Carolina Figueiredo awarded the Vera Rubin New Frontiers Prize
19/09/2026
Carolina Figueiredo, a former student of the Master's Programme in Applied Mathematics and Computation (MMAC) at Instituto Superior Técnico, was named in 2026 as the inaugural recipient of the Vera Rubin New Frontiers Prize, awarded by the Breakthrough Prize Foundation.
The prize recognizes her contributions to the geometric structure of scattering amplitudes, revealing unexpected connections between different quantum field theories. The featured video introduces Carolina Figueiredo and some of the ideas underlying this work, in which geometric structures provide new ways of reformulating and simplifying fundamental problems in particle physics.
Carolina Figueiredo's connection with Mathematics at Técnico began while she was still an undergraduate student. In 2018/19, she was a fellow of the Novos Talentos em Matemática programme of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, under the mentorship of José Natário, Full Professor in the Department of Mathematics. The work developed in this context, on Riemannian manifolds dual to static spacetimes, subsequently led to a research paper co-authored with José Natário.