies at the University of Bucharest. She subsequently held postdoctoral positions at the Max Planck Institute in Bonn, the University of Rome Three and the University of Florence.
Her research combines algebraic and analytic techniques to study fundamental properties of manifolds, including their shape and the choice of metrics from different perspectives. This is also the focus of her Sapere Aude project “Conformal geometry: metrics and cohomology”, where she and her team aim to contribute to current developments in differential geometry. Looking ahead, she plans to further develop these research directions and strengthen international collaborations.
“My research focuses on the interplay of two powerful geometric tools, cohomology and metrics, in order to produce strong classification results.”