Bernt Wennberg was appointed Professor of Mathematics on April 1 2004.
He was born in Växjö in 1961, and graduated in Engineering Physics from Chalmers in 1987. He spent the last year of his undergraduate studies at Imperial College, London. His PhD thesis was presented at the Department of Mathematics, Chalmers, in 1993, and after two years of postdoctoral studies, mostly in Paris, he took on a permanent position as lecturer at Chalmers.
Research summary
Bernt Wennberg's research has mostly dealt with the kinetic theory of gases, but he is generally interested in applied mathematics, and a large part of his research recently has been related to applications within medicine and biology. The research deals with two rather different problems: The kinetic theory of gases originates from the works of Maxwell and Boltzmann about gases. The fundamental equation is the Boltzmann equation, which is an accurate model for dilute gases. Such gases are to be found, for example, in the upper atmosphere, and one field of application is to model the re-entry phase of space vehicles. But the theory has applications in many other areas, such as in models for semiconductor modelling and sand. The group at Chalmers is mostly interested in typical mathematical questions like: Do solutions to the Boltzmann equation exist? Can there be several solutions? Do the solutions behave in a physically acceptable way? And a fundamental question that has been debated since the days of Boltzmann: is it possible to make a mathematically rigorous derivation of the Boltzmann equation? The second part of Wennberg's research deals with models for biological systems. This work is carried out in collaboration with research groups in medicine and biochemistry. The objective of the research is to develop and analyse mathematical models, which may help in the interpretation and understanding of experimental data. It can be seen as part of what is known as Systems biology.
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