Ismael Morales López and Rodrigo Alonso de Pool Alcántara, both former ICMAT master’s degree grant holders, the latter also a PhD graduate of the institute, are among the six winners in this edition.
ICMAT runs various research initiation programmes for young people. Image: Laura M Iraola/ ICMAT.
The Real Sociedad Matemática Española (RSME) and the BBVA Foundation have announced the six winners of the 2026 Vicent Caselles Mathematics Research Awards, which recognise the careers of young mathematics researchers. Among them are two researchers trained at ICMAT: Ismael Morales López and Rodrigo Alonso de Pool Alcántara.
Both began their relationship with ICMAT through the master’s degree grants the institute awards each year under the JAE Intro programme, as part of the Severo Ochoa distinction. These grants, worth €10,000 and lasting ten months, allow mathematics master’s students with outstanding academic records to collaborate with the institute throughout the year and complete their Master’s thesis under the supervision of ICMAT researchers.
Image taken from the researcher’s personal website.
Rodrigo Alonso de Pool Alcántara, who holds a Double Degree in Computer Engineering and Mathematics and a Master’s in Mathematics from the UAM, also completed his PhD at ICMAT, under the supervision of Javier Aramayona, the institute’s current director. In May 2025 he defended his thesis, Rigidity results for the mapping class group. In it, he presents several rigidity results for the so-called mapping class group and other associated spaces, motivated by the comparison between mapping class groups and irreducible lattices in higher-rank Lie groups.
The Caselles Awards jury particularly recognised the result in which he transfers Margulis’s superrigidity theorem to the context of mapping class groups, making it possible to classify homomorphisms between these groups and bringing the field significantly closer to a complete classification, a well-known problem in the area. After completing his PhD, de Pool joined the University of Notre Dame (United States) as a postdoctoral researcher, where he currently carries out his work.
Image taken from the researcher’s personal website.
Ismael Morales López, who holds a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in Mathematics from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, completed his master’s grant and Master’s thesis at ICMAT under the supervision of Andrei Jaikin, CSIC research professor at ICMAT and coordinator of the institute’s Bridson-Reid Laboratory. He went on to earn his PhD from the University of Oxford (2025) and is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics (Germany).
The Caselles Awards jury highlighted his individual and collaborative contributions to group theory and, in particular, to profinite rigidity, with significant advances on the Remeslennikov problem, one of the most important problems in the field — precisely the focus of ICMAT’s Bridson-Reid Laboratory.
Awards for young researchers in Spain, since 2015
The Vicent Caselles Mathematics Research Awards, given by the Real Sociedad Matemática Española (RSME) and the BBVA Foundation since 2015, aim to support and encourage young professionals working in mathematics research. Alongside Morales and de Pool, this edition’s winners also include Gonzalo Cao Labora (École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne), Antonio Casares Santos (Universität Kaiserslautern-Landau), Anna Jové Campabadal (Imperial College London) and Miren Jasone Ramírez-Ayerbe (Université de Montréal).
This edition’s jury was chaired by María Ángeles Hernández Cifre (Universidad de Murcia) and included David Beltrán Portales (Universitat de València), María Cumplido Cabello (Universidad de Sevilla), José María Espinar García (Universidad de Granada), Wenceslao González Manteiga (Universidade de Santiago de Compostela) and Andrei Martínez-Finkelshtein (Universidad de Almería).
Severo Ochoa Master’s Grants for research initiation
ICMAT issues a new call each year for JAE Intro ICU grants for Master’s theses under its Severo Ochoa excellence programme, aimed at students on a Bachelor’s or Double Degree in Mathematics with an academic record of 8.5 out of 10 or above.
Translation disclaimer: This is an English automatic translation of the original Spanish-language text. In case of any discrepancy, the Spanish version shall prevail.