The Junior Research Fellowships (JRF), awarded by the Trinity College, University of Cambridge, provide a unique opportunity to spend up to four years in Cambridge undertaking post‐doctoral research or scholarly work at an early stage of an academic career. The Técnico alumna Rita Costa (Engineering Physics), has been included on the JRF’s shortlist (8 applicants).

“I am honoured to have been invited to be part of this community”, says the Técnico alumna. “Cambridge is an amazing place to do research in Mathematics and Physics, but Trinity even more so. Trinity’s high reputation is well earned: From Isaac Newton to many college members have won Nobel prizes and Fields medals” she adds.

“One of the great challenges of JRF is that they are not designed to support a specific area of knowledge”, says Rita Costa. Science, Arts and Letters applicants are judged simultaneously by a panel composed of representatives from all these areas. “For this reason, it is important to know how to communicate very well, to a wide target audience”, highlights the Técnico alumna, who believes that this was one of her great advantages in the competition. “My research is also very interdisciplinary, which helps a lot”, he added. Rita Costa wrote several articles for PULSAR, a magazine created by NFIST.

The research of the Técnico alumna focuses on Mathematical General Relativity. Rita Costa became interested in Mathematics while she was studying at Técnico. “As a student in Técnico, I was fortunate to get to try out research in both mathematics and physics: I worked for some time with Professors Vitor Cardoso from physics and José Natário from math, and I received a grant from Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation to do some undergraduate research in math with Professor João Pimentel Nunes”, recalls the alumna.

Rita Costa explains: “General Relativity is one of the most successful theories we have, but it is also a theory with a very rich mathematical formulation that combines Geometry and Analysis: the core principles of the theory are Einstein’s equations, which are Differential Equations that specify how the geometry of space and time is influenced by whatever matter and radiation are present”, says the young researcher who also quotes John Wheeler: “matter tells spacetime how to curve, spacetime tells matter how to move”.

During her PhD, under the supervision of professor Mihalis Dafermos, Rita Costa focused her research on black holes. “Scientists believe that all supermassive stars end up as black holes, which are, therefore, seen as an equilibrium state. But this can only be the case if it is a stable equilibrium, that is, if a black hole, when slightly disturbed, manages to return to the form of a simple black hole, perhaps more or less massive”, she highlights. “Otherwise, if small disturbances of black holes created other types of objects, they would have a transient behaviour. Although we have numerical evidence of black hole stability, no theorem has been able to prove it”, says the young researcher.

“If we throw in something at the black hole, does it absorb, wiggle around a bit and settle back to being a normal black hole? Or does it turn into something new? This question requires us to look very closely as black holes. But if we zoom out from a black hole in the universe, we see plenty of other objects around it. And if we zoom out even more, they all blur together and look like a homogenous lump. In fact, scientists know that, at very large scales, a homogeneous lump is a great model of the universe! Unfortunately, it is not entirely clear if this large-scale model can be rigorously derived from our description of the universe at smaller scales, i.e. close to stars and planets, etc. Understanding how to mathematically bridge together the small and large scales is another thread of research I am eager to start as a JRF at Trinity”, says the Técnico alumna during an interview for the Junior Research Fellow Q&A series.

“Calculus and Linear Algebra classes at Técnico, with professors Miguel Abreu and Luís Magalhães, had an unparalleled rigour with those of Physics courses in the UK, not to mention Engineering courses. This background, together with many hours of effort, was enough to finish my master’s degree in Mathematics at Cambridge”, she stresses.