Nikita Safonkin
safonkin.nik at gmail.com
Postdoctoral Researcher
Institute of Mathematics
Leipzig University
I am currently on the academic job market for positions beginning in Fall 2026.
safonkin.nik at gmail.com
I am currently on the academic job market for positions beginning in Fall 2026.
I’m currently a postdoc at Leipzig University in Germany, where I started in November 2023. Just before that, in October 2023, I defended my PhD at the University of Reims Champagne-Ardenne in France under the supervision of Grigori Olshanski (with co-supervision by Michael Pevzner). My PhD research was motivated by the representation theory of the infinite symmetric group and focused on harmonic functions on branching graphs (and their deformations), bringing together ideas from representation theory, symmetric functions, combinatorics, and probability.
I began my PhD research in 2019 at the Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology in Moscow, Russia. I left in 2022 because I no longer felt safe continuing in Russia after the invasion of Ukraine. After a short-term visiting position at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, I continued my doctoral studies at the University of Reims through the PAUSE program.
Before my PhD, I earned a Master’s in Mathematics (2017–2019) in Moscow through a joint program between the Higher School of Economics and the Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology. I completed my Bachelor’s in Physics at Moscow State University in 2017.